Album reviews: Dexys | Patti Smith | Neil Young | Classical | Jazz

Our music critics lend their ears to this week’s latest longplayer releases

POP

Dexys: One Day I’m Going To Soar

BMG, £11.99

Rating: ****

BY ANY standards, 27 years is a long wait for a follow-up album but, fortunately for the faithful, Kevin Rowland has deemed that the time is right to pick up those diverse threads twisted through the three previous Dexys albums and administer another invigorating dose of Celtic soul. Although One Day… doesn’t always soar, there is much to revel in here – the vim of the violins, the brio in the brass, the personality in Rowland’s vocals, whether delivering the poignant internal monologue of Lost or in feisty dialogue with overwrought vocal foil Madeleine Hyland on the theatrical Incapable Of Love – making this comeback a joyful celebration even in its more conflicted or mellow moments.

FIONA SHEPHERD

Patti Smith: Banga Columbia, £12.99

Rating: ***

DESPITE the pervading environmental theme, taking in Japanese earthquakes on Fuji-San and the discovery of the New World on the wide-eyed Amerigo, Banga is no heavy listening experience, instead showcasing Patti Smith in popular mode with intuitive musical backing, including fine, filigree guitar work throughout from Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine and her son Jackson. The title track is one of her most satisfying rock numbers in some time but elsewhere she goes mainly downbeat, taking her time on the absorbing acoustic noir of Seneca. This Is The Girl, dedicated to Amy Winehouse, has a floaty throwback Skeeter Davis feel, while those hankering after a dose of esoteric poetic Patti can get lost in the brooding spoken word piece Constantine’s Dream.

FS

Neil Young: Americana

Reprise, £13.99

Rating: **

NEIL YOUNG maintains his notoriously erratic form with this collection of slapdash reworkings of folk standards, on which he has collaborated with backing compadres Crazy Horse for the first time since the inauspicious Greendale. Together, they wrestle such simple but enduring ditties as Oh! Susanna and She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain into submission and bury the potentially transcendent backing chorus under the weight of their torpid jamming. Fans of Young’s burnished but indulgent guitar style may be able to salvage something from the lumpen, ragged results, recorded with all the finesse of a muddy demo, but his tub-thumping rendition of God Save The Queen should be approached with extreme caution. Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner it ain’t.

FS

CLASSICAL

This is the Day: Music on Royal Occasions

Collegium Records, £12.99

Rating: ****

IF THE feelgood factor is important to you on this week of Royal celebrations, then here’s the very thing. This is the Day celebrates music performed at various Royal events over the past 60 years, from the Queen’s own wedding of 1947 (William McKie’s anthem We wait for thy loving kindness) to Diana’s funeral (John Tavener’s atmospheric Song of Athene) to some of the music written especially for last year’s Royal wedding, such as John Rutter’s This is the Day and Scots-based Paul Mealor’s sumptuous Ubi Caritas. Rutter’s fresh-faced signature is everywhere – directing his own Cambridge Singers and the Aurora Orchestra in a broad church of music from Handel to Mozart, Walton and Britten; and in his glittering orchestrations of such classics as Schubert’s Psalm 23 and Londonderry Air, set to the text I would be true.

KENNETH WALTON

JAZZ

Michael Garrick’s Lyric Ensemble: Home Thoughts

Jazz Academy, £12.99

Rating: ***

MICHAEL Garrick was a significant contributor to British jazz across five decades, and if this final recording, completed shortly before his death last year, is among his more understated achievements, it takes the wheel full circle back to his early experiments with jazz and poetry in the 1960s. As the name he chose for the group suggests, the emphasis is firmly on melody and lyricism in his vocal settings, which include poems by Shakespeare, Robert Browning and William Blake, Jaco Pastorius’s Forgotten Love, Kenny Wheeler’s lovely Everybody’s Song But My Own, and an Asian poem. Garrick’s own sparkling piano work is predictably deft at the head of a fine quartet featuring saxophonist Tony Woods, bassist Matt Ridley and drummer Chris Nickolls, and in Nette Robinson he found a singer capable of doing justice to his lyrical intentions.

KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK

Joy Dunlop & Twelfth Day: Fiere

ORANGE FEATHER RECORDS, £11.99

Rating: ****

THIS frequently beguiling collaboration between Mod-winning Gaelic singer Joy Dunlop and the Twelfth Day duo of fiddler Catriona Price and harpist Esther Swift creates beautifully atmospheric settings for Scots, Gaelic and English poetry by women.

Dunlop’s pure tones clearly enunciate these often life-affirming words, as in the title track, Fiere – Scots for a boon companion, based on Jackie Kay’s neo-Burnsian celebration of friendship. Another Kay lyric, the valedictory Darling, provides some of the album’s most intensely moving moments. Contemporary Gaelic poetry includes Anne Frater’s Reothadh (Frost), its delicately picked-out accompaniment evoking a brittle chill, and the eerie sonorities of Mòrag NicGumaraid’s Colmhead lad (Watch Them).

Liz Lochhead’s Two Birds doesn’t convert quite so effectively, its detail-crammed lines stretched somewhat over an up-tempo pulse.

Elsewhere, however, the indelible hanging moment of Shetland poet Christine de Luca’s Firewirks Owre Bressa Soond is rendered crystalline by harp chimes and fiddle harmonics.

JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD

The Malawi Mouse Boys: He is #1

IRL, £11.99

Rating: ***

THIS convivial CD reflects a crusading enterprise on behalf of some exceptionally underprivileged musicians. Landlocked Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, and these young musicians, whose guitars are made from recycled scrap metal, make their living selling the local delicacy, mice on sticks, as snacks for passing travellers. The eight-man band have been playing together and writing songs since childhood, and this is both the first time their music has been heard outside Malawi, and also the first-ever release in the Chichewa language. Their producer Ian Brennan, whose recent claim to fame was producing Tinariwen’s Tassili, says the only problem in these sessions was the spiders which crawled into his hard drive and crashed the recording system. The songs – some backed by a children’s choir – concern faith and love, and radiate the sort of warmth one associates with American gospel music.

Sufis at the Cinema

Saregama, www.saregama.com

Rating: ***

THE subtitle of this double-CD is “50 years of Bollywood Qawwali and Sufi Song”, and for those who are into this joyfully liberated music, it’s a feast. As the liner note observes, Sufism is as far away from rigid Wahhabi Islam as the Vicar of Dibley is from American Bible-thumpers, and its pervasive presence is what gives Bollywood films their exuberant bounce. Starting back in 1958 with the original recording of a song that many singers have covered since, it progresses via megastars like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle (still singing today in her eighties) to Nusrat’s nephew Rahat. Some of the lyrics reflect the sweetness of religious passion – “How can there be pleasure, if there is no grief? I will ruin myself for love, at your feet I will lay my head” – while others dwell on Romeo-and-Juliet teenage relationships across the Hindu-Muslim divide.

MICHAEL CHURCH