Album reviews: Green Day | Rachael Sermanni | Jazz | Classical | Folk | World

OUR team of music critics give us their opinion on the latest offerings.

POP

Green Day: Uno!

Reprise, £12.99

Rating: * * * *

HOW to follow punk operas American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown? With a self-styled “epic as f***!” triple album, split into contrasting bite-sized chunks, to be released over the next few months. Green Day come bouncing off the blocks with Uno! as the initial punk pop dispatch, comprising mostly three-minute, three-chord blasts of fluent melodic power pop which nod to distinguished forebears from Big Star to The Cars as well as their own early albums. The singles Kill The DJ and Oh Love break the no-nonsense momentum but there is a more welcome variation in style with the snotty bubblegum punk of Let Yourself Go, and strutting garage of Trouble Maker, all handclaps and tremolo. Back to basics in fine style.

POP

Deacon Blue: The Hipsters

Edsel/Demon

Rating: * * *

RICKY Ross has described Deacon Blue’s first studio album in over a decade as “an open love letter” to his band, so it’s out with the self-conscious, over-produced character sketches and in with such fond remembrances as Here I Am In London Town which captures the hopeful anticipation of the group’s early days, glimpsed through a mist of wistful nostalgia. That understated sense of yearning hangs around on the more extrovert title track, but there are freewheeling moments too, such as The Outsiders and That’s What We Can Do, both giddy as a father with a new hobby – or, indeed, a veteran band with fresh new material.

Rachel Sermanni: Under Mountains

Middle of Nowhere, £13.99

Rating: * * *

LIKE the immaculate young ladies in Jane Austen’s novels, Rachel Sermanni has been much admired for her musical accomplishment and self-possession, but I’m struggling to hear what all the excitement is about. Her debut album is fragrant, fragile, folky fare, delivered with not a plectrum out of place – even when she hints at darker lyrical territory on Ever Since The Chocolate. Sermanni sings with delicacy and precision and the arrangements are simple, often sparse, with the occasional tasteful garnish of strings. The tweeness of the more insipid numbers becomes tiresome but there are a handful of enigmatic moments, such as the impish Bones, which catch the ear.

FIONA SHEPHERD

JAZZ

Django Bates: Confirmation

Lost Marble, £12.99

Rating: * * * *

THE pianist continues his radical exploration of the legacy of Charlie Parker in this excellent follow-up to 2010’s Beloved Bird. Don’t expect reverent “in the style” play-throughs, though – Bates and his two young Danish collaborators, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun, are engaged in a process of reinvention rather than replication, picking apart Parker’s tunes and stitching them back together again in their own hugely inventive, often abstract, fashion. There are only three of these reimagined Parker classics this time – Confirmation, Now’s The Time, and Donna Lee, alongside a selection of the pianist’s own compositions which both reflect and contrast the ideas explored in the cover versions. The combination adds up to a continually fascinating package, with an unexpected ending in a version of the standard A House Is Not A Home, sung in surprisingly tender fashion by the usually irreverent Ashley Slater.

KENNY MATHIESON

CLASSICAL

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies 1-3

LSO Live, £11.99

Rating: * * * *

EXCEPT for Tchaikovsky’s popularly tuneful Little Russian symphony (No.2), his earliest symphonies are not as well known as Nos 4-6, or the unnumbered Manfred symphony. So in packaging the first three in this fruity double disc set, Valery Gergiev and the LSO give us something fresh, as well as colourful, to savour. They all have names – No.1 subtitled Winter Daydreams and the No.3 Polish alongside the aforementioned Little Russian – and they range from the rich and heady traditional romanticism of the earliest, with its soft and dreamy adagio and Mendelssohnian scherzo, to the folkish virility of No.2 and its fun-packed sizzler of a finale, to the more fluidly individual, if irrelevantly named Polish. As ever, Gergiev’s readings are meaty and joyous.

KENNETH WALTON

FOLK

SESSION A9: SESSION A9

RAJ Records, £8.99

Rating: * * * *

TEN years on from their formation, this eponymously titled album sees the barnstorming Session A9 in fine fettle, comprising fiddlers Charlie McKerron, Gordon Gunn, Adam Sutherland and Kevin Henderson with guitarist and singer Marc Clement, percussionist David Robertson and Brian McAlpine on piano and accordion. And while the songs interleaved among the instumental fireworks are fine, including their freewheeling anthem, a lively take on John Martyn’s One for the Road, it is the sheer energy of their sets which is their forte, as they fling themselves into the glorious cascade of Gordon Duncan’s The Belly Dancer and splice the driving Shetland reel Up da Stroods da Sailor Goes with the late Jerry Holland’s Mutt’s Favourite. The Miller of Dron, based on the late Hector McAndrew’s variations, progresses from jaunty strathspey to full-tilt reel with exuberant outbursts of mandolin and swing fiddle while, by way of contrast, Gunn’s air, The Birds Have Gone, is sweetly melancholy.

JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD

The Rough Guide to Native America

Rough Guides, £8.99

Rating: * * * *

Garth Cartwright compiled this CD, and he prefaces his liner note with some salutary information. Native American teenagers are twice as likely to commit suicide as any other teenage American group; poverty is endemic in the country’s 330 Indian reservations. And of course that word “Indian” is a good joke, coined by Columbus when he mistakenly imagined that in “discovering” the New World he had found the East Indies. Cartwright gives another depressing fact: in 2011 the Grammy Awards restructured their categories and merged the former prize for Best Native American Music Album with the music of Hawaii and Cajun genres, thus dealing a fresh blow to the Native Americans’ hopes for more recognition. But at least they have the Nammys – the Native American Music Awards – which are independent of big-business pressures. All of which makes this CD very topical. Less is more might be the motto, so spare is the instrumentation, so gentle the melodic thrust. One of the most appealing tracks comes from Blackfire, two brothers and a sister who use voice and drum to evoke the authentic atmosphere of a pow-wow – the tribal gathering which is Native America’s defining ritual. My favourite track is by Ashok, in which the flute is deployed in an almost Japanese manner, but I also like the cleanness of the sound-world created by Clan/Destine with guitars, drums, flutes, percussions, and vocals. Pipestone, from Wisconsin, yodel as they sing a round-dance; C-Weed and his family, from Manitoba, chant in unison; and the Asani trio from Canada ground their mellifluous harmonies in deep drumming.

MICHAEL CHURCH