Album reviews: Liam Gallagher | Belle & Sebastian | Gruff Rhys | Alasdair Roberts

Liam Gallagher sounds revitalised on his new solo album, while Belle & Sebastian revisit some classic tracks
Liam GallagherLiam Gallagher
Liam Gallagher

Liam Gallagher: Why Me? Why Not (Warner Records) ***

Belle & Sebastian: Days of the Bagnold Summer (Matador) ****

Gruff Rhys: Pang! (Rough Trade) ***

Alasdair Roberts: The Fiery Margin (Drag City) ****

Despite the fact that there’s been no discernible difference in musical standards, the simple act of dropping his thoroughly mediocre post-Oasis band Beady Eye and recording once more under his own name has revived Liam Gallagher’s fortunes no end. The return of a tranche of Oasis classics to his live set has probably helped a bit too.

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Rather than respond with top-of-the-world strutting, Gallagher has embraced a degree of subtlety on his second solo album. Working again with producer Greg Kurstin and songwriter Andrew Wyatt, he often dials down the vocals to adopt a more measured tone, accessing parts of his voice barely aired until now. Even the seemingly truculent title actually comes from two John Lennon drawings he owns.

On that note, it takes all of one minute to unleash his first brazenly Beatley melody – and even less to shoehorn in a Rolling Stones reference – on opening track Shockwave, then follow up with Lennonesque ballad Once.

With his son Gene on back-up bongos, he adopts a (relatively) conciliatory tone on One Of Us, evidently inspired by his war of attrition with brother Noel (“act like you don’t remember, you said we’d live forever”). Ironically, its string-soaked indie pop is not a million miles from Noel’s recent compositions.

There is further family business on the standard-issue indie canter Now That I’ve Found You, which was inspired by reconnecting with daughter Molly, before he resumes his mission to emulate the solo Beatles’ careers with a burnished barrage of George Harrison guitar over the philosophical Meadow.

If this sounds uncharacteristically contemplative, fans of lairy Liam can take some solace in the barrelling pub rock’n’roll of Halo, with its rip-roaring fuzz guitar, and low-slung rocker The River, on which he sets himself against “the money-sucking MPs.” For all his musical conservatism, Gallagher the younger can just about cut it as a counterculture figure.

Belle & Sebastian’s evocative music makes ideal soundtrack material, and they already have form with their score for the Todd Solondz film Storytelling. Seventeen years on, they supply the soundtrack to Days of the Bagnold Summer, the directorial debut of Inbetweeners’ actor Simon Bird, starring Nick Cave’s son Earl as a heavy metal-loving teen.

Stuart Murdoch, once a heavy metal-loving teen himself, works up a 25-year-old demo, Safety Valve, for the occasion. The band also re-record a couple of their most delicate reveries, I Know Where The Summer Goes and Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying, and present a batch of new songs, such as the hangdog Did The Day Go Just Like You Wanted? and bare bossa nova ballad This Letter, which are so quintessentially Belle & Sebastian that you feel you’ve heard them before.

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Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys reverts to his native Welsh tongue, via a couple of lines in Zulu, on Pang!, a largely acoustic collaboration with South African electronica artist Muzi which builds simple ditties on top of rhythmic patterns. There is a melancholic nursery rhyme simplicity to Digidigol, mournful trumpet embellishes the indie croon of Niwl O Anwiredd and Taranau Mai is quite possibly the world’s first Welsh language Indian raga.

Alasdair Roberts’ latest collection of original songs in the old folk style is an otherworldly concoction of courtly dances, apocalyptic texts and medieval minstrelsy, including a gargoyle eye’s view of a church congregation, an all-out country reckoning with the reaper (in waltz time) and a serpentine folk lament called Europe which is not about Brexit, but inspired by the true life tale of a Holocaust survivor, all realised with lusty fecundity by his bandmates Alex Neilson, Stevie Jones and Ailbhe nic Oireachtaigh who collectively evoke the spirit of Pentangle. Fiona Shepherd

CLASSICAL

Debussy Nocturnes & Duruflé Requiem (Linn) ****

It’s a strange coupling of Debussy and Duruflé that allows the latter’s music to sound more Debussyesque than the former. Yet that’s what Robin Ticciati succeeds in doing in what ought to be a sumptuous musical coupling of Debussy’s Nocturnes and Duruflé’s Requiem, but which falls a tad short in embracing the layered textural magic of the opening Nocturne, Nuages. The performance by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin is a slow starter, giving this Nuages a laboured edge and a shortage of genuine warmth. The joie de vivre of Fêtes and mystical euphoria of Sirènes quickly redress the issue; and by the time Ticciati brings on board the Rundfunkchor Berlin and mezzo soprano Magdalena Kožená for the Duruflé, its plainsong roots cast in rich Romantic effusion, the performers are firing on all cylinders. Kožená finds demure tenderness in the Pie Jesu; the choral singing is mellifluously wholesome, the orchestral wash heartwarmingly beautiful. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Ahmad Jamal: Ballades (Jazzbook Records) ****

Detached from any rhythm section on most of these ten tracks, veteran American pianist Ahmad Jamal embarks on a gentle, lyrically reflective solo exploration and deconstruction of often familiar tunes. He plays with effortless ease and a palpable sense of warmth for the music, even when at his most introspective, punctuating the more meditative passages with bright flurries of notes. He opens the album with Marseille, his glittering paean to the French port, and brings a drowsily tolling left hand to the Cahn-Stordahl-Weston number I Should Care. He goes on to abandon the customary cheerful shuffle of his old hit Poinciana in favour of a more pensive re-re-imagining, while Rodger’s and Hart’s Spring Is Here wends its way unhurriedly into the similarly measured fragility of Bill Evans’s Your Story. When his long-time bassist James Cammack does join him, as in So Rare, he provides a discreetly empathetic muttering alongside the pianist’s deliberate yet sunny excursions. Jim Gilchrist

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