Album reviews: Lou Reed and Metallica | Beach Boys | Calum Stewart and Heikki Bourgault | Coleman Hawkins | Nicola Benedetti

Reviews of the latest new releases including Lulu from Lou Reed and Metallica, The Smile Sessions from the Beach Boys and Italia by Nicola Benedetti

POP

LOU REED AND METALLICA

Lulu

**

Vertigo, B005LNCMIE

Not to suggest that this collaboration was a sales-driven venture from Reed’s perspective, but here is an accident struggling not to happen. Musically it sounds like War Pigs-era Black Sabbath, lyrically Lou has never sounded less convincing, his poetic bent contorted by warped metal. On Pumping Blood, he exhorts guitarist Hetfield, “Come on James!” without a hint of urgency. Junior Dad certainly lacks any, dribbling on for nigh on 20 minutes, the soundtrack for a painful and slow artistic bankruptcy.

CS

Download this: The View, Iced Honey

BEACH BOYS

The Smile Sessions

****

EMI, £12.99

Considered by many to be pop music’s Holy Grail, Smile, the great unreleased album of the 1960s or any other late 20th-century decade – literally drove Brian Wilson mad.

Now released in a bewildering number of formats, it attempts to do justice to the album originally intended to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds. With 3D artwork, vinyl singles, a five-CD box set or just the modest double CD, both containing various outtakes, this is the ultimate package for the Beach Boys completist. It is flawed beauty, with Heroes And Villains a centrepiece to a chart symphony.

CS

Download this: As much as possible!

FOLK

CALUM STEWART AND HEIKKI BOURGAULT

Callum Stewart And Heikki Bourgault

****

www.calumheikki.com, download only

This album of wooden flute with acoustic guitar by two top younger players from Scotland and Brittany is an absolute listening must for similar instrumentalists.

Neo-traditional music can be complex, tricky and testing to perform, but these two (with Jacky Molard on occasional fiddle) are completely on top of the demands of their mainly self-penned airs and flights of inspired creativity.

NORMAN CHALMERS

Download this: Final Embrace

JAZZ

COLEMAN HAWKINS

Today And Now/

Desafinado

****

Impulse 06007 5334701, £8.99

To mark the 50th anniversary of Impulse! Records, a new series of two-album CDs is being launched, among them this double bill of 1963 LPs by the late great saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Playing as beautifully as ever in the last decade of his life (and accompanied on both albums by a rhythm section led by pianist Tommy Flanagan), the Hawk is in raunchy form on the uptempo numbers on the first album, notably the sensational opener Go L’il Liza, and manages to make the bossa nova his own on a string of tracks associated with Stan Getz.

The absolute stand-out, however, is the sublime Love Song from the movie Apache.

ALISON KERR

Download this: Go L’il Liza, Love Song

CLASSICAL

NICOLA BENEDETTI

Italia

****

Decca 476 4342, £12.99

The CD cover may be 1960s retro, but the music comes from a long time before. Nicola Benedetti’s latest release focuses on Italian music from the Baroque, essentially Vivaldi with added Tartini and a shot of Veracini. Benedetti’s skill is evident in Vivaldi’s Concerto in D, the Grosso Mogul, where she maintains clarity throughout. Yet her portrayal of Summer from The Four Seasons never quite catches fire.

Giuseppe Tartini, a slightly younger contemporary of Vivaldi, was another cleric who changed jobs, but in this instance it was a case of a married friar on the run turned composer and music theorist. Here represented by two works, Tartini gives Vivaldi a run for his money with his Sonata In G Minor, The Devil’s Trill. But it is ultimately the violin versions of the two Vivaldi arias that really stand out.

ALEXANDER BRYCE

Download this: Sonata in G Minor, Allegro