Album reviews: Mull Historical Society | Taylor Swift | Tony Allen | Gerry Cinnamon
Mull Historical Society: In My Mind There’s A Room (Xtra Mile Recordings) ****
Taylor Swift: Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (Republic) **
Gerry Cinnamon: Live At Hampden Park (Little Runaway Records) ****
Tony Allen: JID018 (Jazz Is Dead) ****
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Hide AdColin MacIntyre, aka Mull Historical Society, has found a novel (ahem) way to bring together his two great creative loves – music and literature - on his first new album in five years. In My Mind There’s A Room is both epic and intimate, in that he has commissioned thirteen of his favourite authors, including Val McDermid, Alan Warner and James Robertson, to write about a special room in their lives. MacIntyre, a published author himself, who has long exhibited a talent for storytelling in song, then set their words to music and recorded them in his own special room – a recording studio on his native Mull which used to be his grandfather’s flat.
On 1952, Liz Lochhead’s words about a formative experience “in a room with my own view” are delivered on a soaring chorus with grungey indie guitars, while Nick Hornby’s Panicked Feathers, a wryly nostalgic misadventure involving “cocky little gits”, sounds just right as a barrelling indie stomp with energised saxophone.
Sebastian Barry’s poetic Kelshabeg, enhanced by operatic female vocals, becomes a twinkling Wicklow waltz and Jackie Kay’s more impressionistic Meltwater is interpreted on harp.
Jacqueline Wilson hymns her first writing room on Somebody Else’s Life, tenderly arranged by MacIntyre, and Ian Rankin’s My Bedroom Was My Rocket celebrates a child’s own space as a place of learning, discovery and imagination.
Lochhead herself appears on another song, Anaglypta, heralded by a crackly choral recording and resonant piano and the album ends on a grainy, moving recording of MacIntyre’s grandfather Angus reciting his own poem, Memories of Mull.
Taylor Swift continues to take back control of her catalogue with her latest Taylor’s Version re-recording of one of her past albums. Speak Now, her third album released in 2010, was written in her late teens, fertile emotional territory especially for a writer majoring on love and heartbreak.
Swift slots back comfortably into its inoffensive country pop lane, oscillating between sugary sincerity and snarky humour. The Story Of Us is typical adolescent documentary, Mean a relatable song about biting back against bullying, while Swift styles herself as the person who raises an objection at a wedding on the title track. The overblown Nashville pop production of Dear John threatens to smother the piquant sentiment, while Enchanted gets a big, unsubtle soundtrack to the big, unsubtle feelings round instant attraction.
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At over a hundred minutes of music, it’s a long and not terribly dynamic trawl but fans will want to hold out for the six previously unreleased but newly interpreted songs at the end. Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump and Paramore’s Hayley Williams fall in line with Swift’s middle of the road style on Electric Touch and Castles Crumbling respectively but I Can See You is closer to the indie pop attitude of her later work.
Legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen’s posthumous final recording JID018 was recorded with Jazz Is Dead label founder Adrian Younge in 2018 and released on what would have been his 83rdbirthday. Most tracks, from the Afrofunk of Steady Tremble to the psych groove of Oladipo, begin with and bounce off his loose-limbed polyrhytmic excellence. A laidback hero to the end.
Gerry Cinnamon’s two remarkable pandemic-delayed 2022 hometown concerts are captured with joy on Live at Hampden Park – just a man, a guitar, a harmonica, the occasional touch of melodious piano and 50,000 backing singers. Cinnamon sounds far from intimidated by the occasion – you can hear him laughing during Sometimes, buoyed by the crowd – and, like all the best live albums, it sounds like it would have been a blast to be there.
CLASSICAL
Elgan Llÿr Thomas: Unveiled (Delphian) ****
Open expressions of sexuality are a given these days, compared to when gay composers such as Britten and Tippett, or earlier artists such as Michelangelo, applied necessary discretion in articulating their thoughts. With Unveiled, in which Welsh tenor Elgan Llÿr Thomas is joined variously by pianist Iain Burnside and guitarist Craig Ogden, an underpinning theme of openness offers fresh perspective on Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (presented in a "new English singing version” by Jeremy Sams) and Tippett’s more openly homoerotic, guitar-accompanied Songs of Achilles, to which Thomas adds recordings of Ruth Gipps’ Four Songs of Youth (airy and affectionate settings of Rupert Brooke) and the singer’s own theatrically-charged song cycle Swan, which he and Burnside perform with thoughtful elan. Interesting, too, is W Denis Brown’s To Granita dancing and singing, written in tribute to Brooke. Ken Walton
JAZZ
Zoe Rahman: Colour of Sound (Manushi Records) ****
Zoe Rahman, one of the most distinctively creative pianists on the UK scene, goes big and bold, expanding her established trio alongside bassist Alex Dankworth and drummer Gene Calderazzo with the addition of brother Idris Rahman on saxes and clarinet, as well as other front-liners on brass and flute. They bring accomplished power and exuberance to Rahman’s often complex but potently communicative compositions Roland Sutherland’s flute gives an airy crest to the opening Dance of Time, while joyful horns herald the gospel-tinged For Love, with its querulous split-note sax break from Idris, who returns on clarinet in the inexorably ascending Little Ones. Alex Ridout brings limber flugelhorn to Go with the Flow, while the most dramatic showcase for Rahman’s commanding piano work reverts to trio format in the swirl and drive of Roots, before the closing serenity of Peace Garden. Jim Gilchrist