Album reviews: Mumford And Sons | Cave Painting | The Thelonius Monk Quartet | Folk | Classical

OUR critics review the latest longplayer releases out this week

Cave Painting

Votive Painting

Third Rock Recordings, £11.99

Star rating: * * * *

Pitched somewhere between Glasgow’s Phantom Band and the current Icelandic crop, Cave Painting in fact hail from Brighton. They make a skewed, beautifully packaged rock sound with Adam Kane’s voice gluing the whole process together. Gator stretches their musical legs in a tropical direction, while Leaf and So Calm represent a more commercial bent. But this is big, demonstrative music with a cavernous percussive sound providing depth on the likes of Rio, while Nickel is wistful and wispy like an 80s pop ballad should sound. A rule-bender rather than a game-changer, this is one of the year’s more refreshing releases.

CS

Download this: Gator, Handle

JAZZ

The Thelonious 
Monk Quartet

The Complete Columbia 
Studio Albums Collection

Sony Music 88697957682, £25.99

Star rating: * * * * *

Fans of the maverick pianist and composer Thelonious Monk will rejoice in this attractively presented box set of the six quartet albums he recorded for Columbia between 1962 and 1967. Tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse is his musical partner in crime on all these albums, which include such classics as Monk’s Dream, Criss-Cross and Straight, No Chaser and mark the busiest period in a career that then went into decline in the 70s.

Alison Kerr

Download this: Crepuscule with Nellie, Pannonica (any version)

FOLK

Mary Macmaster

and Donald Hay

Hook

Macmaster/Hay Records 
MDMC002, £10.99

Star rating: * * * *

The Edinburgh-based pair from the burgeoning outer limits of the “folk” field are back with original music 
and songs featuring the contemporary Celtic electro-harp, traditional metal-strung harp, loops, samples and electronica, and percussion plus drums. Both players have long pedigrees on the Scottish and international scenes, but on this CD they can be found ploughing new furrows in texture, dissonance, tone and style. Well performed and accessible, and with vocals in English, it breaks new ground in terms of form, as in the eponymous opener, a hypnotic Gaelic groove, or their transfusion of old airs with spoken voice in Breton.

Norman Chalmers

Download this: Breton

CLASSICAL

John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers

This Is The Day

Collegium COLCD 136, £12.99

Star rating: * * * *

In a year of significance for the Royal Family, John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers have compiled a CD which looks at choral music performed at British royal events over the past 60 years..

The music ranges from Mozart’s Laudate Dominum (the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson) to Rutter’s This Is The Day (Prince William and Kate Middleton), as well as John Tavener’s Song for Athene, popularised by its use at the funeral for Diana, Princess of Wales. Britten’s Choral Dances from Gloriana is an oddity, since the Queen is not a known lover of opera and was reportedly even less a fan of this 1952 work. Well performed throughout, this is a piece well worth hearing.

Alexander Bryce

Download this: How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place