Album reviews: Nathaniel Rateliff | Pictish Trail

Nathaniel Rateliff: And It’s Still Alright (Stax) ****

 Pictish Trail: Thumb World (Fire) ****

 Close Lobsters (Last Night From Glasgow/Shelflife) ****

 Over the last five years, Denver musician Nathaniel Rateliff has enjoyed great success with his rhythm’n’blues party band The Night Sweats, but he was already an established solo artist before his fleet-footed soul man incarnation became the toast of the festival circuit. Now he returns to his country and folk roots for his first solo album in seven years.

 And It’s Still Alright is a personal testament of heartbreak and bereavement following the break-up of his marriage and the death of his producer Richard Swift but it’s far from heavy weather, offering healing, hope and resilience via an intoxicating sound palette infused with the spirit of sumptuous Californian songwriters like Dennis Wilson and Harry Nilsson.

 Rateliff sets the tone with the measured but satisfyingly soulful What a Drag, allowing space for the sentiment over a groovy, shuffling beat and understated guitar twang. There is a Dylanesque philosophical sweetness to the title track, a lonesome outlaw country ballad with warm and comforting slide guitar.

 Rateliff moves from light conversational delivery to a more soulful declamation on All or Nothing with its McCartneyesque melody, vaudevillian guitar and sighing strings, while the hypnotic, undulating guitar on the tremulous torch song Tonight #2 stands on the shoulders of Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake. Rateliff seals the deal on rekindling a romance with some gentle gospel backing vocals.

 But the cold light of day hits on the simple acoustic ramble You Need Me with Rateliff asking “are you telling me now in the middle of the s*** ‘I need you’?” He goes for outright catharsis on Kissing Our Friends, a classic old school country ballad of such elegance and heartache that it could have come from the pen of Willie Nelson.

 Closing track Rush On is a slowburn valediction for Swift which demonstrates, like the rest of the album, that Rateliff is as much a solo soul man as a rhythm’n’blues bandleader.

 One man band Johnny Lynch, aka Pictish Trail, also covers some dark territory via mellow tunes on his fourth album. Thumb World comes at everyday anxieties from a more eccentric perspective, its title track exploring the idea of wanting to hide away from the world via a dreamy tale of sex on the moon. Elsewhere, there are bad trips and alien abductions, incarcerated migrants and toxic relationships, mostly set against a calming, hypnotic electronica backdrop.

 Recording shortly after the birth of his son and before the birth of his daughter, Lynch attempts to get his paternal panic in perspective on the languid electro folk number Fear Anchor, while the more upbeat and instant Bad Algebra varies the musical mood with a distorted rockabilly twang followed by a space age punky blowout.

 Paisley’s Close Lobsters provide a refreshing blast from the past with the release of their first album in 30 years. The band first emerged as part of the C86 underground indie scene of the mid-80s, a relatively broad church of alternative pop and rock bands, including fellow Scots Primal Scream and The Shop Assistants, but failed to make it to the end of the decade.

 Eight years after reforming, their facility for classy jangle pop has not deserted them. Post Neo Anti crosses the politicised post-punk of the likes of Wire and Gang of Four with the literary urban romanticism of Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, also mixing in some cosmic Americana and low-slung rock’n’roll on album highlight Let the Days Drift Away.

 Like Edwyn Collins and Mike Scott in recent times, they allow themselves some dusky nostalgia on penultimate track Under London Skies, recalling their first flush and early influences such as The Only Ones with wry understatement: “we were alive, it was alright.” Fiona Shepherd

CLASSICAL

 Prokofiev: Symphonies Nos 1 & 5 (Linn) ***** 

Nearly 30 years separate the composition of Prokofiev’s First and Fifth Symphonies, but what years they were. In 1917, against the turmoil of revolutions in Russia, Prokofiev composed his First Symphony, the “Classical,” reimagining Haydn for the 20th century. The Fifth, praising “the free and happy man,” and written in 1944 with the end of the Second World War in sight, presents a more radical. emotionally complex countenance. But what connects the two is Prokofiev’s preoccupation with simplicity and clarity. Such qualities abound in two magnificent performances by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Thomas Søndergård. Rarely will you hear the “Classical” Symphony etched so finely, the orchestral colours warming the traditionally cool textures. The Fifth Symphony offers pungency and bite to which Søndergård’s precision engineering injects a laser-like hysteria that sets the music ablaze. Ken Walton 

 JAZZ 

Pablo Held: Ascent (Edition Records) **** 

 The highly regarded German pianist and his trio team up with the Brazilian guitarist Nelson Veras to produce thoughtfully considered, often richly textured music in this highly empathetic collaboration. The opening Unlocking Mechanism sets the scene and establishes a sound world that becomes particularly atmospheric in Forest Spirits, augmented by the ethereal singing of Veronika Morscher and secretive clarinet calls from Jeremy Viner. Morcher also guests on the title track, its urgent hustle suddenly giving way to sonorous chiming and vocalising in unison with piano and guitar before drums and double bass signal a muscular resolution. Some numbers are unhurried explorations, such as Seizing, but elsewhere are bustling elaborations on one of Federico Mompou’s Musica Callada piano pieces, a Rachmaninoff extract and a return to jazz via a short, pithy round of Thelonious Monk’s 52nd Street Theme. Jim Gilchrist  

Album reviews: Nathaniel Rateliff | Pictish Trail | Close Lobsters