Album reviews: Sparks | Wanda Jackson | Suzie Ungerleider | Paper Birch

For their latest project, a sung-through movie musical, the always idiosyncratic Mael brothers have turned the crazy dial up to 11, writes Fiona Shepherd
Sparks PIC: Anna WebberSparks PIC: Anna Webber
Sparks PIC: Anna Webber

Sparks: Annette: Cannes Selections – Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Milan Records) ***

Wanda Jackson: Encore (Big Machine/Blackheart Records) ****

Suzie Ungerleider: My Name Is Suzie Ungerleider (MVKA) ***

Wanda Jackson PIC: Emma Lee PhotographyWanda Jackson PIC: Emma Lee Photography
Wanda Jackson PIC: Emma Lee Photography

Paper Birch: morninghairwater (Reckless Yes) ***

At a point in their career where a band of Sparks’ vintage might be considering the pipe-and-slippers option, the Mael brothers have instead completed one of their most ambitious projects, a sung-through movie musical written with Holy Motors director Leos Carax.

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Annette sounds barking even by Sparks’ idiosyncratic standards. Greeted with equal parts acclaim and bewilderment at Cannes, and shortly to be screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, it stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as a celebrity couple with an uneasy private life and a baby on the way.

This is no standard domestic narrative – better just to let go and listen to the heightened rock operatics than attempt to impose any conventional order on the soundtrack, which comprises the duo’s familiar baroque pop chops, art rock swagger and observational quirks delivered by a chorus of different voices.

Suzie UngerleiderSuzie Ungerleider
Suzie Ungerleider

Driver and Cotillard are game for the staccato mantra So May We Start and elegantly circle each other on the ambivalent We Love Each Other So Much. Both are strong, expressive singers, though soprano Catherine Trottmann is on hand to provide supplementary technical heft.

As Cotillard fades somewhat from the spotlight, Russell Mael leads the chorus of disgust on Six Women Have Come Forward while Driver responds with rage on rhythmic rocker You Used to Laugh, torrid regret on Stepping Back in Time and vulnerability on Sympathy for the Abyss. But it’s not over until the creepy child sings.

Wanda Jackson built her cult following on raspy rock’n’roll ripostes such as Mean Mean Man and Fujiyama Mama. She’s still a badass at the age of 83 but now the queen of rockabilly bows out with her 32nd and final album Encore. The pace is slower and the voice more frail but the attitude is still there. Wanda’s not for letting her man get away on Two Shots and the ass-shaking attitude gives way to a dreamy come-on middle eight on Treat Me Like A Lady.

Produced by Joan Jett, with the Blackhearts as the twanging backing band, Encore shows off Jackson’s range from the blues strut of You Drive Me Wild and mean stomp of Good Girl Down to fragile ballad That’s What Love Is and the tear-in-her-beer country of Johnny Tillotson’s It Keeps Right On A-Hurting, while she rules utterly on the love/hate last dance sway of We Gotta Stop.

Canadian singer/songwriter Suzie Ungerleider is a waft of warm air next to Hurricane Wanda. No longer comfortable with her previous Oh Susanna moniker (because of its association with the American minstrelsy tradition), Ungerleider is now trading under her birth name with an album which follows the autobiographical A Girl in Teen City with more thoughtful excerpts from her back pages.

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Her clear voice with its plaintive edge is all the better for the bittersweet storytelling of Mount Royal, evoking her late teenage years in Montreal, and Summerbaby, recalling the traumatic birth of her daughter. Hearts is a gentle ode to her now teenage offspring, its barely-there backing contrasting with the aching Americana of Baby Blues and winsome indie pop of Sweet Little Sparrow.

Paper Birch is a lockdown collaboration between Fergus Lawrie, late of Glasgow indie noiseniks Urusei Yatsura, and London-based multi-instrumentalist Dee Sada. The duo have never actually met in person and yet their soft voices blend wistfully on their debut collection, morninghairwater, which drifts seamlessly from the sculpted shoegazing distortion of Summer Daze via the yearning Velvet Underground-like balladry of Love For The Things Yr Not to the gauzy, glitchy lullaby Hide and the more upbeat fuzz rock paean I Don’t Know You.

CLASSICAL

Summertime: Isata Kanneh-Mason (Decca) *****

Isata Kanneh-Mason, senior pianist of the multi-talented musical family, confirms her brilliance in this second solo album, where she largely explores the energy and sincerity of the 20th century American musical landscape. At its heart is Samuel Barber’s extraordinary Piano Sonata in E flat. Kanneh-Mason finds a deep and expressive warmth even within its brittlest utterances. This is a performance of impressive virtuosity – not least in the final fugue – and candid, generous musicianship. Beyond that we find the pianist at ease with Earl Wild’s reworking of Gershwin’s Summertime, unperturbed by the filmic eccentricities of Copland’s humorous showpiece The Cat and the Mouse, eliciting woozy sensuality from Gershwin, and winding things up affectionately with three of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s spiritual arrangements. She also includes Amy Beach’s quiescent By the Still Waters and the the first ever recording of Coleridge-Taylor’s Impromptu No 2 in B Minor. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Journeys in Modern Jazz: Britain (1965-1972) (Decca) ****

This invaluable double CD, which comes with a well informed 55-page commentary by compiler Tony Higgins, features long unavailable tracks in a snapshot of the vibrancy of a UK jazz scene energetically and inventively casting off from the “trad boom” of the earlier Sixties. Some of the big band tracks especially, headed by the likes of Dankworth, Westbrook, Tracey, exude burgeoning creative energy, while emergent instrumental voices are shaping up – John Surman’s even then unmistakable soprano saxophone biting through With Terry’s Help, or the late Don Rendell’s high-energy soprano sax in his Quintet’s A Matter of Time. Then there’s the mighty orchestral fusion of Michael Gibbs’s Some Echoes, Some Shadows, its 1970 rock credentials underpinned by the presence of bassist Jack Bruce and the seething guitar of Chris Spedding. This compilation signals that Decca’s British Jazz Explosion reissue series, which it launches, means business. Jim Gilchrist

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