Album reviews: The Birthday Suit | Veronica Falls | Classical | Folk | Jazz | World

Our team of reviewers review the latest pop, classical, folk, jazz and world albums

Pop

The Birthday Suit: The Eleventh Hour

Sing It Alone, Download Only

***

WITH Idlewild on a break and frontman Roddy Woomble scratching his folky itch on his solo albums, guitarist Rod Jones cleaves to rousing indie pop/rock on his new band project, upping the volume following his own mellow solo album A Sentimental Education. The Eleventh Hour, which is available now for download ahead of its physical release in November, is spirited rather than punky, though, with ringing guitars, lithe pop melodies, complementary female backing vocals and a strong Celtrock streak – indeed, is that a bagpipe guitar sound lurking in the background of A Nation?

Veronica Falls: Veronica Falls

Bella Union, £13.99

***

WITH their jangly guitars, Mo Tuckerish drumming, dreamy odes to boys, floppy fringes, retro knitwear and the very use of the name Veronica, this four-piece, featuring a couple of ex-members of Glasgow’s The Royal We, are proud inhabitants of Planet Twee. But it’s not all skipping through meadows on their debut album – that dream boy is married, for starters. And these guys like to hang around in cemeteries (Found Love In A Graveyard, boasting the hookline “dearly departed, I’m broken-hearted”) and at notorious suicide spots (the gothic garage urgency of Beachy Head), even if they don’t go anywhere musically that The Shop Assistants and The Wedding Present hadn’t already been 25 years ago.

Ryan Adams: Ashes & Fire

PAX-AM/Columbia, £12.99

****

WHETHER rocking out with his band The Cardinals or strumming thoughtfully on the porch, Ryan Adams has never been short of material, but he is at his classiest on this contemplative country collection, which captures mood and exudes emotion with a beautiful restraint. His subject matter is hardly original – help me make it through the night, just how much of a mug am I for being stuck on you, that kind of thing – but it is conveyed with such eloquent economy and a warm ache by Adams and his guests Benmont Tench on organ and Norah Jones on backing vocals. The mellow, soulful likes of Do I Wait, Invisible Riverside or closing piano ballad I Love You But I Don’t Know What To Say don’t shout their credentials from the rooftops; instead, they lay down softly by your side.

Fiona Shepherd

Classical

Delius: String Concertos

Chandos, £12.99

****

THESE string concertos of Delius may seem didactic in structure, but each of the Concerto for Violin and Cello (yes, Brahms’ Double Concerto isn’t the only one for such a combination), the Violin Concerto and the Cello Concerto contain a rhapsodic fluidity and hazy string of harmonies that are Delius through and through. They are music for a summer’s day, preferably in an English cottage garden of a bygone Edwardian age. Violinist Tasmin Little and cellist Paul Watkins are a masterful solo pairing in performances that are full of personality and mighty in tone. Sir Andrew Davis draws warmth and finesse from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Kenneth Walton

Folk

Fiona Cuthill and Steve Lawrence: A Cruel Kindness

Fellside, £12.99

***

SOME sprightly playing on this album, right from the opener, with fiddle and guitar ringing together in snappy strathspey time to open the Stairs set before accelerating into exhilarating reel time.

The tunes are composed largely by fiddler Fiona Cuthill and guitarist Steve Lawrence, with Lawrence’s guitar work coming to the fore in the Peisey Bubble jig set, but where Cuthill excels, as both composer and player, is in her slower material, such as the title track, which has an old-fashioned grace about it, accompanied by Rachel Hair’s clarsach, or the winsome air, Mrs Nan Stewart that launches the closing set before things speed up for a driving finale bolstered by Brendan McCreanor’s uilleann pipes. And one track deserves a prize for least likely folk choice – an acoustic version of the old (and heavy) Jethro Tull number, Locomotive Breath.

Jim Gilchrist

Jazz

Sam Crockatt Quartet: Flood Tide

Babel, £12.99

****

SAXOPHONIST Sam Crockatt’s debut was voted best album in the Parliamentary Jazz Awards in 2009, creating a fair weight of expectation prior to the release of this follow-up. It’s fair to say that those expectations are handsomely fulfilled. The Quartet is affiliated to the influential Loop Collective in London, and retains Oli Hayhurst on bass and drummer Ben Reynolds from the earlier album, with Kit Downes replacing Gwilym Simcock on piano. They make a potent unit in combination with Crockatt’s tenor saxophone. Other than the opening Sun and Moon, written by Downes, the music is all by the leader, and reveals him as a strong composer as well as improviser, switching readily from the energised free-bop of King Apple or Theodore’s Spring Song to a more European-style reflectiveness on The Prophet, from funky rhythmic urgency on The Ridgeway to a folk-like melodic simplicity on Trilogy.

Kenny Mathieson

World

Sezen Aksu - Optum

World Village, £13.99

****

THEY call her the “Turkish Madonna”, and there is indeed a physical resemblance. Sezen Aksu has also been dubbed “the voice of Turkey”, and not only because for three consecutive years in the early 1980s she was a finalist in the Eurovision Song Contest. She grew up in the southern town of Izmir, where she studied agriculture, theatre, dance, and sculpture as well as music, but her wonderfully versatile contralto soon propelled her into the limelight as a singer. The Rough Guide to World Music informs us that thanks to her wealth she lives in high style, owning both a nightclub and a recording studio on the banks of the Bosphorus.

On Thursday, the Royal Albert Hall will be packed out for her long-awaited solo appearance, backed by her traditional-instrument band plus a 35-piece oriental orchestra, but for those us unable to attend there is also her new album, to add to the 23 she has already put out.

Like the others, it both echoes the Turkish classical tradition and speaks to current social injustices.

She has long campaigned against Turkey’s oppression of its ethnic minorities, notably the Kurds, and she had a long relationship with the Turkish-Armenian composer Onno Tuncboyacian; after his death in a plane crash she withdrew from public life for a while, and her songs still reflect their union. As this new CD shows, she has a uniquely compelling timbre, which can go very high but becomes bewitching in the low register; and a lovely sense of line.

No wonder she’s a heart-throb for three generations of her compatriots. The backing sound is warm, and the songs segue gracefully one into another.

Michael Church