Album reviews: Laura Marling | Ron Sexsmith | Port Sulphur

Laura Marling

Laura Marling offers succour in difficult times, while Ron Sexsmith exudes contented wellbeing

Laura Marling: Song For Our Daughter (Chrysalis/Partisan) ****

Ron Sexsmith: Hermitage (Cooking Vinyl) ****

Port Sulphur: Compendium (Creeping Bent) ****

While some of the bigger – and not so big – names in pop err on the side of commercial caution and push back album releases until later in the year, there are other artists stepping into the Covid-19 void with unexpected early arrivals.

Laura Marling, a singular voice at the best of times, has opted to get her new album out there for the worst of times. By her reasoned reckoning, what’s the point of waiting? People need to plug into the galvanising power of music more than ever, and there is a special energy around Marling’s music, a warm elixir of the ethereal and the earthed.In her teens and early twenties, Marling often drew on mythology and folklore for her lyrical inspiration. Now she is 30 and thoughts turn to domestic responsibilities, Song for our Daughter, a manual of hope and guidance for a fictional child, inspired by Maya Angelou’s Letter to My Daughter, is the first album she has written not as a touring musician but as a domiciled songwriter.

Marling is based once more in London but her musical heart is still partly in her previous playground of California. The freewheeling Alexandra could easily have floated across from Laurel Canyon in the early Seventies, while the simple, fluent piano ballad Blow By Blow recalls the gentle sagacity of Judy Collins.

Even when tangling with thorny material, Marling is a natural communicator. The acoustic blues of the title track is a tender but earnest attempt to pass on her knowledge and experience (“Lately I’ve been thinking about our daughter growing old, all of the bulls*** that she might be told”).

She sounds liberated as she delivers the soulful rootsy pop of Held Down, layering her voice to create heavenly harmony backing vocals. Elsewhere she takes a more rhythmic, semi-spoken approach to Strange Girl and supports the mellow melancholy of Only the Strong with a soothing hum.

The timeless waltz Fortune is backed with swooning strings but Marling’s tenderly picked acoustic guitar, pure voice and spellbinding storytelling skills are the star attractions. She continues to draw inspiration from the twin Canadian peaks of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, sculpting wise counsel from the simplest of ingredients.

Ron Sexsmith occupies a more modest spot in the Canadian canon yet, for long-term consistency, this brilliant, balmy songwriter is hard to beat. There is never a bad time to become acquainted with his music but now, more than ever, he can provide an empathetic easy listening refuge.

Hermitage exudes contented wellbeing, with Sexsmith revelling in the leafy small town delights of his new home in Justin Bieber’s former stomping ground of Stratford, Ontario, capturing the tweeting birds on the bucolic Spring of the Following Year, expressing blushing romance on Whatever Shape Your Heart Is In and staying in touch with that quintessential Sexsmith ache on You Don’t Wanna Hear It.

Sexsmith has long displayed a McCartneyesque ear for melody but throughout Hermitage he also indulges his inner Ray Davies, whether on the yearning Apparently Au Pair or the peppier Winery Blues.

Port Sulphur is the current working alias of musician about town Douglas MacIntyre, a discerning outlet for his unapologetic fanboy tastes. This bumper debut collection, to be released through his Creeping Bent website, evokes the rebel indie sounds of early Eighties Scotpop, with a side order of Bristolian industrial punk-funk courtesy of saxophonist Gareth Sager and New York rock’n’roll swagger from late Suicide frontman Alan Vega.

Elsewhere in this free-ranging odyssey, Gene Tambourine celebrates Gene Clark of The Byrds in the style of a Velvet Underground jam, Fast Boys & Factory Girls is a motorik tribute to the trailblazing independent labels of Edinburgh and Manchester, and there’s even a touch of Philly soul to the immaculate Towerblock.

CLASSICAL

Canadian Organ Music from Coventry Cathedral (Delphian Coro) ****

Rachel Mahon’s Canadian programme on the organ of Coventry Cathedral opens with one of the giants of the late Romantic repertoire, Healey Willan’s Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue. It’s a beast of a piece, on the scale of Liszt, Reubke or even Reger, whose identically-titled work was the inspiration for the English-born Willan. Mahon seeks out organ colours that capture the beefiness of the music, yet avoids the muddiness that can so often turn good pieces into mush. Her playing is clear-minded and articulate. The remainder of the disc is more contemporary: Gerald Bates’s neoclassical Petite Suite (1965), Ruth Watson Henderson’s French-inspired Chromatic Partita (1995) and Rachel Laurin’s Symphony No 1 (2008). The last is of equal proportions to the Willan, somewhat cliched in style, but with sufficient delicacy and nuance to warrant the freshness and charm of Mahon’s colourful performance. Ken Walton

JAZZ

George Colligan Trio: Live in Arklow (Ubuntu Music) ****

The creative energy of live jazz at its best radiates from this album by esteemed US pianist George Colligan in the sterling company of Irish sidemen, drummer Darren Beckett and double-bassist David Redmond, caught in full flight in a County Wicklow church. A brief opening solo foray by Colligan morphs into the breezily energetic waltz time of Freddie Hubbard’s Up Jumped Spring, with the pianist ranging vivaciously about the keyboard and trading breaks with Beckett, while Colligan’s own Lost on Fourth Avenue opens with steadily ringing piano chords that shape into an increasingly funky melody line over Beckett’s beaty and increasingly boisterous drumming. Again with Attitude is another sparkling excursion as all three let rip while, as its title suggests, Usain is a bolt of similarly high energy. In contrast, Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love? is a lingering keyboard meditation over shushing brushes and murmuring bass. Jim Gilchrist