Album reviews: Scott William Urquhart & Constant Follower | boygenius | Thomas Bangalter

Scott William Urquhart and Constant Follower PIC: Jai Ohare

Scott William Urquhart & Constant Follower: Even Days Dissolve (Golden Hum Recordings) ****

boygenius: the record (Polydor/Interscope) ****

Thomas Bangalter: Mythologies (Erato/Warner Classics) ****

Murray A Lightburn: Once Upon A Time In Montreal (Dangerbird Records) ****

Stirling-based songwriter Stephen McAll, aka Constant Follower, emerged seemingly fully formed in 2021 with Neither Is, Nor Ever Was, a beautiful debut album which was in fact the culmination of 20 years of recovery from a traumatic physical assault in his late teens.

The poetry of Norman MacCaig was part of that healing journey and now provides the inspiration for this equally gorgeous collaboration with guitarist Scott William Urquhart. Even Days Dissolve is forged with a similar love of nature, respect for space and careful layering of instrumentation to create a self-soothing suite of tranquil beauty.

The languorous dexterity of Urquhart’s playing is showcased on Song For A Willow Tree, while Space Between Stars blends acoustic post-rock with a touch of electronica and some eerie whispering from McAll. In contrast, the title track evokes the soft melodiousness of Sixties folk rock, embellished with sustained cooing notes.

Guest musicians colour the mood. Constant Follower compadre Amy Campbell adds harmony vocals to the indie folk balm of Watching the Black River Run, Matt Carmichael lends sultry saxophone to Comes A Silence (Basking Shark), Stirling-born, Glasgow-based rapper CRPNTR provides meditative spoken word on Ash Wednesday Slow and MacCaig himself is sampled on a couple of atmospheric occasions.

In a good week for symbiotic collaborations, feted solo singer/songwriters Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacas and Julien Baker release their first full-length album as supergroup boygenius. The record gives equal weight to Dacas’s folk leanings, Bridgers’ roots pop and Baker’s indie rock stylings.

While Bridgers and Dacas serve up the yearning regret, Baker leads on the heavier tunes, which recall Nineties melodic grunge grrrl bands such as Belly. The low-slung garage rock of The Satanist gives way to a dreamy reverie at the last gasp while all three come together in ravishing a cappella unity on Without You Without Them, with Simon & Garfunkel-like synergy on Cool About It and harmonising wittily about an “existential crisis” on Leonard Cohen, a love song about their friendship which tells the true story of a bonding and unintentionally circuitous car journey.

Thomas Bangalter is best known as one half of titanic dance pop duo Daft Punk but, following their split in 2021, his first solo album is an entirely different and audacious compositional feat. Mythologies is a fluent orchestral soundtrack to choreographer Angelin Preljocaj’s ballet of the same name, which encompasses classical traditions from pastoral to modernist to create symphonic snapshots of mythological characters from Icarus to Medusa, Aries to Aphrodite.

The Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, under the baton of Romain Dumas, captures the dramatic urgency of L’Arrivée d’Alexandre, the spring in the step of Treize Nuits, a surprisingly circumspect Zeus, with its intimations of caution and hesitancy, the sorrowful swell of L’Accouchement and the blockbuster drama of Le Minotaur, topped with soulful solo violin.

Murray A Lightburn, frontman of Canadian indie rock band The Dears, also brings compositional flair to his solo album. Once Upon A Time in Montreal is his requiem for the jazz musician father he barely knew, telling his story as an immigrant from Belize, who relocated from New York to Montreal to follow the love of his life, pieced together with input from his mother and recorded with players from the city’s jazz scene.

It makes for a gentler chamber pop experience than the melodrama of The Dears, taking in the tremulous strings and pastoral pop of No New Deaths Today, the delicate jazz guitar and old school serenade of The Only One I Want to Hear, symphonic soul of Oh But My Heart Has Never Been Dark and rueful crooning of Reaching Out For Love.

CLASSICAL

Coronation: Music for Royal Occasions (CORO) ****

Did Handel write Zadok the Priest, his rousing coronation anthem for George II, with a sense of the theatrical bordering on mischief? That’s the impression Harry Christophers, with his chorus and period instrumentalists of The Sixteen, proffers at the start of this timely album of music for royal occasions. Rather than the traditional crescendo running through Handel’s expectant, arpeggiated instrumental introduction, Christophers keeps it hushed and languid, the choir entering with a mighty wallop that would see even the drowsiest of courtiers leaping from their pews. It’s a gloriously joyous moment in a disc that includes music for the first Queen Elizabeth by Byrd and Tallis, and for successive monarchs by Gibbon, Purcell and Britten. There’s a sumptuous contemporary anthem – O Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth – by Cecilia McDowall with exquisite harp accompaniment. Christophers also cheers us with Choral Dances from Britten’s opera Gloriana, and Tippet’s Dance, Clarion Air. Ken Walton

FOLK

Salt House: Riverwoods (Hudson Records) *****

Written to complement an eponymously titled documentary made by rewilding charity SCOTLAND: The Big Picture, to highlight the decline in returning salmon, this latest album from the trio Salt House is suitably riverine in its beguiling flow. Guitarist-mandolinist Ewan MacPherson, fiddler and violist Lauren MacColl and singer-guitarist-pianist Jenny Sturgeon (between them doubling on harmonium and synths) create a richly organic sound. This is exemplified by the glittering guitar and mandolin that herald the opener, Her Silver Spate, joined by fiddle lilt and Sturgeon’s quiet vocal authority, and the subsequent instrumental, The Dipper, takes up the flow. There’s a fine, folksong-like drift to another instrumental, Unspoken Waters, MacColl’s fiddle doing the singing. Birch Lines, meanwhile, traces pathways “past sleepers in the old kirkyard”, echoing viola tone contrasts with brighter strings and synth shimmer in The Loom o’ Morn, while things open out beautifully for Headwater, illuminating a worrying issue with glowing lyricism. Jim Gilchrist

Album reviews: Scott William Urquhart & Constant Follower | boygenius | Thomas Bangalter | Murray A Lightburn