Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brilliance
Nile Rodgers is a pop juggernaut, up there with the very biggest. Aside from Chic's disco monsters “Good Times” and “Le Freak”, he’s also responsible for Sister Sledge’s career (“We Are Family”), “Let’s Dance” by Bowie, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”, Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, Diana Ross’s “Upside Down”, and too many other hits to mention. Since 2011 he’s endlessly played the festival circuit, a euphoric show reminding us of his legacy. He has not, however, resurrected Chic in the studio until now.
One of the biggest crowd roars of the night comes right at the start when Jake Shears runs onstage. He is wearing a grey top hat, a white tail-jacket with glittered lapel-edging, silver glittery trousers, a tight black sequinned vest top, and a bow tie on his bare neck. The 600 capacity Concorde 2, right on Brighton's seafront, is sold out.
It’s hard to know who to write about when reviewing a new Gorillaz release. According to the official line, the band have shorn their usual guests to focus on the core creative team: vocalist 2D, drummer Russell, guitarist Noodle, and new bassist Ace, borrowed from The Powerpuff Girls.
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best.
The packed crowd at the Jazz Café was fired up by a sizzling samba soul band led by Kita Steuer on bass and vocals, singing along to a production line of hits, complete with dynamic brass section and superior percussion. All songs by a singular Brazilian artist, Tim Maia, who died 20 years ago and whose music was being celebrated.
Although its opening minute suggests one of Can’s Ethnological Forgery Series tracks, Jungle? Quelle Jungle? quickly sets its stall with gentle whacka-whacka guitar, a Cerrone-type or South African-styled female chorale, fusion-jazz woodwind, shimmering electric piano, Latin percussion, squelchy bass and a touch of Space’s space disco. There is a lot going on.
Essentially, the album – its title a reference to Supertramp’s Crisis What Crisis – marries yacht rock and the smooth, Côte d'Azur side of disco. Fire Island, this is not. Instead, this could have packed the light-up dance-floor of Paris’ Chalet du Lac in 1976 or 1977.
Getting a handle on Jungle? Quelle Jungle? isn’t difficult but what perplexes is why such an album been fabricated. It sounds expensive and glossy, and is terrifically clever but lacks joy. Surely those behind it would have the nous to create something which hid its bricolage nature more successfully? Or to avoid edging into parody? And imbue it with a sense of fun? Apparently not.
Jungle? Quelle Jungle? has not come from nowhere. Ten years ago a French trio called Jordan released their only album, Oh No! We are Dominos. Produced by Jay Pellici, whose credits also include Avi Buffalo, Deerhoof and Sleater-Kinney, it employed Pixies-like stop-start songs, yelping vocals, odd bits of Afro guitar and parping keyboards. The lyrics were in English and it may as well have been by an American art-rock band. After that, the band faded from view but one-third of the line-up resurfaced in 2011 as the prime mover of electro-disco outfit Bon Voyage. Adrien Durand had made his next move.
Fast forward to 2017 when Durand claimed the producer credit for Amadou & Mariam’s last album, La Confusion. Now, a full album arrives under the imprimatur Bon Voyage Organization. Through-and-through, it is Durand’s project. Jungle? Quelle Jungle? is also an efficient, if deliberate and soulless, construct.
Overleaf: watch the video for “Goma” from Bon Voyage Organization’s Jungle? Quelle Jungle?
Tracey Thorn’s solo career in the 21st century has veered between contemplative adult music and the pop dancefloor. With her latest, we’re definitely on the pop dancefloor, but, despite delicious synth-led production from Ewan Pearson, ignore the lyrics at your peril. It’s unlikely the likes of Dua Lipa or Rita Ora would start a song with the lines “Every morning of the month you push a little tablet through the foil/Cleverest of all inventions, better than a condom or a coil” as Thorn does on the pithily crafted motherhood-themed “Babies”. Her smart, sharp lyrics give these nine numbers a rich added dimension to engage with.
Like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Record plays with listeners’ knowledge of the singer’s personal life. Thorn has, famously, been together with her Everything But The Girl partner Ben Watt for decades. The songs “Go” and “Face”, however, are both heartfelt lost love numbers, the latter about late nights looking at social media, asking, “Do you scroll through my photos just to check that I’m fine?” She’s almost certainly playing with us, as spirited artists do, but because she delivers the whole thing so plaintively, only those with hearts of stone won’t wonder just a little. In any case, alternatively, “Guitar” is a nostalgic celebration of her original meeting with Watt.
Never mind who she’s hooked up with, though, the album fizzes with her wit and intelligence and, in the eight-and-a-half minute “Sister”, featuring grooving percussion from Warpaint and backing vocals from Corinne Bailey Rae, she’s created an electro-disco corker honouring woman power. Elsewhere she proclaims her love for London on the folk-tronic “Smoke” and later concludes proceedings with the sheer joyful abandon of “Dancefloor” (“Where I want to be is on a dancefloor with some drinks inside of me”).
Apart from the almost Sinéad O'Conner-like vocals she adopts on “Go”, Thorn revels in the deeper timbres of her mature voice, giving her an authority that sits well amid synth pop styled mostly somewhere between Erasure and Pet Shop Boys. It’s a feisty, appealing album, never wallowing, showcasing its maker as an original to be treasured, although she’d undoubtedly scoff at such a suggestion.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Queen" by Tracey Thorn
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
One New Year’s Eve in the 1970s, hot young session musicians Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were assured by Grace Jones that they could penetrate the inner sanctum of Studio 54 by dropping her name at the door. A doorman thought otherwise and invited them to "fuck off". Making alternative arrangements, they bought a couple of bottles of Dom Perignon – “rock’n’roll mouthwash”, in Rodgers’ phrase – and went home to jam.