Hot on the heels of her celebrated 2017 album Out in the Storm, Katie Crutchfield shares an EP of a very different nature. The Waxahatchee sound is stripped down to its most bare and essential; much of Great Thunder is simply Crutchfield sat at a piano.
Paul Simon is currently traversing the globe on his Farewell Tour. His new album clearly accompanies that. It’s a thoughtful look backwards wherein Simon has plucked numbers from his catalogue he feels deserve another go-round, recording them with guest artists, often from the world of jazz (notably Wynton Marsalis). It is, by its nature, somewhat self-indulgent, for there are none of his most famous songs here. These are numbers he wants to bring out of the shadows; that he reckons are worth further attention. On occasion, he’s absolutely right.
The album opens with "One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor", originally a chugging rock’n’roll frolic on 1973’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. It has become a faintly Christmassy piano jazz shuffle that recalls Cab Calloway. It’s not unpleasant, not better, just different. The singer is famed for the pithy wit of his songwriting and, at the album’s best, he grabs the listener by the mind and heartstrings. A good case in point is “Darling Lorraine” from 2000’s You’re the One (from which four of this 10-song set are drawn). The poignancy was arguably submerged on the original’s twangy “adult contemporary” arrangement but here, in more pared-back form, the song is affecting.
Elsewhere New York chamber sextet yMusic get involved on "Can’t Run But" and "Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War". The latter is a particularly literary song and the delicate orchestrations forefront the ache at its heart. Something about it recalls Al Stewart.
I suppose your preference regarding these versions and their originals depends on your relationship with Paul Simon. I possess none of his records and his existence generally passes me by. Music journalists should occasionally make such matters clear with artists who have long, storied careers. It tempers the relevance of what they have to say. From where I’m standing, then, In The Blue Light is an album that, in some places, has a delicate beauty, but in others, overeggs the pudding towards sentimentalism.
It’s been a decade since we last heard from Tom Baxter when he released his second album Skybound, which itself was four years after his debut Feather & Stone. That album included “Almost There”, a song somewhat implausibly covered by Shirley Bassey; Baxter accompanied her when she sang it at the Roundhouse’s Electric Proms.
This Friday, July 20, sees the world premiere of Six Lethargies, a composition by the singer-songwriter Keaton Henson, created collaboratively with various artists, including the Britten Sinfonia who’ll be performing it.
"Homeward Bound – the Farewell Tour", they were calling it. But with a show this strong, nobody would complain if that farewell were to turn out at some point not to be absolutely final.
There aren’t too many folk singers that make it into the pages of Vogue and Interview magazines, but that’s what comes of being a face of Burberry – attire that’s not necessarily a good folk fit. He’s also been snapped in the Augustus Hare catalogue modelling a rather sharp suit and tie. He’s studied theology, likes Bob Dylan and Nick Drake, and his favourite city is Jerusalem. He describes himself as “a classical folk singer”. Sometimes he sounds a little like Donovan.
Gota Fría, or “cold drop”, is a Spanish weather phenomenon associated with violent rainstorms, when high pressure has caused a pocket of cold air to dissociate itself from the warmer clouds. Meteorologists, please excuse my basic and probably erroneous interpretation; the point here is that any person who’s experienced mental ill-health will likely relate to the idea of a sudden dip in temperature, a torrential downpour, and the accompanying isolation.
The line that best summed up the European opening night of Taylor Swift’s latest tour had nothing to do with snakes, or tattered reputations, or tabloid melodrama. It came, in fact, from opening act Charli XCX, who chose the intro to cotton-candy sound-of-last-summer “Boys” to shout out the “three incredible, badass women” who’d take turns sharing the stage tonight.
For his fifth solo album (not counting last year’s delayed soundtrack to Set Fire to the Stars) Welsh singer-songwriter and sometime Super Furry frontman Gruff Rhys inhabits an imaginary landscape in order to deal with issues that are all too real. Like its filmic predecessor, it has been a long time coming. The songs were recorded back in 2016 and, given the world's trajectory in the ensuing years, the dystopian landscape Rhys paints could easily be seen as visionary.
The reason for the delay was not to encourage comparisons with Nostradamus but to ensure that composer Stephen McNeff was available to score the songs. The best things really do come to those who wait. The orchestration drives but never overpowers, and is delivered with a beautifully harnessed sense of sympathy. The same is true of the band that Rhys gathered for this project. In particular, the basslines provided by Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) are astounding, marrying form and function in a way that would make Carol Kaye proud.
Rhys manages to inject humanist hope into scenarios with a gentle unfolding of the human conditionThe songs on Babelsberg contain timeless echoes of songwriting royalty. Touchstones include Scott Walker, Lee Hazelwood and Jimmy Webb but, crucially, at no point does this feel like anything other than a Gruff Rhys record. Rhys has one of the most distinctive voices in modern songwriting, and the fact that this cuts through such a diverse range of work is testament to his vision.
The scope of this collection feels bigger than previous solo outings. These are songs that depict a world gone wrong, heading for a catastrophic date with destiny. Rhys manages to inject humanist hope into this beak backdrop by invoking a sense of compassion and a belief that all might not be lost. “They threw me out of the club, into the darkest alley,” he sings in “The Club”. It’s a wonderful rendering of the sentiment felt by nearly half of the country as we stagger into the darkened cul-de-sac of independence from Brussels. Yet even here there is optimism as the song ends in defiance with “I pick myself up into the blazing sunset.”
The sunset also features in the album’s closer, the apocalyptic duet with Lily Cole, “Selfies in the Sunset”. As well as containing one of the funniest lyrics I’ve heard in years, “Mel Gibson howls with rage / The worst Hamlet of his age”, the song tempers the dread of oncoming armegeddon with the line, “Wake me in the morning at the beginning of a new dawn.” It’s a gently buoyant ending for an album that sees Rhys offer the best of songs for the end of times.
Overleaf: watch the video for 'Frontier Man'
Lindsey Jordan was 16 when she released her first EP as Snail Mail on her local punk label Sister Polygon Records. Two years later, she has graduated from high school and signed to Matador Records, home of Stephen Malkmus, Kurt Vile and Helium. Lush is Jordan’s debut full-length album, which she describes as being “more deliberate” than her previous work.