Latest CD releases reviewed
THE BLUE NILE
High Sanctuary
**
The release of a new record by the notoriously unprolific Paul Buchanan is sure to cause much loss of bladder control among long-time fans; but hold onto your water - the sporadic musings of the Scots songwriter have long ago lost their allure, and High sounds like it's been sitting neglected in a room that no one's visited since the 1980s. Buchanan's plaintive, portamento croon glides you straight back to the heady ambience of Hats and A Walk Across The Rooftops, but the artificial soul of Days Of Our Lives, Broken Loves, Because Of Toledo and She Saw The World are unable to keep you there for very long. Buchanan certainly knows how to craft an introspective, soul-searching atmosphere with keyboards and voice, but the air is stale with the musty echoes of someone else's past life.
www.sanctuaryrecords.com
Kevin Courtney
THE DEVLINS
Waves Rubyworks
**
It never rains but it drizzles. Hot on the high heels of the new album by the Corr sisters, here's the Devlin brothers with their fourth album, recorded at the Factory in Dublin, and containing 10 new songs that sound not unlike many classic songs you may have heard before. Colin and Peter Devlin are veterans of the Irish music scene by now, and they're past masters at taking familiar chord progressions and turning them into rootsy, radio-friendly rock anthems. Like U2's quieter, less showy cousins, The Devlins use many of the Big Music's motifs, but keep their feet firmly on earth rather than shoot off over the horizon. Sunrise is probably the closest they come here to total fireballs-out rock, while Careless Love has an adult contemporary charm of its own. Expect to hear these warm, old-fashioned songs on drinks ads, oddball American drama series and low-key movie soundtracks.
www.thedevlins.com
Kevin Courtney
GRAND DRIVE
The Lights In This Town Are Too Many To Count Gravity
***
Can white men play the blues? Can city types and urban cowboys sing Americana? These are questions that have bothered genre-protective purists for decades, and, while there's some truth in the answers (yes and no), you can be assured that a band such as Grand Drive - from South London via Australia - treasure the music above all else. Yet Grand Drive have changed over the past eight years, and this, their fourth album, sees them veer away from their early base of Americana/Beach Boys folk/pop towards something rather more glorious. Opening track Love and the Truth sets the tone: slow burning, layered and building from ground level to peaks not previously attained by the band. If the album falters from here on in it's no big deal, as the remaining tracks (especially Santa Rita and I Believe in Love) almost equally qualify. Produced by Daniel Lanois alumnus Malcolm Burn, the songs lend themselves to his rustic yet spatial skills. For the most part, simply gorgeous.
www.grand-drive.com
Tony Clayton-Lea
TANYA DONELLY
Whiskey Tango Ghosts 4AD
***
Tanya Donelly has moved on - from the sugar-coated grunge pop of her Belly years to languid ballads and fragile acoustic ruminations. Trumpeted as the alt.country masterpiece she had always threatened, her third solo album doesn't quite live up to its billing. The record's gentle pace and sedate palette of sounds - pianos and steel pedal are to the fore - certainly marks a departure from the reverb-drenched shoe-gazing that characterised her 1990s output. Yet, for all its passion, genuine emotiveness somehow eludes the project. Too many songs ring of filler, too few melodies soar rather than plod dutifully. Without Donelly's vocals, which have grown sadder and wearier yet somehow more spine-tingling over time, Whiskey Tango Ghosts would have been a cross-over project of minor import. As it is, this counts as a triumph, albeit a minor-key one.
www.4ad.com
Ed Power
THE ALBUM LEAF
In A Safe Place City Slang
****
Multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Lavalle's solo instrumental project The Album Leaf's new album is an astonishingly successful collaboration between members of Iceland's post-rock and electronic exports Sigur Rós and Múm and Lavalle's own alt.rock outfit The Black Heart Procession. From loose improvisations and group discussions of ideas to lo-fi rehearsal takes, Lavalle incorporates his recording and collaborative process into In A Safe Place's unique sound world; the nine-minute Moss Mountain Town blends a slide guitar and piano instrumental track with a distorted recording of a Lavalle ballad. He merges effortlessly Sigur Rós's brooding guitar drones and Múm's sinuous electronic percussion with his own folk-rock sensibility, deftly reconfiguring each collaborator's signature sound and style - particularly Jonti Birgisson's ethereal vocals on Over The Pond or Lavalle's own lyric style on On Your Way. Rarely are collaborations this good.
www.cityslang.com
Jocelyn Clarke
ZRAZY
Dream On ALFI
***
Mellowing more with each record, while melting further away from the pulsing techno and club anthems of their musical beginnings, the closest thing to Zrazy's delicate sultriness may now be the blossom of cool jazz in the 1950s. With a pronounced emphasis on the lightly tripping rhythms and chilled improvisations of Bossa Nova, composer and saxophonist Carole Nelson and honey-toned vocalist Maria Walsh create something equally sedate and sensual from the breathy opening of Angel Walking. Loose and limber, their backing band can be nerve-fraying for Maroc, a Waitsian detour, then aptly soft-focused for Walsh's Dietrich purring through The Water is Wide. If Keep it Real seems characteristically arch, matching a jaunty piano motif to a hip-hop phrase, it holds together like each sigh and exultation of the record: nestled into the sounds of Zrazy in love.
www.zrazy.com
Peter Crawley
FEIST
Let It Die Polydor France
***
Given that Leslie Feist's former musical ploys were as Bitch Lap Lap alongside such extra-terrestrial pranksters as ex-flatmate Peaches and Gonzales, there was always a chance that the Canadian's début solo album would have been death-by-fashionista. Instead, Let It Die is a triumph of ideas and imagination, a minor-key classic which owes a little to a lot, from Carole King and PJ Harvey to Sade, Jane Birkin and Astrud Gilberto. If you're thinking, "Katie Melua for hairdressers", stop right there because there's a fragile, spirited elegance to Feist's work (and that includes a spiffing cover version of the Bee Gees' Inside and Out) that augurs well for the future. Soulful without losing her cool, funky without resorting to platforms and jazzy without getting jizzy, Let It Die is an informed pleasure from start to finish.
www.listentofeist.com
Jim Carroll
