Follow the light
His first ‘proper’ solo LP in years. Rosanne Cash, Weyes Blood, and Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig from Lucius guest.
T Bone Burnett ★★★★
The Other Side
VERVE FORECAST. CD/DL/LP
PLAYING GUITAR on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue; bringing the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack to life; producing everyone from Roy Orbison to B.B. King to Brandi Carlile: however high the stakes, T Bone Burnett has always delivered. Indeed, the diversity of this 76-yearold son of St Louis, Missouri’s canonical output boggles the mind, and sparks a thought: how do you tread pastures new when you’ve already been pretty much everywhere?
Burnett did so, though, on 2019’s The
Invisible Light: Acoustic Space, and on 2022’s The Invisible Light: Spells. Made with drummer Jay Bellerose and film composer Keefus Ciancia, these unner ving, sci-fi-oriented LPs tapped electronic and spoken-word elements, and were part influenced by a dystopian dream about tech-ruined humanity Burnett had as a kid. For a man synonymous with roots music, it was quite the odyssey.
Having journeyed to The Twilight Zone, Burnett now presents The Other Side. It’s a calmer, infinitely more traditional-sounding record, but some of these spare countr y-blues songs are not for the faint-hearted either. With Burnett’s co-producer Colin Linden on dobro and Kalamazoo guitar, and Dennis Crouch on string bass, Waiting for You seems conceptually straightforward until you learn it portrays a love affair between ghosts, while the graveyard-set Sometimes I Wonder, with Natalie Mering, AKA Weyes Blood, on bv’s, ponders transition to the sweet, or perhaps not so sweet hereafter.
Happily, there are also mood lighteners. All horses’-hooves percussion and Everly Brothers harmonies, (I’m Gonna Get Over This) Someday is a charming Burnett/Rosanne Cash duet; the kind of song that would have bedded-down nicely on either of the LPs T Bone produced for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. The str uctural integrity of Come Back (When You Go Away) is similarly impressive, Burnett connecting his guitar chords with simple, lower register r uns, and making a little orchestra out of nothing. Yes, there is cuatro, clarinet and violin on The Other
Side, but it’s mostly just Burnett and an acoustic guitar. Songs this good need little ornamentation.
There is fine, often textural use of the Lucius singers’ spectral harmonies, but Burnett’s beautifully abraded voice stars, calm and quietly authoritative on The First Light Of Day. He attributes the new tone he has found at 76 to singing from his chest, rather than his head, and we benefit from his onward journey.
A record producer’s role often involves great tact and a nurturing largesse, but it’s taken him until now, Burnett has said, to treat himself with the kindness he’d automatically afford other artists. He’s an old dog with new tricks then, The Other Side probably the most honest reflection of himself he’s ever made.
IN THE RED. CD/DL/LP
Ty Segall sideman’s powerpop bonanza of “love songs for the apocalypse”. As supporting guitarist in Segall’s Freedom Band, and lead guitarist in Fuzz (where Segall drums), Moothart clearly shares his bandmate’s hyperproductivity, having somehow found time for three late-2010s outings with his CFM quartet. For this full-name debut, he recorded alone in LA, yet Black
Holes Don’t Choke has a feel of ‘lonerism’ à la Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, as if its ideas, musical and thematic, were unloaded into Pro Tools in frenzied wee-hours sessions on a tour bus, then later organised. As such, it’s anything but live-in-the-room, with opener Roll, Little Egg and Clock Rats each taking dramatic left-turns mid-song, from acoustic to electric or vice versa, like entirely separate tracks have simply been spliced together digitally. Out of all that chaos, however, some memorable tunes emerge: One Wish recalls Matthew Sweet’s honeyharmonised hyper-pop, while Anchored And Empty echoes Fuzz’s doom metal, amid prevailing themes of alienation in these precarious times.
Jessica Pratt ★★★★
Here In The Pitch CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP
BACK IN 2012, when her self-titled debut became something of a word-ofmouth sensation, Jessica Pratt explained that her yen for a slightly distant sound was down to growing up listening to music on cassette. “That real dreamy, cloudy sound,” she said. “That’s kind of always what I wanted to go for.”
One way and another, Pratt has stayed true to that vision. Here In The Pitch is only the fourth LP the perfectionist songwriter has managed to let go of, but on the belated follow-up to 2019’s much-feted Quiet Signs, her ethereal songwriting, uncannily pitched vocals and penchant for Shangri-Las séance music continue to mark her out as an eerie one-off: Laura Nyro as painted by Joan Miró.
Pratt calls lead track Life Is a “false flag” in terms of the rest of Here In The Pitch, its kitchen-sink drama production and carpe diem spirit somewhat at odds with the record’s murky MO. “Life is/It’s never what you think it’s for,” she announces over stabbing Street Hassle strings. Ryley Walker is on guitar somewhere in the mix, but Pratt is the frosty Shirley Bassey centrestage, a splendid ambling melody leading her to her fridge magnet-worthy pay-off line: “It’s the age of what’s to come/And baby you’re on.”
However, if Pratt has the chutzpah to deliver a killer affirmation, it is not something she makes a habit of. While on World On A String she sings, “I want to be the sunshine of the century”, her natural place remains the shadowy corners, with Here In The Pitch imagining Scott Walker’s moody Scott 3 on star vation rations: grand metaphysical drama, but with the gigantic orchestrations boiled down to acoustic guitar, ghostly keyboards and echoey wood-block percussion.
There are fragments of a tale of woe scattered across its Desertshore-style r un time. All chewed fingernails, Pratt yearns for cosmic vengeance on Better Hate, and for lost things on her beached samba Get Your Head Out (“I keep comin’ back to what I left behind”). However, as with Aldous Harding, Jana Horn or Aoife Nessa Frances, her words tend to sidestep the confessional to chart more diffuse interior states, By Hook Or By Crook, Empires Never Know and Nowhere It Was all venturing far into automatic-writing dreamland.
It ends somewhere a little more lucid. The Last Year offers something like a resolution. “You’d wonder if ever there’s been hope for me,” Pratt sings as she picks out another redemptive, Dusty Springfield-at-35rpm melody. Times have been hard, but the future suddenly looks bright: “I think it’s gunna be fine, I think we’re gunna be together, and the storyline goes forever.” The finer details of that plot are a little hazy, but Here In The Pitch prefers to keep it that way. It’s cloudy, dreamy. Don’t worry so much about what it all means, lie back and let the tape hiss.
Bab L’ Bluz REAL WORLD. CD/DL/LP
Franco-Moroccan quartet rocking harder than ever. Bab L’ Bluz’s debut, Nayda!, arrived without fanfare in 2020 and was a proper eye-opener: a bovver-booted North African psychedelic blues album that gave Yousra Mansour and her crew a crowd-pleasing set wherever they played. “We adapted our sound for festival crowds, made it heavier, rockier,” she says. “More courage. More fire.” Their second LP, then, arrives with greater expectations, but a gig-tested muscularity to blow the cobwebs off that four-year gap, with the rock of Led Zeppelin rather than the roll of more familiar Saharan bands. Crucially, though, the band use traditional lutes, flutes and percussion – awisha, ribab, guembri, qraqeb, ney – giving their music a different texture to groups with similar dynamics. There’s a trance-like swing to AmmA, no-nonsense boogie on Zaino, and if apocalyptic freak-outs (à la I Am The Resurrection) are your thing, Mouja will definitely not disappoint.
★★★★ Orchestras
BLUE NOTE. CD/DL/LP
The master guitarist comes with strings attached.
If you were to pick an electric guitar player likely to team up with symphonic forces then the self-effacing Bill Frisell might not seem your man. The blend of Americana and jazz he has explored over a pioneering 50-year career has always seemed intimate, personal, self-contained – no need for battalions of fiddles and French horns. So this hook-up with the near 60-strong Brussels Philharmonic on one disc, and the smaller Umbria Jazz Orchestra on another, takes some getting used to. But persist: arrangements by Michael Gibbs are sympathetic and subtle, sustaining a mood that is recognisably Frisell-ian. Among tunes from across his career, a few sag under the weight of brooding brass and strings – Lookout For Hope, Doom – but others soar – Beautiful Dreamer, Electricity, We Shall Overcome. Ultimately it’s a winner.