Music
Sean Ryder’s creative rejuvenation finds boisterous and funk-laden expression in Black Grape’s excellent comeback album
Album reviews of Black Grape and Randy Newman, plus Piping Live! previewed
Twenty years on from
Black Grape’s charttopping debut It’s Great When You’re Straight…
Yeah, its ironic title rings true for frontman Shaun Ryder who is responding to his incorrigible national treasure status with greater productivity than ever before, reforming his post-happy Mondays party band in tandem with the latest Mondays reunion.
But while the Happy Mondays have the greater overall cultural cachet, it is Black Grape who are first out of the blocks with a comeback album. They are the more flexible outfit, comprising a nucleus of Ryder and rapper Paul “Kermit” Leveridge, whose return to health signalled the return of the band.
Pop Voodoo doesn’t have the raucous anthems of their debut but it is a sleek and satisfying collection, with producer Youth supplying a connoisseur’s mixtape of slinky soul, 70s funk and diverse backing flourishes to Ryder’s extempore street poetry. Over the shuffling funky drummer groove and blasts of feverish saxophone on Everything
You Know Is Wrong, Ryder and Kermit trade scattergun banter on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, lampooning the former’s idiosyncratic use of language.
Ryder has his own linguistic tics, a lairy mix of stream-of-consciousness, word association and rhyming couplets which supplies the crude contrast with the sultry 60s ambience of Nine Lives, blithe sunshine pop of
I Wanna Be Like You and the vibrant Hammond soul blast of Set the Grass
on Fire.
Money Burns is an electro-funk meditation on the fatal attraction and corrosive power of capital, while the smart harmonica-fuelled beat pop of
String Theory has carefree echoes of the early days of Madchester before the scene turned dark and heavy. Ryder and Kermit appear to relive those years on brooding coda Young
and Dumb, a dubby clubland odyssey about the chemical highs and the comedown lows. The redoubtable troubadour Randy
Newman is the music man to turn to in a global crisis. On Dark Matter, his first album of penetrating wit in almost a decade, he gets stuck in immediately with The Great Debate – that’s science versus religion, dummy – then sabotages any chances of ever holidaying in St Petersburg with Putin, a rollicking jazz hands takedown of the action man beginning with the emasculating image of “Putin puttin’ his pants on”.
Brothers revisits the tensions around the Bay of Pigs invasion through the eyes of John and Bobby Kennedy, imagining the real reason for the failed raid – “we’re gonna save Celia Cruz”. But, as ever, Newman gives much more than witty snark. Lost
Without You is one of his classic maudlin-but-tender ballads, while
She Chose Me is a humble reflection on late-blooming love.
Lana Del Rey proves to be equally consistent on her fifth album, with a brace of breathily stylised songs about dreamy boyfriends and unattainable stars. The Weeknd and A$ap Rocky add sultry R&B and drowsy trip-hop respectively to the mix with their guest contributions. She recruits Sean Lennon for the blatant Beatles referencing
Tomorrow Never Came while the original Californian queen bee Stevie Nicks lends her throaty wisdom to the elegantly satirical Beautiful People
Beautiful Problems. But then she punctures the languorous rapture with gunshot sound effects on the straight-shooting God Bless America – And All The Beautiful Women In It
and, from here on, it’s all about the state of her nation. In recent months, Del Rey has gone from casting a spell on her listeners to advocating a hex on Donald Trump and she frets for future generations on Coachella – Woodstock In My Mind and has US imperialism in her sublime sights on
the ethereal When The World Was At War We Kept Dancing.
Lana Del Rey recruits Sean Lennon for the blatant Beatles referencing Tomorrow Never Came