Music
Laurie Anderson’s haunting love letter to home city New York lingers in the memory, while MGMT refuse to rehash past glories
Album reviews, plus David Kettle interviews the SCO’S Thomas Dausgaard
Kronos Quartet provide the endlessly expressive acoustic and electric backdrop to Anderson’s remembrances
Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet: Landfall
Nonesuch
JJJJ
MGMT: Little Dark Age
Columbia
JJJJ
Grant-lee Phillips: Widdershins
Yep Roc
JJJ
Ewan Cruikshanks: A Glasgow Band
Armellodie
JJJ
Laurie Anderson has dealt with loss in her respected multi-media work before. Her 2015 film and album
Heart of a Dog was ostensibly a fond farewell to her dog Lolabelle but also a veiled requiem for her partner Lou Reed and an outlet for the bereavement she felt for her beloved New York in the aftermath of 9/11.
Her home city is also the setting for her latest work, developed in collaboration with veteran experimental string ensemble Kronos Quartet, who provide the endlessly expressive acoustic and electric backdrop to Anderson’s poetic remembrances of the day Hurricane Sandy ripped through town, knocking the pips out of the Big Apple.
Landfall begins with the calm before the storm, subtle wind effects and string drones. It’s more than seven minutes before we hear Anderson’s soft caress of a voice, the stillness in the eye of the storm, as she contemplates Sandy’s dramatic, destructive path. The Kronos players add layers of scared scurrying
urgency to Darkness Falls and imitate the clank, scratch and squeak of structures in a storm in Dawn of the
World before capturing the eerie aftermath and the trepidation of We
Head Out.
But Anderson widens her surveillance of devastation to include
Nothing Left But Their Names ,atenminute meditation on endangered species, using pitch-shifted vocals, ambient backing, glacial keyboards and mournful strings, and Everything
is Floating, a sober reflection on loss and disposability, before dancing the sad, soulful tango of Gongs and
Bells Sing to a slow fade-out, pausing before life goes on, simply because it must.
Where the direction of travel for many bands once they taste success is to rehash or bland out, US indie duo
MGMT rebelled against their early popularity by floating further out on the dreamy psychedelic elements of their pop sound. Little Dark Age, their fourth album, continues that voyage with slightly off-kilter rhythms and distorting effects employed to produce the noir whimsy of When
You’re Small, the blithe but hectic electro funk of She Works Out Too Much and the woozy exotica of
TSLAMP, about the intoxicating effects of a phone screen. Back on musical terra firma, Grantlee Phillips, erstwhile frontman of LA roots rockers Grant Lee Buffalo, has titled his ninth solo album after the old Lowland Scots word for anticlockwise to encapsulate his anxiety over where humanity is heading, and he sets off on a musically jaunty but
lyrically baleful path with Walk In
Circles.
The state of his nation lurks in the background but is addressed in universal terms. What he wrote in a heightened state comes out as a soft croon on the breathy sensitivity of King of Catastrophes but there are glimpses of the more dramatic Phillips of old in the Springsteenesque guitar squall and martial beat of Liberation and the punkier strut of Scared Stiff. Glasgow-based troubadour
Ewan Cruikshanks is not wanting for character nor variety on his debut album, which is littered with immediate indie pop songs and enhanced by some impressive guitar work, plus the skill-on-a-shoestring production of Catholic Action’s Chris Mccrory. A Glasgow Band kicks off with the headlong garage rock thrash Youth Never Dies, before taking in the Glitter Band rhythm of C.A.A.G.B., rapturous lo-fi indie croon For A Girl, soulful chiming guitar on Superman, blissed-out psychedelic rock on Treasure Chest and an allout 80s sax break on Cosmic Star ina confident, carefree display of mixtape eclecticism.