Ray of light
The former Kinks mainstay presents a characterically whimsical Anglo view of music and culture in the US
POP Ray Davies: Our Country: Americana Act II
Legacy
JJJ Jimi Tenor: Order of Nothingness
Philophon
JJJJ The Orb: No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds
Cooking Vinyl
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Finiflex: Suilven
Finiflex
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Ray Davies must have had such a blast on his 2017
Americana album that he has swiftly arranged another musical road trip in the company of alt.country outfit The Jayhawks. The sonic scenery on Our Country:
Americana Act II remains broadly the same on his second visit. While there are subtle slide guitars, country-inflected melodies and a hint of gospel flavour, this is still Davies’ characteristically whimsical Anglo take on the music and culture of the big country which he first encountered with The Kinks, and which has subsequently resonated through his career.
The title track is a timely reminder of the openness to immigration which first made America great, capturing the wonder of being welcomed to a new country. Davies contrasts this with the cultural incursion of British rock’n’roll in the 1960s on the spoken reminiscence of
The Invaders.
There are abundant artist namedrops and cultural references along the way, although a re-recording of Oklahoma USA, originally from The Kinks’ Muswell
Hillbillies album, intimates that this is nothing new in the Davies canon. Even as a young man, he wrote with wistful nostalgia about England; now he applies that soft focus to the doowop and blues rock of Back in the Day.
But Davies finds his mojo as his tour hits the south. The gruff jazzy blues of
A Street Called Hope suits his style and the sassy blues strut of March of the
Zombies is a full-blooded production in a somewhat piecemeal collection. In keeping with its inspiration, Our
Country is a sprawling suite, a little too long as an album but with the potential to make an interesting live show of songs and anecdotes.
Noted Finnish auteur Jimi Tenor is likewise partial to a musical trip but his is not one of soil and toil, but a mesmeric, meditative, transcendent, hedonistic flight of electro jazz funk fancy, where psychedelic flutes, analogue synthesizer licks and Afrobeats come together in cosmic harmony. His latest, Order of Nothingness, floats around not dissimilar territory to the fabulous fusion sounds of Kamasi Washington, but there’s an added dose of Barbarella kitsch to the space jazz trills of Quantum Connection and the astral projections on My Mind
Will Travel.
One might reasonably expect a similar electro trance from The Orb, who came to prominence as one of the more inscrutable and outthere bands of the rave generation,
“performing” a game of chess on
Top of the Pops and releasing singles
called A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld.
Their latest odyssey spools out over 70 minutes yet individual tracks are pretty focused and accessible. Rush
Hill Road, with honeyed vocals from Hollie Cook, is springy, inoffensive dub pop, while Doughnuts Forever is a 60s-flavoured pop reverie, but as No
Sounds Are Out Of Bounds progresses, it succumbs to a steady, restful drift, culminating in lengthy fade-out of
Soul Planet.
Orb contemporaries Finitribe were early adopters of acid house, but the Edinburgh trio didn’t quite achieve the same crossover success as the likes of The Shamen. Now original Finitribe members Davie Miller and John Vick have regrouped as Finiflex to release their first new music in over 20 years, picking up where they left off with the welcome 90s timewarp of Suilven, a beatific double album of moody chillout material which also encompasses the flinty techno edge to The Piano Player and Oddity, cut-andpaste electro of Good Feeling and the robotic purr of TX20.
CLASSICAL Beethoven: Piano Concerto No 4 /Mendelssohn: Double Concerto
Signum
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You can tell so much from the first few unaccompanied bars of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 about what to expect from the ensuing performance, but in this recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra, pianist Min-yung Kym gives very little away. It’s a kind of nondescript opening, and the orchestra, under the baton of Clemens Schuldt, issues a warm, equally benign response. Yet as the conversation develops, Min-yung’s character emerges in a beguiling interpretation. Her calming influence in the central Andante is a delicious foil to Schuldt’s nagging orchestral response and the finale is a resilient reconciliation. Enter violinist Zsolt-tihamér Visontay, and exit the Philharmonia wind and brass for a rare outing of Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin, Piano & String Orchestra. The piece is not Mendelssohn’s most outstanding, but the performance is ripe and seductive.
Ken Walton
Oklahoma USA, from The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies album, intimates that this is nothing new in the Davies canon
You can’t not enjoy Skerryvore. The folk-rockers have covered a lot of ground – quite literally – since they were formed by the Tiree-born Gillespie brothers 13 years ago, taking in New York, Shanghai Expo and, well, Oban (where they host their own festival). This latest album, which made a surprise entrance to the UK album charts earlier this month, is much as we’ve come to expect: that trademark west-highland pipe, fiddle and accordion sound, bolstered by ringing guitars and purposeful drumming. There’s anthemic Celtic rock, as in The End of the Line and
Waiting on the Sun, and the feelgood rush of their single Take My
Hand. There are occasional echoes of Runrig, such as the heady Live
Forever, although singer-guitarist Alec Dalglish’s songs have a more Americanised rock vibe. Harddriving instrumentals include the opening Exorcists set, and a plaintive slow air by Martin Gillespie that surges dramatically into The Rise.n