Music
Biffy Clyro mix things up while Alanis Morissette embraces middle age with a mature collection
Album reviews, plus Jim Gilchrist on the School of Scottish Studies Archive
POP Biffy Clyro: A Celebration of Endings
14thfloor Records
✪✪✪ Alanis Morissette:
Such Pretty Forks in the Road
RCA
✪✪ James Dean Bradfield: Even in Exile
Montyray
✪✪✪✪
Martha Ffion: Nights to Forget
Lost Map
✪✪✪✪
Be careful what you wish for. The title of Biffy Clyro’s ninth album, A Celebration of Endings, refers to embracing change, waving goodbye to the old ways and forging ahead with barely a backwards glance. Well, now – or soon – is the time. The unleashing of this celebration was postponed from May but here we are with as direct and commercial a rock record as the Ayrshire trio has ever produced.
A Celebration of Endings is trimmer and more to the point than previous sprawling epics, with frontman Simon Neil giving free rein to his commercial songwriting sensibilities. The songs still change direction on a dime but there is a more freewheeling momentum, which suggests natural gear shifts rather than deliberately disruptive handbrake turns.
Still, longtime Biffy fans will be relieved to revel in the angular rhythms, funky downtuned guitars and oblique, introverted lyrics of North of No South. The baleful balladry of The Champ gives way to Elo-like symphonic pop, folding in references to climate change and the death of child refugee Alan Kurdi along the way, while the mighty alt. rock racket of Weird Leisure makes an appeal to a chaotic friend.
Grunge, prog and mainstream rock influences collide on Worst Type of Best Possible and there is a clear ear to airplay in robust radio rocker Tiny Indoor Fireworks, acoustic, stringladen rock ballad Opaque and the vacuous arena rock of Instant History – with epic ravey keyboards to boot. They recover a hint of punk savagery on the urgent End Of, which barely touches the ground, and having worked up a lather Neil is practically spitting feathers on closing track
Cop Syrup, where a Jack White-like apoplexy gives way to romantic strings and a pacific expanse before this particular celebration ends on a 20-second raging reprise and the cathartic kiss-off “f*** everybody, woo!”
Alanis Morissette knows a thing or two about fury as a creative fuel but, 25 years on from her wrathful breakthrough Jagged Little Pill ,she channels her traumas into candid confessionals to sweeten said pill. Such Pretty Forks in the Road ,her first album in eight years, is a mature work, with all the middle-aged spread that implies. The resonant piano ballad Diagnosis addresses her postnatal depression, Pedestal faces love as a long haul, and there is a chiming levity to the healing Sandbox Love but Reasons I Drink is the one to cling to for that raging buzz of old. Manic Street Preachers frontman
James Dean Bradfield celebrates the life of Chilean poet activist Victor Jara on the rousing yet reflective Even In Exile, complemented by a three-part podcast, Inspired by Jara, available in weekly instalments thoughout
August. Inspirational is the word – Jara’s songs are sung to this day in Chile, he is referenced in The Clash’s Washington Bullets, Simple Minds’ Street Fighting Years is dedicated to him, and his Manifiesto has been covered by Springsteen.
Bradfield tackles Jara’s La Partida with a Morricone flourish but everything else was written by Bradfield to words by Patrick Jones, brother of Manics bassist Nicky Wire.
Occasionally his music is redolent of the Manics’ AOR politicking but overall this is a more esoteric affair, with Latin inflections to Bradfield’s lyrical playing on the tender acoustic instrumental Under the Mimosa Tree.
Glasgow-based Irish singer/ songwriter Martha Ffion follows up her Scottish Album of the Year Award-nominated Sunday Best with a cohesive collection of light touch breathy pop, gently dusted with arpeggiated synths for that hazy, lazy summer feeling. But there are lyrical clouds looming. The title track of Nights to Forget sets a steely recall of negative encounters to a wistful pop backing and there is a dark ambivalence in the perky 80s synth pop of Walked Me Home.
Biffy Clyro’s songs still change direction on a dime but a more freewheeling momentum suggests natural gear shifts