CDS of the week: three new releases
Laura Marling: Semper Femina More Alarming Records £9.99
Having expressed dissatisfaction with her fifth album, the self-produced Short Movie, Laura Marling has turned to producer Blake Mills to oversee the recording of this, her sixth, said Andy Gill in The Independent. Mills, whose diverse work includes John Legend, Jim James, Alabama Shakes and Lana Del Rey, “specialises in the spaces and textures of sound”. Here, along with arranger Rob Moose, he has helped Marling create gripping, irresistible work which at times recalls the “darkly pastoral” music of Nick Drake, and at others the “shivering strings” and “scrawling vibrato lead guitar line” of Portishead.
Perhaps for the first time in Marling’s illustrious career as a singer-songwriter, our “attention is focused as much on the music as the lyrics”, said Mark Edwards in The Sunday Times. It seems that Mills has successfully broadened Marling’s music and “pushed her guitar-playing into new places”: the off-kilter opening track, Soothing, exemplifies the new sound, and “offers a career-best performance”.
Sleaford Mods: English Tapas Rough Trade £9.99
When the great and the good of the music industry tip their stars of tomorrow, none has ever mentioned “a truculent middleaged man from Nottingham who rants like the guy at the bar nobody wants to be stuck next to, while his friend sets off a looped sample on a laptop and jiggles about”, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. Yet Jason Williamson, a 46-year-old former benefits adviser, and Andrew Fearn, a former callcentre worker, have, since their 2012 debut as Sleaford Mods, become “the most vital and original band in Britain”. This latest collection is a “relentless listen”, with its savage songs of English working-class rage, yet it is also “engaging and impossible to ignore”.
Many assumed that Sleaford Mods would be a short-lived phenomenon, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. But this “great” album – potent, incisive, blackly funny and more melodious than previous offerings – never sounds remotely like a “band running out of steam. Quite the opposite.” More please.
Les Arts Florissants: Monteverdi Madrigali Vol. 3, Venezia (cond. Paul Agnew) Harmonia Mundi £12
After discs devoted to the madrigals that Monteverdi wrote in Cremona and Mantua, the final part of Les Arts Florissants’ anthology – a sublime celebration of the “joyous range and variety” of the composer’s madrigals as they evolved over six decades – presents pieces from the seventh and eighth books, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian. Published in Venice in 1619 and 1638 respectively, they were the last such collections to appear in the composer’s lifetime, and the 51 numbers include some of the greatest of all of Monteverdi’s music.
The standard five-part madrigal is a rarity here, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times; instead we chiefly get pieces for solo voice, two, three and six parts. Tenor Paul Agnew takes the role of narrator, and while his Italian isn’t as natural as a native’s, his “declamatory style and articulation are gripping”. He is also the lead in the Lamento
della Ninfa, but he doesn’t outshine his two sopranos, whose voices clash with “exquisite dissonance” in Chiome d’oro.