CDS of the week: three new releases
Kendrick Lamar: Damn Polydor Group, £10.99
Lamar’s last album, To Pimp a Butterfly, was a glorious, important record, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. It was universally lauded for its mixing of hip-hop, soul, funk and jazz with racial politics, and led critics to compare the young rapper with everyone from Marvin Gaye (plausible) to Mahatma Gandhi (not so much). Damn may or may not turn out to have the same “epochal impact”, but it is unquestionably another great album from a supremely gifted artist at the top of his game.
Damn lacks the political directness of Butterfly, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. For example, there’s no equivalent of Alright (which became the anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement). Yet this album is “just as complex, eschewing clear statements for an atmosphere both dreamlike and dystopian”. Lamar has created a vision that is “intense, surreal and haunting”, and this triumphant follow-up to a masterpiece confirms him as “the most pioneering and compelling figure in contemporary hip-hop”.
Sheryl Crow: Be Myself Warner Brothers, £9.99
Sheryl Crow’s “excellent” new album is her “toughest and best in a decade”, said Rob Sheffield on Rolling Stone – a “full-blown return to her fierce rock-queen glory”. Reunited with her 1990s collaborators Jeff Trott and Tchad Blake, the American singersongwriter aims “directly at the torn-andfrayed guitar groove” of her smash hit 1990s folk-pop-rock sound, but with “flourishes of her recent detours into Memphis soul and Nashville country”. It works a treat.
At the age of 55, and with a cancer scare behind her, Crowe has composed an album darker than her early ones, said Dave Simpson in The Guardian. Its lyrics see her battling everything from a kiss-and-teller to depression. But there’s “pithy humour, too”, in tracks taking on Twitter “butts”, selfies, indie bands with fake followers, and Donald Trump. Love Will Save the Day is “touching, not trite, and if there isn’t an obvious smash in the mould of All I Wanna
Do or If It Makes You Happy, Be Myself certainly punches its weight in sass”.
Benjamin Appl: Heimat (James Baillieu, piano) Sony Classical, £9.99
Benjamin Appl is the “most promising of today’s up-and-coming song recitalists”, said Richard Fairman in the FT. Bavarianborn, he has his roots in Schubert and the rest of the great Lieder tradition, but in this recital on the theme of heimat (literally “home”, but meaning much more than that), he sounds equally at ease in France (Poulenc), Norway (Grieg), and here in his adopted homeland (Warlock, Vaughan Williams). Appl’s singing “can take on a plummy tone at times, but mostly these performances are mellow in sound, engagingly expressive and skilfully accompanied by James Baillieu”.
Schubert favourites punctuate the first half of this “thoughtfully conceived and executed” programme, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. But there are rarities, too: Reger’s The Children’s Prayer, Brahms’ setting of Mondnacht, Wolf’s Er ist’s. Appl’s “suave, light baritone is ideally suited to this repertoire”, but it is “his beautiful German diction, every consonant voiced but not exaggerated, that gives special pleasure”.