CDS of the week: three new releases
US Girls: In a Poem Unlimited 4AD £10
“Setting polemic to pop is scarcely a new trick, but in the right hands, it can still pack a punch,” said Dan Cairns in The Sunday Times. The Canada-based Illinoisan Meg Remy (who records under the name US Girls) has long been known for wrapping “fierce lyrics in sweet coatings”. Here, on her sixth album, she rails against “misogyny, lying politicians, sexual hypocrisy and domestic violence” to a lush soundtrack that ranges from funk to dreamy atmospherics to swaggering electro-disco. On highlights such as Incidental Boogie, Remy “challenges you not to dance even as she pins you to the wall”.
This is “protest music, in the guise of joyous, life-affirming pop”, said Dave Simpson in The Guardian. The mix of classic 1960s girl group influences and disco-era Blondie is so “gloriously celebratory it’s not always obvious” that Remy is singing about harrowing subjects. There’s humour, too, with “saucy double entendres” in among the “fizzing sci-fi funk” and “sax-blasting pop-dance songs”.
Tracey Thorn: Record Unmade Road £8.99
If reflections from middle age are normally sombre affairs, Tracey Thorn (of Everything But The Girl fame) turns that convention upside down here on “an album fizzing with effervescent pop”, said Martin Townsend in The Sunday Express. On the wonderful Air, Thorn dismisses her own square-peg image (“too tall, all wrong/ Deep voice, too strong”) with a “couldn’tcare-less joyfulness”. There’s unexpected poignancy on Smoke, a love letter to London – and also on Go, a song about the pain of having to let adolescent children go. In sum, a “brilliant record”.
Thorn has described this fifth solo album as “nine feminist bangers”, though this “gorgeous, funny, moving” album is actually less polemical than that suggests, said Neil Mccormick in The Daily Telegraph. “I fight like a girl,” sings Thorn with all her familiar cool elegance, on “the mesmeric disco dub” of Sister, an “inspirational club anthem”. She transforms that line – usually wielded as an insult – into a delicious “declaration of defiance”.
Debussy: Préludes II; En Blanc et Noir, Maurizio Pollini Deutsche Grammophon £11.86
Maurizio Pollini, now in his mid-70s, recorded the first book of Debussy’s
Préludes in 1999, and since that time his iron control, at least in live performances, has grown a little weaker, said Geoff Brown in The Times. But on this 2016 recording of Book II – a set of 12 “enigmatic wonders” published in 1913 – the great Italian pianist is close to his best, “endlessly shifting between different tone colours and modes of attack”, while remaining “wondrously alert to the modernist tendencies of pieces that bubble along without clear-cut forms or melodic motifs”. Along the way, the microphones occasionally pick up Pollini quietly crooning in his powerful bass register. “Well, at least we know he’s enjoying himself.”
The disc also includes a rare chance to hear Pollini playing music for two pianos, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian. On En Blanc et Noir, in which he partners his son Daniele, the “clearly defined outlines and fierce climaxes seem totally appropriate to what is one of Debussy’s greatest late works”.