CDS of the week: three new releases
It’s 16 years since Interpol first emerged from the same “New York post-punk cauldron” as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes, said Roisin O’connor in The Independent. They’ve always been known for their icily detached style; comparisons to Joy Division have been frequent. But with this excellent, surprising sixth album, they’ve at last added “warmth and lightness” into the mix – and it works a treat. Marauder is their most experimental work to date, “blending everything from rough garage rock to Motown rhythms”. Interpol sound reinvigorated, “brimming with energy and self-assurance”.
This “affecting and immediate album” has Interpol “breaking free of the past”, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Some praise must go to the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev producer Dave Fridmann, whose fingerprints are all over the record. But mostly the credit goes to Interpol for “moving on” and making a mature, interesting record – a feat that has eluded most of their noughties NYC peers. Jackie Oates has been well known in traditional folk circles for more than a decade, but has “never quite had the acclaim she deserves”, said Jude Rogers in The Guardian. Her voice is “sweet, pretty, unadorned, the kind of vocal that could disappear on the breeze”. What she sings about, though, “gives it gravity”. This beautiful album is suffused with the sorrow of recent loss: while Oates and her newborn daughter were both recovering from sepsis contracted in hospital, her beloved father died suddenly of the same illness. It’s a “moving, depth-filled” record and “Oates should be deeply proud of it”.
As the title suggests, there is joy amid the sorrow, said Neil Spencer in The Observer – songs that celebrate birth and life along with those of mourning. It’s a varied collection, with songs by Bill Caddick, Hamish Henderson, Ewan Maccoll and John Lennon, as well as Edwardian lullabies and playground chants. The vocals “pull us between sorrow and delight” in “a personal, affecting collection”. This fourth volume of Schubert from Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake – made up of songs from 1822 and teenage Goethe settings – is an impressive achievement, said David Cairns in The Sunday Times. Bostridge sings with “exceptional intelligence” and is “wonderfully partnered” by Drake on a disc that includes some of my favourite Schubert lieder, along with some lovely discoveries. But often one would like “less subtlety and more straight singing”. For example, Ganymed’s climactic “Alliebender Vater” surely needs “unambiguously full voice”.
Maybe Bostridge could sometimes keep things simpler, said Hugo Shirley in Gramophone. Yet his willingness to explore the expressive potential of the lieder should be applauded. I especially enjoyed hisww version of Erlkönig, which “relishes the storytelling like few others”: Bostridge offers a deeply affecting impersonation of the Erl-king himself, all “snarling lip-curl and insidious promise”. Like the pair’s previous discs, this is well worth exploring.