Albums of the week: three new releases
Twenty years on from their debut album, the mask-wearing Iowan heavy metallers Slipknot have remained “true to their core”, even as their line-up underwent frequent changes, said Jordan Bassett on NME.com. That core involves being “drunk on rage, self-disgust and lacerating, redemptive nihilism”. And rarely has their aggressive, relentlessly percussive music sounded fiercer or more compelling than on this “astonishing” sixth album – a “roaring, horrifying delve into the guts of the band’s revulsion, a primal scream of endlessly inventive extreme metal”.
Fans have drawn comparisons between the new material and Slipknot’s stunning career peak album Iowa from 2001, said Roisin O‘Connor in The Independent. The main difference is that this album “allows each member’s musical prowess to shine through”. There’s no lack of “pummelling force”, but the greater emphasis on melody “allows you to consider everything without being engulfed by noise”. It’s a “blistering” triumph of a record. This passionate and unashamedly sexy third album feels like a big step forward for English singer-songwriter Marika Hackman, said Aimee Cliff in The Guardian. Compared with her folky debut in 2015, or even her experimental follow-up, I’m Not Your Man, Any Human Friend is like listening to a new artist. On this album she “soars through electronic transitions, swears down the microphone and wields her electric guitar” with “full-on rock star attitude”.
When she arrived on the scene in 2015, aged 22, Hackman seemed like ”another English rose dipping into spectral melancholy”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. Her transformation into a “swaggering, bolshie, sexy beast with an electric guitar, dirty mouth and provocative sense of black humour” is as surprising as it is musically impressive. Even today, it’s unusual to hear a young female artist “owning” her sexuality as “boldly and bravely” as Hackman does here, on an album that signals her “coming of age as an artist with real purpose and star power”. In time, it’s highly likely that Hans Werner Henze will be accepted as Germany’s “preeminent” postwar classical composer, said Richard Fairman in the FT. Since his death in 2012, there has been no great bounce in his reputation, but this excellent collection of orchestral works – recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2014, under the baton of Oliver Knussen – should help win his music a wider audience in this country.
This is a “necessary and important album”, agreed Geoff Brown in The Times – “contemporary music at its ebullient, intoxicating best”. Henze’s combination of “German thoroughness and Mediterranean spontaneity” is on full display in Heliogabalus Imperator, a “riotous portrait” of one of the least well-behaved Roman emperors. And on the “cello concerto of sorts” titled Englische Liebeslieder (six commentaries on English love poems) the music “teems with a profusion of textures and colours”, conducted by Knussen with “surgical skill” so that every element stays crystal clear.