Albums of the week: three new releases
FKA twigs: Magdalene Young Turks £9.99
The release of Cellophane, the “extraordinary, raw” first single from FKA twigs’s new collection, suggested we were in for a “break-up album to equal the greatest in the genre”, said Dan Cairns in The Sunday Times. “Well, Magdalene is emphatically that.” A series of bold, beautiful songs capture the stages of loss with “visceral, almost operatic power”. This is the art-pop equivalent of chamber music: “moments of infinite subtlety and sonority” suddenly give way to “explosions of colour”. “It’s overwhelming – and a masterpiece.”
Tahliah Barnett (twigs’s real name) is a gifted dancer – and director of music videos and short films – as well as a musician, said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. She’s a hard act to classify, but there’s a strong “classical undercurrent” that brings to mind pioneers such as Kate Bush and Björk. Her “eerie” sound evokes “a cathedral more than a nightclub” – and there are moments here where her music delivers “a kind of transcendence found nowhere else”.
Lankum: The Livelong Day Rough Trade £10
The third studio album from the Dublin foursome Lankum is a “fierce and fragile masterpiece”, said Siobhan Long in
The Irish Times. The band is known for reworking familiar folk songs in a way that forces the listener to re-evaluate them “from the ground floor up”. And on this “chillingly cohesive” and “visceral” album – of just eight songs, but with a hefty 56-minute running time – they build a “wall of sound” that “rattles” assumptions about what traditional and folk music can be.
The sound is based on uilleann pipes, concertina and harmonium, which “drone terrifyingly, sounding drained of their souls”, said Jude Rogers in The Guardian – while vocal harmonies evoke the “witchy barrenness” of the Portishead album Third. The results are hugely impressive, and can be “thunderously sad”. The Wild Rover, for example, is transformed from a rousing drinking ditty into a moving account of poverty-stricken regret, with “scraped strings rising in tone like the wail of an air-raid siren”. It’s “devastating” stuff.
Schumann: Myrthen – Christian Gerhaher, Camilla Tilling and Gerold Huber
Sony Classical £9.99
“As wedding gifts go, this one beat the customary diamond ring,” said Richard Fairman in the FT. On the eve of their wedding in 1840, Robert Schumann presented his wife-to-be, Clara, with a deluxe edition of Myrthen, his newly composed cycle of 26 songs named after the German symbol of marriage, the myrtle. For this recording, the second instalment in a series of complete Schumann songs recorded by Christian Gerhaher, the preeminent lieder specialist is joined by the Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling, and accompanied with “exemplary clearheadedness” by pianist Gerold Huber.
Tilling’s “bright, flexible sound” turns out to be a “perfect foil for Gerhaher’s honeyed warmth”, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian. It’s a strong collection, which keeps up the standard set by the excellent first album. Of the highlights dotted through the disc, a particular standout is Gerhaher’s performance of Aus den hebräischen Gesängen, with its chromatic, “almost Schoenbergian” piano introduction.