Albums of the week: three new releases
As a music producer, Blake Mills has won Grammy awards and nominations for his work with artists including Alabama Shakes, Laura Marling, John Legend and Perfume Genius. This fourth solo album should be the one to turn him into a star in his own right, said Dave Simpson in The Guardian. The “tapestry of sounds” Mills creates has “fleeting, faraway echoes of John Martyn at his wooziest”; often it’s as close to avant-garde classical or chamber music as it is to rock and folk. His beautiful songs don’t shout their arrival; they emerge from a “gentle hum of guitar, saxophone, piano and pensive orchestrations” – to beguiling effect.
The atmosphere is all, said Kitty Empire in The Observer. This is not so much a set of songs as “an exercise in humid world creation”, with everything feeling “like it is pulsating away within an amniotic sac – in a good way”. The highlight, Vanishing Twin, is more than six minutes of “prodigious noise-making, anchored by a thrumming loop”, while Eat My Dust is “an avant-jazzfolk revelation”.
Lady Gaga’s “country rocking” turn in the film A Star is Born was a reminder that she is a “world-class talent”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. But dance music remains Gaga’s true calling, and Chromatica, her sixth album, has been “purpose-built to re-establish” her “global pop supremacy”. With “singalong melodies, catchy hooks and infectious grooves, thrilling synth sounds and lubricious rhythm tracks”, this 16-track collection is an “all-killer-no-filler set so tightly honed, it could be a greatest hits compilation”. My only reservation is that at times the tone is too “bombastic” for the deep emotional undercurrents of the lyrics.
Dance music will always be Gaga’s “salvation, and her pop renaissance couldn’t come at a better time”, said Kory Grow in Rolling Stone. She’s at her considerable best “when taking musical risks”, like on 911, which “splits the difference between The Buggles and Kraftwerk, filtered through Gaga’s kaleidoscope”; and on a “prog-pop” duet with Elton John, Sine from Above.
Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) is a piece that sorts Richard Strauss fanatics from “mere admirers”, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian. To confirmed “Straussians”, its sumptuously inventive score is the summit of his operatic achievements. To “non-believers”, it’s an overblown, overlong, faux-oriental fairy tale. But if any conductor can make a “convincing musical and dramatic case” for the opera, it’s Christian Thielemann. This “outstanding” rendition – recorded live at the Vienna State Opera last year – is “arguably the most satisfying version now available”.
Strauss referred to this as his “problem” opera, and he recognised that it was his most demanding, in terms of “its huge orchestral forces” and its casting, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. Here, though, the cast is strong: Camilla Nylund and Nina Stemme are well contrasted as Empress and Wife; Stephen Gould makes a weighty Emperor and Wolfgang Koch a sincere Barak, and Evelyn Herlitzius as the Nurse “sweeps all before her”.