Albums of the week: three new releases
Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A minor (for piano accompanied by string quartet) is one of the “immortal” chamber works he wrote in the summer of 1918 after a period of mental and physical collapse, said Fiona Maddocks in The Observer. It is at once “ghostly and expansive, tender and passionate”, and evinces an “intimate” side to the composer that’s only hinted at in his major works. Pianist Garrick Ohlsson and the Takács Quartet “plumb every emotional possibility” without excess or hysterics; the “glowing”, yearning, viola playing of Geraldine Walther is a particular highlight.
The Elgar has been well-paired with Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet in F sharp minor from 1907, and both works are performed powerfully and expressively on this excellent disc, said David Cairns in The Sunday Times. Beach’s quintet is a piece which would surely be better known had its composer been a man. A richly atmospheric work, it has a similar restless, poetic intensity to the Elgar, and “Brahmsian echoes” that are fully “absorbed into its own distinctive voice”.
The US hip hop duo Run the Jewels – rapper-producer El-P and rapper Killer Mike – will “derive no pleasure from the timeliness” of their superb fourth album. Focusing on racial injustice and police brutality, it is a howl of protest that throbs with the “boom-bap pugnacity of oldschool rap”, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. On one track, Killer Mike raps: “And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me / Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper / ‘I can’t breathe’.” A week before the album’s release, he went viral with an “impassioned speech”, in which he urged the people of Atlanta not to “burn your own house down”, in response to the killing of George Floyd, but to “plot, plan, strategise, organise and mobilise”.
This much-anticipated album is Run the Jewels’ best work yet, said Will Lavin on NME. It’s a raw, uncompromising, ragefilled “modern protest classic”: less What’s Going On and more It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. “The breath in me is weaponry,” raps Mike. It’s some weapon; and some album.
“It’s always fun to witness a band grow into how great they can be right in front of your eyes,” said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. That’s exactly what happens with the second album from Australian indie “guitar romantics” Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. Their hook-laden debut, Hope Downs, was one of the highlights of 2018. And this follow-up is even better, serving up track after track of “perfect summertime indierock”. The “tense, pretty” melodies recall The Go-Betweens, but married with the “empathetic rhythms” of REM at their most optimistic. The “wonder will pull you in”.
There’s so much to enjoy here, agreed Will Hodgkinson in The Times: the interplay between the three guitars; the Byrds-like harmonising; the “breezy mood with its undertow of melancholy”. Falling Thunder, driven by “the kind of shimmering melody that Johnny Marr came up with for The Smiths, is simply beautiful”. The Cool Change is a Stone Roses-like gem about leaving Melbourne for Los Angeles. “Uplifting but nuanced”, this joyful album will keep you going “all summer long”.