Albums of the week: three new releases
“Epic, yet suffused with a sense of personality, atmospheric but filled with big pop hooks”, this debut album from the London band Another Sky is an “exciting, unusual” record, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. Their sound reminded me of the Cocteau Twins, from the “euphoric builds and dream pop haziness” to the stunning voice of frontwoman Catrin Vincent; she sounds “like a medieval nun in the throes of religious ecstasy, but transplanted to 21st century south London”.
This young band had gained a loyal following with their live shows before lockdown, said David Cheal in the FT – and you can see why. This is music (like that of The Killers, U2 or Coldplay, say) designed to be played in big venues and at festivals: “big guitars, big riffs, a big sound and the big, big voice of Vincent”. It’s an arresting, androgynous sound – a kind of “female tenor”. The “ringing guitars and walloping drums” might not be exactly groundbreaking, but “Vincent’s voice stands out. We will be hearing more of it.”
Shirley Collins, a leading light of the English folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s, fell silent for almost four decades after suffering problems with her singing voice. But in 2016, aged 81, she returned with the “miraculous” Lodestar – and now the “reinvigorated octogenarian has delivered again”, said Jochan Embley in the London Standard. In one sense Heart’s Ease is a “scholarly” album; some of these songs date back hundreds of years. But it also feels highly personal, and “disarming in its warmth, with an emanating sense that this music really is Collins’ lifeblood”.
The singing here is more confidently voiced than on her 2016 comeback, said Neil Spencer in The Observer. Collins’s “seasoned tones unerringly read the mood and narrative”. On the closer, Crowlink, a tribute to Collins’s beloved South Downs, a hurdy-gurdy drone “conjures a mighty sky against which birdsong chafes and Collins’s voice briefly chants. It sounds like a pagan epiphany, or an emanation of the spirit of Albion from a born-again May Queen. Long may she reign.”
This “imaginative” debut from The Hermes Experiment is made up of specially commissioned new works – all “vivid, spirited and highly individual” – by nine composers, said Fiona Maddocks in The Observer. All are writing for the group’s “fertile line-up” of harp, clarinet, double bass and soprano – the “hyper-versatile” Héloïse Werner. All contribute “distinctive, witty, arresting songs”.
The result is a “most enticing calling card” both for the outstanding musicians and for Britain’s lively composing scene, said Geoff Brown in The Times. I especially enjoyed Giles Swayne’s Chansons dévotes et poissonneuses, “nimble settings of playful French poetry”; Josephine Stephenson’s “expressive musings on love and war” ( Between the War and You); and the “Soviet machine aesthetic” of Joel Rust’s Pack of Orders. And the opener, Emily Hall’s I Am Happy Living Simply is “one minute and 44 seconds of delight” which shows off Werner’s “vivacious” voice. She pounces on notes and words with “a tiger’s tenacity and a kitten’s glee”.