Albums of the week: three new releases
Elvis Costello: Hey Clockface Concord £10
“I don’t spend my time perfecting the past. I live for the future, because I know it won’t last.” So sings Elvis Costello on his new solo album, Hey Clockface. But for all the singer-songwriter’s talk about being future-facing, said Roisin O’Connor in The Independent, this latest release is really “an old curiosity shop” – one of his most “evocative” albums yet, offering a melange of “quirky memorabilia and his typically eccentric cast of characters”.
Costello “mixes styles and moods to often brilliant effect”, agreed Kitty Empire in The Observer. The “crowning glory” of the album is No Flag, a “farewell to love whose overdriven churn mirrors Costello’s eloquent anomie”. The title track, by contrast, is an “old-time jazzy flail that quotes Fats Waller and again blames romantic disappointment on a perfidious timepiece”. Then there are the “emotionally skewering” tracks They’re Not Laughing at Me Now and What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have – both “subtle miniatures that reaffirm Costello as one of the masters of his craft”.
Ariana Grande: Positions Republic £11
How does Ariana Grande follow up Thank U, Next, one of “pop’s greatest, boldest” break-up albums? With a “horny, campy collection of R&B slow jams, of course”, said Brittany Spanos in Rolling Stone. Positions is not a radical departure: Grande has always had a penchant for both “subtle and not-so-subtle sexual innuendos and come-ons, delivered sweetly” in her powerful voice. But she seems here to have “hunkered down more confidently and astutely on her core musical identity”; it’s a “solid step forward” for one of “pop’s most exciting stars”.
Positions sees Grande returning to the Mariah Carey-inspired tone of her 2014 debut, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. The style is “smooth R&B and soul, with Grande’s voice fluting through slow jams as though she were both singer and lead instrumentalist”. And it’s pretty elaborate, with “numerous examples of the whistle register” (a Carey trademark, accessing the highest notes available to a soprano). Yet Grande’s tone remains “unforced, rather than loudly self-assertive”, and it works.
Wiener Philharmoniker (Christian Thielemann): Bruckner – Symphony No. 8 in C minor Sony Classical £12
The Vienna Philharmonic performed the premiere of Bruckner’s “almighty Eighth” in the Golden Hall of the city’s Musikverein in 1892, said Fiona Maddocks in The Observer. Since then, it has made classic recordings of the work under Furtwängler (1944) and von Karajan (1988). Now it has tackled it again, as the first recording in a new Bruckner symphony cycle, due for completion in 2024, the composer’s bicentenary. “Tempi are broad, but not slow”; the sound is “resonant and glowing”; the build-up of tension and release perceptively handled, and “each solo impeccably played by some of the world’s best musicians”.
It is conducted by Christian Thielemann, “today’s leading native representative of the Austro-German tradition”, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. Any recording by him of an “Austrian masterwork with this orchestra is an event” – and the quality here is thrilling. The playing is “magisterial”, yet “Thielemann encourages a transparency in the filigree string writing of the Scherzo of almost chamber-music delicacy”.
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