Albums of the week: three new releases
When they put out their first album, Raising Sand, in 2007, it looked like a “whimsical side-project”, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. But the odd couple pairing of Led Zeppelin rock god Robert Plant and country star Alison Krauss worked, and their collection of blues, folk and country classics became a smash hit, selling two million copies and winning five Grammys. Fourteen years on, the pair are back with a belated – but just as rewarding – follow-up, made with the same producer, US roots music specialist T Bone Burnett.
It is a “fantastic” record, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times: the pair take a selection of “creaking old standards” and raise them to “a different place entirely, imbuing them with a dusty, mystical quality redolent of wide-open plains and lonely truck stops”. There are more British folk numbers this time. Go Your Way by Anne Briggs is “turned into a folk-rock epic reminiscent of Fairport Convention in their louder moments”. And their take on Bert Jansch’s 1965 classic It Don’t Bother Me “shimmers with a kind of ancient mystery”.
Released a fortnight ago, Adele’s new album took just three days to become the best-selling album of the year in the US; in the UK, it outsold the rest of the Top 40 combined. Meanwhile, the first single from it, Easy On Me, went straight to No. 1 in 25 countries, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Given more first-week plays on US radio than any song ever, it is not so much a comeback as “an act of global reassurance”. Our world may be in disarray, but “at least one thing hasn’t changed: Adele Adkins is still heartbroken and belting it out over a gentle piano and tasteful orchestration”.
The “welcome news for listeners of a nervous disposition” is that Adele’s divorce album is “not quite the utterly devastating weepy many feared”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. There’s much “spirited positivity amid the self-pity and self-flagellation, allied to melodies that will have karaoke nights booming, delivered with Adele’s customary gusto and lit up by her sheer joy when singing”. This is her “strongest album yet”.
“Be clear about one thing: this is not just another recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes,” said Richard Fairman in the FT. Many great pianists have put these much-loved pieces on disc, but even set against “a dozen of the best”, Stephen Hough’s recording stands out. Taking Chopin’s own markings as his guide, Hough is swifter than we are used to, “allowing the melodies to sing fluently as if they were arias from the composer’s favourite Bellini operas”. The results are beautifully poetic and intimate; each Nocturne “shimmering as though touched by the most subtle of moonbeams”.
Like the composer himself, Hough is an opera lover, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. Here, like a great bel canto singer, he “breathes” Chopin’s Belliniesque melodies with the long phrasing beloved of Wagner, yet he “avoids any hint of ‘Belliniof-the-Piano’ cliché (a frequent 19th century putdown)”. A selection of posthumous Nocturnes, questionable attributions, and an alternative version of Op. 9 No. 2, with Chopin’s own “coloratura” embellishments, are “substantial bonuses”.