Albums of the week: three new releases

Kendrick Lamar: Mr Morale & The Big Steppers PGLang/TDE/ Aftermath/ Interscope

Kendrick Lamar’s last album, Damn, was the first non-classical or jazz album to win the Pulitzer. After a five-year hiatus – during which he has started a family – Lamar has returned with another triumph, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian: an “exhilarating epic” consisting of 18 tracks, and not a “moment of padding”. In these musically adventurous songs – with lyrics that range from “deeply troubled to lovestruck, and from furious to laugh-out-loud funny” – Lamar’s “prodigious” lyrical skill leaves the listener “almost punch-drunk”.

Rap may primarily be a “word form driven by rhythm”, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. But Lamar’s music is “so rich and varied, so exploratory yet also filled with hooks and melodies, that even people who thought they hated rap can get pulled in”. Here, the most shattering track is the closer, Mother I Sober, a plaintive piano ballad on which Beth Gibbons of Portishead “provides the most delicate vocal delivery ever found on a rap album, ever. It’s beautiful.” And the album’s a “masterpiece”.

Saint-Saëns: Piano Concertos 1 & 2 (Alexandre Kantorow) BIS £13.50

“Phenomenal, tremendous, incandescent, compelling, a true artist.” These were among the words used to describe the 24-year-old pianist Alexandre Kantorow following his recital in London in January, said Geoff Brown in The Times. His programme then had included pieces by “heavyweights” including Liszt and Scriabin. So it’s wonderful to find that the French prodigy is an equally brilliant performer of simpler, or lighter fare, such as the two Saint-Saëns piano concertos on this album. The “dancing clarity of [his] fingerwork” is a joy; and he “gives the more serious side” of Saint-Saëns its due.

Kantorow previously recorded a “superb” disc of Concertos Nos. 3, 4 and 5 with the same orchestra, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, and conductor, his father Jean-Jacques Kantorow, said Jeremy Nicholas in Gramophone. Here, the first movement of Concerto No. 2 is taken rather too “ponderously”, but it’s still a terrific disc, exuberant, full of joy – and a “feather in the cap” of all concerned.

Florence and the Machine: Dance Fever Polydor £10.99

When an album’s called Dance Fever, you might expect “glitter balls, Spandex and disco anthems”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. But this “magical” album is from Florence Welch, Britain’s “most artily cerebral pop diva”, and the title refers not to disco, but to the dance fever that gripped the German town of Aachen in the late 14th century, in what seems to have been a form of mass hysteria. Choreomania is the title of a “whirling dervish” of a song here – and its boldness is typical of a “lush” record on which the sound “shifts sinuously between the delicate and the huge” in “a baroque blend of epic Gothic pop and melodic folk”.

In its “commitment to euphoria”, this is an album “that looks forward to the release of all the pandemic’s pent-up energy at this summer’s festivals”, said Helen Brown on The Independent. On one track, Welch sings: “Have I learnt restraint?/ Am I quiet enough for you yet?” Ha! I hope that this “most dependably thrilling” of musicians “never learns to keep a lid on her wonderful wildness”.