Albums of the week: three new releases
“The last of the rock stars is back” with a terrific third solo album, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. Liam Gallagher still has a “powerful voice that mixes raw attack with bittersweet tinges of vulnerability, and enough swagger to solve the nation’s energy crisis”. Here, he has employed several co-writers to create unashamedly Oasis-like songs that could easily be the work of his estranged brother Noel, Oasis’s songwriter; and the record is “comfortably better than anything Oasis released after 1995’s world-conquering What’s the Story (Morning Glory). Even Noel might be begrudgingly impressed.”
Liam trailed his new album as “a bit peculiar”, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. In practice, that simply means “adding the odd psychedelic echo or electronic reverberation onto the familiar anthemic rock”. This is a “very good” album that sticks closely to a “formula guaranteed to please the Oasis faithful” – and serves as an invigorating reminder of what an “amazing band” they were. “One day, I suspect, they will return.”
Although the American alt-rockers Wilco emerged from the ashes of a country band, they’ve always had a “stilted” relationship with country music, said Patrick Clarke on NME. Over their near-three-decade career, country has always been an ingredient – but never the focus – of a sound that has shifted from “straightforward rock to longform experimental pieces”. But here, Wilco “lean into country music wholeheartedly” for the first time – with an album full of “compelling” portraits of a fractured nation. “If the best country music has always been about storytelling, then on Cruel Country Wilco are delivering it in its purest form”.
The band recorded this album’s 21 songs in live takes, said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone; it is the first time they’ve done this since “their tranquil 2007 highpoint Sky Blue Sky”. It gives the album an unpolished feel, like “the most beautifully ornamented home recording imaginable”. It’s not too challenging: mostly, they “evoke Americana at its folkiest and most comforting”. But even doubters will surely be stunned by the “consistency and quality”.
“Would you like to escape from a noisy, brash and violent world into a landscape magical, quiet and mysterious?” Then step into the “secret garden” of Reynaldo Hahn’s piano music on this captivating album from Pavel Kolesnikov, said Geoff Brown in The Times. Recorded with microphones closely positioned to a Yamaha CFX concert grand, the Russian virtuoso’s “thoughtful and penetrating” playing seems to involve “not so much depressing as stroking the keys, conjuring up such fragile but potent poetry that when loud sounds eventually arrive, you might well jump out of your seat”.
It’s almost as if Kolesnikov is playing these “gorgeous, delicate miniatures” for his private enjoyment, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian. Nineteen of the 25 pieces are from Hahn’s Le Rossignol éperdu (1912) – and hearing them “is like paging through a book of musical fairy tales”. Kolesnikov’s sublime playing “puts them in a quiet, dreamy world, the colours of the sound clean but translucent, blurring into one another like watercolours”. The effect is “slightly unsettling, and entirely beguiling”.