Albums of the week: three new releases
Drawing on multiple folk traditions, this collaboration between the Irish actress Jessie Buckley and the former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler is simply “mesmerising”, said Damien Morris in The Observer. Buckley’s great strength as an actress is that, “however preposterous her character or dialogue, she locates something true and compelling and makes you believe it”. That same “rich, animating intelligence” suffuses this collection. She can be “puckish, yearning, impossibly weary” and intimate, all in the space of one song; and Butler’s “light, confident touch” is the perfect foil for her “magical voice”.
As well as folk, this delightful record leans into classical music, blues and rock, said Siobhán Kane in The Irish Times. A highlight is the track The Eagle &The Dove, which seems to “dance on a kind of musical tension, with Buckley’s impressive vocal sweeping and soaring, interrogating darkly lit corners, and Butler’s playing at once complex and understated”. It is a “magical and mysterious” album, with “lovely moments” throughout.
Born in Russia and raised in the US, Regina Spektor made her name alongside the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as part of New York’s “fertile early Noughties garagerock scene”, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. But really this “most unique” of New York songwriters “belonged to the city’s florid traditions from decades previously: the piano-led complexities of Laura Nyro; the jazz romanticism of Billie Holiday”. It is that sensibility that she brings to the fore on this terrific album, her eighth; it shows the full force of her playful but sophisticated songwriting imagination.
Spektor’s music is “intimate enough to feel like a friend speaking directly to you”, but so robust that she is able to share stages with bands such as the Strokes and Kings of Leon, said Ali Shutler on NME. This is her “most expansive, funny and heartbreaking album” to date. It includes some of the “haunted folk songs” for which she is best known, but she pushes into “vibrant, previously unexplored territory” – with moments of urgent funk, emo-pop and flamboyant surrealism. It’s great.
The conductor John Wilson is known for thrilling Proms audiences with his concerts of Hollywood and Broadway scores, said Geoff Brown in The Times. These days, though, the “dynamic maestro” is mostly found “powering through colourful classical repertoire” with his new Sinfonia of London. The work of John Ireland, one of the more introverted and impressionistic of British 20th century composers, seems an odd match for Wilson’s energetic approach. But it works a treat, with Wilson “punching out the climaxes, keeping rhythms sharp and breezy, and avoiding any hint of a droop”. This is “lovely music, superbly played with plenty of poetry and fire”.
It’s a great disc, agreed Ken Walton in The Scotsman. Like a classic film score, Ireland’s 1946 Overture Satyricon “wallows in lyrical sweetness”, yet offers “robust sophistication – Elgar heading towards Vaughan Williams”. There is “luscious originality” in A Downland Suite. The symphonic rhapsody Mai-Dun is “spirited and adventurous”. And A London Overture opens like a “demonised” version of Elgar’s Cockaigne.