Bennett bows out with a little help from a Lady
LADY GAGA & TONY BENNETT: Love For Sale (Columbia/Interscope)
Verdict: Unlikely duo strike gold again ★★★★★
ROGER TAYLOR: Outsider (EMI)
Verdict: Rueful reflection ★★★☆☆
THIS is traditionally the time when the music business limbers up for winter, with its biggest record releases. With new albums due from Abba, Coldplay, Elton John and Ed Sheeran, this year will be no exception.
It’s also shaping up as a season of artistic surprises. First, Elvis Costello remade one of his classic albums, This Year’s Model, entirely in Spanish. Then Rick Astley announced he’s playing two concerts with Stockport indie band Blossoms in which he’ll be singing nothing but songs by his 1980s heroes The Smiths.
Two of pop’s oddest couples are also returning. Former Led Zeppelin rocker Robert Plant is teaming up for a second time with Illinois bluegrass singer Alison Krauss for a new album, Raise The Roof, which arrives in November. Before that, there’s a new record from an even less likely double act: madcap diva Lady Gaga and crooner Tony Bennett.
The queen of drama and the king of cool first got together a decade ago, to sing show tune The Lady Is A Tramp for Tony’s Duets II LP. They followed that with a full album, Cheek To Cheek, in 2015. Far from being a novelty, the Italian-American New Yorkers proved to be a match made in heaven, and their latest effort, Love For Sale, further cements an improbable bond.
Gaga’s singing has sometimes been overshadowed by her outrageous dress sense. Over the years, she’s sported fake baby bumps, triceratops horns and outfits made from wood shavings and meat.
But the musician, 35, sang jazz in her youth and shares a love of the Great American Songbook with Bennett, 95, who has spent a lifetime celebrating the swing era.
By the time they reunited to make Love For Sale, Bennett had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a condition his family made public this year. Gaga put the recording of her own recent album, Chromatica, on hold to join him in New York, aware that he saw this as his final album. The pair also sang live together at the city’s Radio City Music Hall in August.
Love For Sale is a concept album, showcasing the songs of Cole Porter, the composer whose songs lit up Broadway and Hollywood from the 1920s onwards. His sharp, urbane lyrics and haunting melodies — light on the surface, darker underneath — suit the duo perfectly and their voices dovetail neatly on standards such as It’s De-Lovely and Night And Day.
On the former, an upbeat swing number featuring trumpeter Brian Newman and sax man Steve Kortyka, the richness of Gaga’s jazz voice is complemented by Tony’s flawless pitch and warm, twinkling charm. With Bennett’s regular band augmented by luxuriant orchestral strings, Night And Day begins in buoyant fashion before easing down a gear.
The veteran handles the opening lines of I Concentrate On You — performed as a Latin swing number — with Gaga adding playful notes; and the title track is racy and up-tempo.
Such is the overriding sense of joy that even numbers as ubiquitous as I Get A Kick Out Of You sound fresh.
Amid the duets, both singers take solo turns. Gaga adds a period feel to lush 1930s ballad Do I Love You, and Bennett shows his mastery of conversational phrasing on Just One Of Those Things.
If Love For Sale dips a little on the solo tracks, it’s only because the duets are such fun. Working without the whistles and bells of her machine-tooled dance-pop albums, Gaga, just as she did in the Hollywood remake of A Star Is Born, sings superbly.
And if Love For Sale does prove to be Bennett’s studio swansong, a giant of music is going out on a high.
■ THERE’S another surprising duet on Roger Taylor’s first solo album in eight years, with the Queen drummer linking up with KT Tunstall on We’re All Just Trying To Get By, a piece of lockdown reflection on which the Scottish singer’s soft harmonies offer an appealing counterpoint to Taylor’s huskier vocals.
The album, Outsider, is a mixed bag. As composer of the Queen classics Radio Ga Ga and A Kind Of Magic, Taylor, 72, has an impressive songwriting pedigree, and the album’s best moments use progressive rock guitars and widescreen keyboards to explore a mood of rueful, autumnal nostalgia.
Several tracks, including Tides and the epic Journey’s End, sensitively examine thoughts of mortality, and there are shades of 1970s Queen on the melodramatic soul ballad I Know, I Know, I Know. Foreign Sand, a re-working of a 1994 solo single, is all delicate acoustic guitar.
Perhaps wary of appearing too downbeat, the drummer also indulges his sillier side. More Kicks is a blues-rock stomp, driven by his powerhouse rhythms, and there’s an incongruous cover of Shirley Ellis’s 1965 pop single The Clapping Song.
These lighter tracks, fine in isolation, add variety, but detract from Outsider’s more elegant highlights.
■ BOTH albums are out today. Roger Taylor starts a tour tomorrow at the O2
Academy, Newcastle (ticketmaster.co. uk).