Still chasing scars
Snow Patrol Wildness Universal
MY goodness, has it really been seven years since the last Snow Patrol album? It has indeed. But you’ll soon know why when you listen through all 10 tracks of Wildness.
Lead singer Gary Lightbody looks backward to his youth, forward to his body breaking down, confronts his battles with alcohol and depression, as well as touches on his father’s dementia and explores various ways we get wild. The result is a fantastically ambitious collection of songs, one more direct and intimate than many previous Snow Patrol offerings.
Lightbody experiments with his vocal range and the rest of the band – multi-instrumentalist Johnny McDaid, guitarist Nathan Connolly, bassist Paul Wilson and drummer Jonny Quinn – are in top form under longtime producer Jacknife Lee.
Album opener Life On Earth is majestic and grand, both personal and yet universal, carried by a string quartet and drum flourishes. It’s bold and brilliant. It sounds like something we should send out on the next spacecraft to tell aliens what humanity is all about. It’s that good.
A few songs later, it’s just Lightbody and McDaid on piano for the exquisite, stripped-down What If This Is All The Love You
Ever Get? (“What if it hurts like hell?” he asks. “I know the wreckage so well.”) Like many songs on the album, it takes a few unexpected turns.
Lightbody looks backward in the nicely layered A Youth Written In
Fire (“Remember the first time that we kissed?”) and pours so much heartache into the stirring Don’t
Give In that he seems to be singing about himself. It’s so intimate and needy that you’ll want to wrap it in a blanket and put it beside a fire.
Snow Patrol gets positively slinky for A Dark Switch and on the heartbreaking Soon, Lightbody comforts his ailing dad. “Tomorrow is nothing to fear because, father, it’s always today,” he sings. “The secret storms of your wild youth/ Now just gentle breezes warm and faint.”
While not every song rises to these high levels – and the closing
Life And Death underwhelms, especially with such an enterprising title – Wildness signals a triumphant Snow Patrol return. – Mark Kennedy/AP
Chvrches Love Is Dead Universal
WITH their third album, Love Is
Dead, the Scottish synth-pop trio Chvrches brazenly embraces its commercial pop side.
Whereas previous records had mixed rousing singles such as The
Mother We Share and Bury It with artsy and insular tracks that foregrounded their seriousness, Love Is
Dead is full of widescreen anthems. For the first time, the trio — transplanted from Glasgow to Brooklyn — brought in outside producers, most notably hit-maker Greg Kurstin (Adele, Pink), who worked on three-quarters of the album’s dozen songs.
While the music is relentlessly hook-filled with reliably explosive choruses, the lyrics offer a conflicted view of love, often accusatory or questioning. “Good intentions never good enough,” Lauren Mayberry sings in the seemingly chipper Get Out.
“Weren’t we gonna be honest and weren’t we gonna be more?” she sings on the repetitive Never
Say Die. And The National’s dour Matt Berninger drops in for an argumentative duet, My Enemy.
Love Is Dead is sometimes heavy-handed in both its joyful tone and cynical sentiments, but the friction is often fascinating. — Steve Klinge/ The Philadelphia Inquirer/Tribune News Service
Kanye West
Ye Universal
KANYE West’s new album Ye is truly a product of these times.
It’s all right – nowhere close to West’s masterpieces, not nearly as awful as the two truly terrible singles Lift Yourself and Ye Vs. The
People that preceded it, but mercifully did not make the final cut.
But in today’s world, is anyone interested in measured responses? If it’s not the greatest thing ever or the worst music ever made, then what’s the point?
More than any other artist around, West understands the power of outrageous actions. The problem with Ye, though, is that he generated all this outrage with comments like “Slavery was a choice” and calling President Trump his “brother” for a collection of songs that are mostly about his favourite topic: himself.
Politics is only mentioned in passing and Trump isn’t mentioned at all.
He does mention Stormy Daniels, though, in All Mine, where he talks about the desire men have to cheat, throwing in sister-in-law Khloe Kardashian’s boyfriend Tristan Thompson’s cheating allegations.
West raps about being bipolar in Yikes, the album’s best song because its dark production matches the danger he’s trying to convey. He even offers an example of his thought process by starting out rational, moving into how being bipolar is his “superpower” and how he is a superhero before he just ends up screaming.
By trying to build up his own importance with all his political pronouncements, West ends up diminishing fine moments like this by raising the expectations too high.
By playing up his own personal story, he ends up shifting the focus from more universal ideas. The love song Wouldn’t Leave is actually pretty sweet, but most will move right past the sentiment to how his wife, Kim Kardashian, reacted to his controversial comment about slavery. “My wife callin’, screamin’, say, ‘We ‘bout to lose it all!’,” West raps.
West gets high marks for rolling out “content”, but we can only wonder how much better Ye could have been if he focused more on quality. Yet another sign of the times. – Glenn Gamboa/Newsday/ Tribune News Service
Jennifer Warnes Another Time, Another Place BMG
EVEN when major an-album-ayear bands and singers are rare, the 17 since Jennifer Warnes’ last record, The Well, are far too lengthy an interval, making her return that much sweeter.
Still further back is her career peak – her tremendous 1987 collection of Leonard Cohen songs,
Famous Blue Raincoat – and her
soundtrack hits from Norma Rae, An Officer And A Gentleman and Dirty Dancing.
There are no Cohen compositions on Another Time, Another
Place, but Warnes has found plenty of songs worth her attention and talent, mostly covers written or made famous by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Pearl Jam, Elvis Presley, Mickey Newbury and Dire Straits.
The opening track, Eddie Vedder’s Just Breathe, is imbued with a dose of elegance both in Warnes’ vocals and in the arrangement, which chooses strings and a French horn to layer the emotional heft without mawkishness. Presley recorded Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow
Night already while at Sun Records and Warnes preserves its simplicity and aching uncertainty, and she fully submerges herself in the soulful blues of
Back Where I Started, written by Derek Trucks and Warren Hayes. A version of Mark Knopfler’s
Why Worry ends the album with sentiments similar to the opener’s – both champion hope and resilience amid tragedy – fitting choices as Warnes lost her mum and several other close kin, as well as her manager, within a short span.
If it took Warnes a long time to commit to making an album again, the clarity and confidence of her performances on Another
Time, Another Place validate her decision with style and grace. – Pablo Gorondi/AP