Buckley gets the blues with help from a Suede sidekick
JESSIE BUCKLEY & BERNARD BUTLER: For All Our Days That Tear The Heart (EMI) Verdict: Unlikely pair strike gold ★★★★I FOALS: Life Is Yours (Warner) Verdict: Post-lockdown tonic ★★★★I
THERE’S really just one question to ask when one of Hollywood’s fastestrising young stars releases an album: would it still be worth listening to, without its maker’s Tinseltown connections? In the case of Jessie Buckley, the Irish actress who this year received an Oscar nod for The Lost Daughter, the answer is a resounding yes.
The 32-year-old from County Kerry has sung in the West End — she won an Olivier Award for her work in last year’s revival of Cabaret — and played an aspiring country starlet in 2018’s Wild Rose. Her singing talent was abundantly apparent in that film.
On those occasions, she was a gifted actress taking on specific roles. Her new album with former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler is different. Here, in an engrossing mixture of jazz, folk and blues, she delivers a performance — restrained yet deeply emotional — that goes well beyond stagecraft.
Jessie and Bernard are an odd couple. Her background is in musical theatre, while Butler, 52, is one of the unsung heroes of Britpop. His brash guitar on the Suede singles Metal Mickey and So Young helped pave the way for Blur and Oasis, and he has since worked with Sophie Ellis-Bextor, David McAlmont and Duffy.
But the London musician also has Irish roots (his parents are from Dun Laoghaire), and Buckley’s manager put the pair in touch after sensing they might be kindred spirits.
Butler, on piano and guitar, provides a sympathetic backing for Jessie’s rich voice, but the real surprise is just how well their songwriting partnership works.
Rather than cover traditional folk tunes or jazz standards, they have co-written 12 new numbers that explore a range of moods. The folkish Eagle & The Dove echoes Joni Mitchell. Babylon Days is the kind of song that might have cropped up on Island Records alongside Nick Drake and Fairport Convention in the 1970s.
Those searching for instant pop gratification should look elsewhere — and the duo’s fondness for wordy song titles is slightly off-putting — but this is an album that rewards repeated play. There’s a windswept air to 20 Years A-Growing, based on the 1930s memoir of a man living on a remote Irish island. Seven Red Rose Tattoos is plaintive and jazzy.
Hints of Jessie the stage singer occasionally seep through, and the title track, built around strings, horns and double bass, is unabashedly melodramatic.
Butler’s skill as an arranger — rocky on We’ve Run The Distance: bluesy on Shallow The Water — is clear; and Buckley sings with an earthiness that stops these songs from sounding twee. Where she usually plays a role, she’s now playing it straight, and For All Our Days… is an unexpected triumph. ■ WITH a Saturday night headline slot at next month’s Latitude Festival and a bill-topping appearance on Glastonbury’s Other Stage a week today, Foals are set to cement their status as one of the country’s biggest bands. They were crowned Best British Group at the 2020 BRITs, so they have plenty to build on.
Their profile should be boosted further with the arrival of Life Is Yours, a bright, accessible pop record made to banish post-lockdown blues. The Oxford outfit haven’t always been so happy-golucky, but frontman Yannis Philippakis says they wanted to deliver something upbeat.
The band began this seventh LP in quarantine, writing songs that reflected their desire to escape. By the time they got to finish them, in a Bath studio, the world was opening up, and the album became a celebration. If 2019’s two-part Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost was overwrought, this is tight, life-affirming and punchy.
Having been a five-piece for most of their 17-year career, Foals are now a slimmed-down trio, with Philippakis accompanied by guitarist Jimmy Smith and drummer Jack Bevan. Barely pausing for breath, they gallop through 11 numbers in 42 minutes.
The title track sets the tone, its jittery percussion and swirling keyboards reminiscent of Once In A Lifetime-era Talking Heads. Wake Me Up is funkier, pitched between Chic and Duran Duran, and Under The Radar features a 1980s synthpop groove Depeche Mode or Soft Cell would have been happy with.
PHILIPPAKIS joined Foals while he was studying at Oxford in 2005, and the band’s early gigs were chaotic club shows. He recalls those on Looking High, while lamenting the loss of scores of live venues to property developers (‘Looking high, looking low, for where all our friends used to go’).
It’s a rare moment of reflection, and the mood is overwhelmingly joyous. The odd slow song wouldn’t have gone amiss, but variety clearly wasn’t on the agenda, with Yannis, on The Sound, singing about savouring the prospect of playing live again. Glastonbury and Latitude are in for a treat.
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