CD REVIEWS
Aidan O’Rourke Hotline (Reveal)
THE hotline in question is a cable housed in a building near fiddler Aidan O’Rourke’s boyhood home in Oban that carried the transatlantic telephone link between the American and Soviet Union heads of state. Using conversations gleaned from those who tested this link, as well as music recorded in the massive chambers within this building, O’Rourke has created a work that captures some of his impressions of the TAT-1 engineering project that brought this phenomenon to Argyll and what it was like to grow up there. Working also with Phil Bancroft (tenor saxophone), Paul Harrison (piano and synths), Catriona McKay (Scottish harp) and Martin O’Neill (bodhran and percussion), O’Rourke uses simple motifs as building blocks on the five tracks. The results, with their echoes of Terry Riley’s minimalism, can be a little episodic but at their best they convey atmosphere and a pleasing air of mystery, with Harrison’s bluesy keyboard work lighting up Clarenville and the ensemble working up a bagpipe-like trance on the closing Gallanach Bay.
Rob Adams
Jacqueline du Pre, Bruno Leonardo Gelber, Radio Symphonie-Orchester Berlin Schumann: Cello Concerto/ Brahms: First Piano Concerto (Audite)
PERHAPS the most striking feature of this wonderful 1963 recording of Jacqueline du Pre playing Schumann’s Cello Concerto for German radio is the comprehensive display of her gifts, already breathtaking in their maturity at the age of 18. The Schumann Concerto still struggles to find a regular place in the repertoire. It is elusive in its structure and its character, and not every cellist pulls it off. These qualifications evaporate in du Pre’s magical hands, and the concerto just flows with its glorious mercuriality, freshness, playfulness and spirit. Bruno Leonardo Gelber’s version of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto is totally majestic, and I will return to it soon in the context of an article about this piece. All in, this is a phenomenal disc, with top-drawer soloists, first-class repertoire and superlative playing from the Radio-Symphonie Orchester Berlin, with young conductor Gerd Albrecht assured at every turn. An essential recording for every serious music lover.
Michael Tumelty
Haight-Ashbury Perhaps (Lime)
ALMOST four decades after the phenomenal success of Bohemian Rhapsody, with postmodernism wrapped in a blanket and buried in a shallow grave beneath a privet hedge, pastiche has never witnessed a lower trough than on Glasgow trio Haight-Ashbury’s third album. Which is not to say Perhaps is an unlistenable set. The choralism, plangent guitars and avowedly unfussy playing – all swathed in gargantuan reverb – make for a euphoric if innocuous sound redolent of pretty much anything produced by Phil Spector and everything such recordings sparked down the line, notably the Jesus And Mary Chain and Spirea X. The concern here is that so few new ingredients have been thrown into the pot, what’s left is fundamentally a lyrically feeble, musically necrotised tribute to the psychedelic high points of late 1960s and early 70s west coast USA – recorded in the second decade of the 21st century. On the plus side, reservations are temporarily obliterated by standout track Alibis, a heartbreaking mix of stoned FM rock, the doomed tristesse of ABBA and a chord progression worthy of peak-period Neil Young.
Sean Guthrie
Editors The Weight Of Your Love (Play It Again Sam)
THERE are times on this fourth album from Editors when only Tom Smith’s distinctive baritone voice is there to remind us that this is indeed the same band who first peeked through the post-Interpol gloom with The Back Room in 2005. Except of course it isn’t the same band: Chris Urbanowicz left just over a year ago “in a decision entirely based upon future musical direction”. I think I’m on the guitarist’s side: the heart’s saying yes to the upfront melodies but the head’s saying no to the mainstream change of style in The Weight Of Your Love. This is Editors as minor-chord balladeers, sailing dangerously close to X Factor territory with the soulful falsetto of What Is This Thing Called Love and pouring on the strings for Nothing, a song that might have suited Tom Jones back in the day or Westlife in more recent times. A Ton Of Love is a Stars In Their Sunglassed Eyes homage to Echo And The Bunnymen, while Formaldehyde recasts the Birmingham-based band as a pop New Order with a recognisably Hooky bass line. Something isn’t right.
Alan Morrison