Music
Marc Almond and Jools Holland make odd but effective recording partners, while Mumford & Sons revisit old ground
Fiona Shepherd reviews A Lovely Life To Live by Jools Holland and Marc Almond
POP Jools Holland & Marc Almond: A Lovely Life To Live
Rhino
Mumford & Sons: Delta
Island Mark Knopfler: Down the Road Wherever
British Grove The Eastern Swell: Hand Rolled Halo
Stereogram Recordings
The Jools Holland juggernaut trucks on with an uncharacteristically jaunty Marc Almond in tow on A Lovely Life To Live, a product of their sporadic collaboration over the last ten years and, to a degree, their tribute to shared experience on the London music scene in the early 1980s.
A couple of originals celebrate that shared heritage. Ilostmy
City is prime chanson territory for Almond, as he drifts by the dusty old haunts against a dramatic big band backdrop. Next, he gets his strut on to salute that bygone nightlife on
London You Were My Lover, though one senses Almond could capture the decadence without the blast of Holland’s rollicking Rhythm & Blues Orchestra behind him.
Elsewhere, there is an overblown take on Edith Piaf ’s Hymne A L’amour, while Almond submits to the cheesy finger-clicking swing of Dirk Bogarde
and Me. The same big band treatment is meted out to Tainted Love to the detriment of the sentiment.
Almond relishes these jazz hands moments but is more suited to an intimate torch song delivery.
However, he and Holland find their ideal crossover point covering two Bobby “Blue” Bland numbers, digging in the dirt of It’s My Life Baby and unleashing the sheer sass of I’ll Take
Care of You.
There is not much new to report in
Mumford & Sons’ world but another album inspired, they say, by “death, divorce and depression”. Down in the Thames Delta, the blues takes the form of introverted nonentities such as Woman. The minimalism of The
Wild is better, building to a swirling string crescendo and inhabiting the self-involved sensitive-guy territory of their onetime peers Noah and the Whale.
In collaboration with producer Paul Epworth, they have slightly varied the musical palette for their fourth album, experimenting mildly with elements of orchestration, electronica and distorting effects, none of which particularly invigorates the songwriting. Rose
of Sharon is passionate lyrical declaration of love with a curiously dispassionate soundtrack and, from here, Marcus Mumford appears caught up in the rapture in his own polite way, finding its most satisfying expression in Wild Heart with its rhetorical poser “who wants a love that makes sense anyway?”
Mark Knopfler is in typically lowkey form on Down the Road Wherever which meanders meditatively over 75 minutes from the mellow
rhythm’n’blues of Back On The Dance
Floor to the bright Tijuana Brass-style
sashay Heavy Up.
John Mccusker’s fiddle and Michael Mcgoldrick’s whistles add a plaintive backdrop to the crumpled but
sincere empathy of Drovers’ Road and Knopfler recalls his hitchhiking musician days in the gentle bluegrass terms of Matchstick Man. Just a Boy Away From Home
is an impish tale inspired by his father’s memory of a Liverpool fan wandering the streets of Newcastle singing You’ll Never Walk Alone. Knopfler picks out the tune on his guitar in a moment of levity but the highlights of an understated collection are two cocktail lounge laments, Slow Learner and When You
Leave, with Knopfler invoking the spirit of Jacques Brel as a devastated, desiccated soul soundtracked by Tom Walsh’s keening jazz trumpet.
Edinburgh’s The Eastern Swell follow up their immersive debut One
Day, A Flood in similarly timeless and seamless style, embellishing the psych folk and prog rock of opening track Miles From Home with a bright horn break straight out of the Burt Bacharach songbook, applying western swing fiddle and trad jazz trumpet to the scurry of
Zeitgeist and offering a sensitive psychedelic reading of folk standard
Blackwaterside, which showcases Chris Reeve’s guitar playing as much as Lainie Urquhart’s storytelling.
Almond could capture the decadence without the blast of Holland’s rollicking Rhythm & Blues Orchestra