Music
Freewheeling spontaneity infuses The Waterboys’ new album, while Howard Jones finds his electro- pop back in vogue
Album reviews, plus David Kettle on the Edinburgh Incidental Orchestra
POP The Waterboys: Where The Action Is
Cooking Vinyl
The National: I Am Easy to Find
4AD
Rev Magnetic: Versus Universe
Rock Action
Howard Jones: Transform
Dtox Records
Never short on confidence in his music and his band – and justifiably so – Mike Scott has proclaimed the latest album by The to be “an entertainment in sound.” In practise, Where The Action Is is a mixed bag, casting its net wide, wearing its freewheeling go- faster stripes with ease and worrying not where its next idea comes from.
The title track is a propulsive, feelthe- power update on Robert Parker’s northern soul favourite Let’s Go Baby but there’s no time to hang around – Scott wants to pay affectionate tribute to Mick Jones of The Clash. London Mick is another carefree rock’n’roller, recounting their crossing paths over the years. Later, he goes deeper into his heady London days on Ladbroke Grove Symphony, a fleet, rootsy boogie about time and place colliding, which is so vividly drawn that you can appreciate the musical eclecticism which still runs in Scott’s veins all these years later.
Elsewhere, he cannot resist sermonising soulfully on In My Time On Earth but protests “I didn’t mean to make a speech, I’m just sayin’ off the cuff ” as he delivers the sage and tender advice of Right Side of
Heartbreak ( Wrong Side of Love).
Scott’s gift is in making such eloquence so immediate. And There’s Love recalls a former love with the wisdom and wistfulness of a Jacques Brel number. Yet, frustratingly, he manages to drain the natural emotion from Robert Burns’ beautiful Green Grow The Rashes- O with a tinny drum machine backing, while
Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a wideeyed recitation from said visionary chapter of Wind in the Willows over a backdrop of leisurely piano and keening fiddle.
Where The Waterboys pull through with spontaneous insouciance,
The National go for the grand( er) concept and deliver a lengthy, underwhelming suite of sensitive arena indie rock, with accompanying short film directed by Mike Mills and starring Alicia Vikander.
The featured female voices on the album – Bowie bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, Lisa Hannigan, Sharon Van Etten, Kate Stables of This is the Kit – are also the star attraction, providing some much needed dynamism on a long trawl of occasionally ponderous songs.
The more conventional indie rock catchiness of Rylan should go over well on radio but is less representative than twinkly ballad Not In Kansas with its lullaby choir. Suitably for an album of contrasting voices, most of the highlights are choral interludes, be it the Brooklyn Youth Choir’s soothing input to the ambient, glitchy So Far So Fast, the almost monastic monotone on Dust Swirls in Strange Light or the devotional drone of Underwater.
There is further loose conceptualisation from Rev
Magnetic, a new outfit helmed by author, musician and Mogwai associate Luke Sutherland. Versus Universe traces the tale of a neglected daughter who retreats into the music of the radiophonic spheres, though the listener is more likely to be hypnotised by the woozy dreamscapes and Sutherland’s breathy voice than the nebulous story.
The sunburst guitar heroics of Yonder and expansive fuzz noise reverie Gloaming pierce the ambience and Sutherland unexpectedly breaks out pedal steel guitar, folk melody and soulful chorale on Palaces in a sonic melange worthy of Young Fathers.
Popular music being a cyclical thing, 80s synth pop boffin Howard
Jones sounds almost contemporary again on his latest album, Transform, which includes a couple of catchy retro electro pop cuts from the
Eddie the Eagle soundtrack and three superior collaborations with trance pioneer Brian “BT” Transeau, including the title track, which is a sleek coming together of Jones’s thought- for- the- day philosophising and Transeau’s studio finery.
London Mick is another carefree rock’n’roller, recounting their crossing paths over the years