CDS of the week: three new releases
Robert Plant: Carry Fire Nonesuch Records £12
It’s “not enough to say that Plant has successfully reinvented himself” since his days as a rock god, said Mark Edwards in The Sunday Times. On this “magnificent album, he successfully reinvents himself on every single song”. It makes it easy to see how he continues to resist the lure of a multimillion-dollar Led Zep reunion. Why bother when he can instead devote his energies to “musical alchemy” such as Heaven Sent, the closer in this album? Keep it Hid is another belter: to an electronic beat that sounds “half Bo Diddley and half James Blake”, Plant conjures up a vocal “akin to both prayer and singing the blues”.
Plant’s co-writers on this cracking record are his backing band, the Sensational Space Shifters, said Tim de Lisle in The Mail on Sunday. Raised in “disparate fields, from the Bristol trip-hop scene to Gambia, they come together to make a noise that is both heavy and light – a wall of sound that suddenly retracts, like a stage set, to disclose a gleaming solo”. At 69, Plant remains a force to be reckoned with.
St Vincent: Masseduction Loma Vista/ Caroline International £10.99
It is hard not to envy Annie Clark (aka St Vincent), said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. On the evidence of Masseduction she is not merely a “beautiful, stylish, gender-fluid polymath”, but a musical genius. This “sparkling” album is a “closeto-perfect creation, unique and filled with character, yet accessible and catchy”. It has “elements of Sparks’ wit, Kate Bush’s gauzy romance, Kraftwerk’s sympathy for robot life, and LCD Soundsystem’s knowing cool”. It is funny, sexy, eccentric, revealing and perceptive all at once. “Frankly, it isn’t fair.”
Clark limits her “virtuosic guitar playing to touches and flourishes, but her singing has never been more expressive”, said Ludovic Hunter-tilney in the FT. The vocal highlight is the ballad Happy Birthday, Johnny, a farewell to an old friend who knows the narrator’s “secrets”, sung with mixed pathos and guilt. There were just a couple of tracks that I didn’t much care for (an art-rock number, Pills, and an overemotive ballad, New York). “The rest of the album is a cut above.”
LSO, conducted by Simon Rattle: Debussy – Pelléas et Mélisande, LSO Live £19.99
The LSO’S January 2016 performances of Debussy’s opera at the Barbican have been “beautifully transferred” to CD, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian – and the result is a credit to the LSO’S own record label. It is perhaps not a definitive performance: in my view Christian Gerhaher’s Pelléas is “too pointed”; Magdalena Kožená’s Mélisande “too worldly sounding”. But it’s an exceptionally vivid” take, expressively sung. And under Simon Rattle’s baton the orchestra is “a true protagonist in the drama; the colours of his great score are constantly evolving, intensifying and receding, and the interludes are wonderfully well played”.
Rattle’s “spring cleaning” of the LSO’S sound is evident in this account of a score he has championed for decades, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. The conductor achieves a “miraculous translucence of texture without sacrificing drama”. Gerhaher and Kožená are both “substantial” in the title roles, but for my money the “star” performance here is by Gerald Finley as an “intense” Golaud.