CDS of the week: three new releases
Her sixth album has Taylor Swift cutting her last ties with her Nashville roots in favour of the “blare and honk” of dance-driven pop, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Even the weaker numbers are “decent pop songs”. The best have a “fizzing, pugilistic energy that recalls Britney Spears’ brilliant, mid-breakdown, screw-you-all 2007 album Blackout”. And Swift’s lyrics – tales of love, loss and celebrity feuds – are “far better and wittier than the average pop fare”.
Much of the record is “an ear-bending assault of warping bass synths, headsmacking drum patterns and deliriously treated vocals”, said Neil Mccormick in The Daily Telegraph. Another, more reflective, strand emerges on a series of sensual synth-pop songs “questioning whether love can survive in the unrelenting glare of the media”. And the closing song, New Year’s Day, “dials down the electronics and histrionics” for a piano and guitar love ballad. “A beautiful song, delivered with touching sincerity,” it confirms Swift’s reputation as “a genuine musical talent”.
As a vocalist with gospel legends The Staple Singers, Mavis Staples was delivering “anthems of pride and defiance” back in the Civil Rights era, said Neil Spencer in The Observer. On her third collaboration with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, she “eschews standards and revivals” in favour of ten new Tweedy-penned songs that “form a state of the nation address”. But this is far from an angry rant – “love is Staples’ weapon of choice”. It’s inspirational musically: a “low-key meld of 1970s funk, gospel choruses and wonky rock guitar”.
The veteran soul singer is 78, and her voice has grown raspy, said Ludovic Hunter-tilney in the FT. “It now dwells at the lower end of the deep register that captivated” the young Bob Dylan (who once proposed marriage to her, unsuccessfully), but “the power is still there, and with it a sense of stature and purpose”. “We go high when they go low,” she sings at one point, applying Michelle Obama’s words to the “righteous force of soul music”.
Berlioz’s grand opera, based on scenes from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, is as “majestic, as ambitious, as extravagant as they come”, said Richard Fairman in the FT. With this new recording, taken from live concert performances in Strasbourg, Erato does it “full justice”. Les Troyens remains something of a rarity in the opera house, yet the American conductor John Nelson has staged it several times. Here, “he has a live-wire grip on the score and gets detailed playing from his orchestra”, and phenomenal performances from the singers.
Joyce Didonato has done nothing finer on disc than her Didon here, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. “This is singing in the Janet Baker/lorraine Hunt Lieberson class, but I doubt either of those great Didons rose to the emotional extremes of suicidal despair that the American mezzo does here.” Michael Spyres is in the same lofty class as Énée; Marie-nicole Lemieux’s Cassandre is “the finest on any complete recording”. In sum, a “triumph”.