CDS of the week: three new releases

James Blake: Assume Form Polydor £9.99

James Blake is among the “most inventive producers of his generation”, said Neil Mccormick in The Daily Telegraph. His love of “digital distortion and fractured beats” has helped carve out more subdued, less flashy territory for hip-hop and R&B superstars, while his own output tends towards “ambient experimentalism”. On Assume Form, we find Blake in love. Across a dozen strange, fascinating songs, he presents an “obsessive, fretful, psychologically wracked” exploration of the joys (and anxieties) of full-blown infatuation. It’s a record “as dizzyingly romantic as any you will ever hear”.

Musically, this is “noticeably more popfacing” than before, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. I’ll Come Too sounds “appealingly like the kind of songs Harry Nilsson used to write” when feeling inspired by pre-rock ’n’ roll pop. Can’t Believe the Way We Flow is a “blissful update of the sound” that emerged when soft 1970s soul keyed into sleepy doo-wop ballads. All told, it’s “immensely pleasing”.

The Twilight Sad: It Won/t Be Like This All the Time Rock Action £10.99

This outstanding fifth album from the Scottish “gloom-rockers” might never have been made, said Andrew Trendell on NME. Exhausted after their last record, the band were ready to pack it in, until one of their biggest fans – Robert Smith – invited them to tour the world as The Cure’s support act. Five years on, rather than being “owned by their demons”, the band have created this 11-track “exorcism” to master them. It’s full-bodied, visceral and “inescapable”: we should “feel grateful to have them”.

There’s nothing novel about the group’s “sound and fury and throbbing basslines”, said Dave Simpson in The Observer. They slip comfortably into a tradition stretching from The Chameleons to The Killers. What they offer, though, are “timeless, highquality songs” that bring an “epic grandeur to post-punk”. Singing in an accent as “proudly Scottish as Arab Strap or The Proclaimers”, lead singer James Graham is clearly “living these songs of love, loss, abandonment and existential angst”. This is “dark, bold, big music”.

Wolf: Italienisches Liederbuch, Diana Damrau, Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch Erato £9.99

As a lieder composer, the “depressive and adventurous Austrian master” Hugo Wolf has never been as popular as Schubert, said Geoff Brown in The Times. But when the “lustrous” Jonas Kaufmann and Diana Damrau toured Europe last year with his 46-strong Italienisches Liederbuch, they received packed houses and rave reviews. This disc, recorded live at their Essen date, shows why. The beautifully sung Italian songs (“suavely” translated into German) are by turns “ardent, coquettish, despairing” and comic takes on the bottomless topic of love. And Helmut Deutsch, on piano, is “judicious, perfect and precise”.

Wolf is “unlikely to be better served in this generation”, agreed Richard Fairman in the FT. Damrau excels in communicating the essence of the music: she sketches vivid vignettes by accentuating the rhythms and the detailed word-painting in the text. Kaufmann gets the less characterful songs, but his “burnished tenor, occasionally rousing itself to operatic scale, holds glowing embers of romance in its sound”.