Albums of the week: three new releases
Sam Lee: Old Wow Cooking Vinyl £11.99
This third collection from the raffish English folk musician (and former burlesque dancer) takes his career to a “masterful new level of sophistication”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. Old Wow is a “spine-tingling collection of traditional songs, artfully reinterpreted for contemporary ears and concerns”. The “sinuous” arrangements by producer Bernard Butler (of Suede fame) use jazzy piano, double bass and percussion to conjure a kind of dreamy, downtempo folkpop, while Lee sings with a “quality of understatement that nevertheless conjures intense emotional presence”. The effect is “sublime”. Wow, indeed!
An old Gypsy ballad, The Moon Shines Bright, features eerily beautiful guest vocals from Elizabeth Fraser, said Jude Rogers in The Guardian. Another track, Lay This Body Down, marries a “Fleet Foxes-like intro with Bad Seeds slink”. Add in a “sleepy Sundaymorning John Martyn jazz vibe, all walking bass, piano and shivery strings, and the effect is exquisite”.
Kesha: High Road RCA/Kemosabe £9.99
Kesha’s Grammy-nominated 2017 album Rainbow documented – with beautiful, highly personal ballads – the fallout after she accused her former producer of sexual assault. Her new collection, High Road, is a return to the Kesha of old: a “brash, often X-rated” grab bag of party pop, full of witty one-liners, girl-gang chants and “celebratory tales of friendship, freedom and nights on the tiles”, said Lisa Verrico in The Times. Highlights include Raising Hell, a “genius hip-hop hoedown”, and Resentment, a “lovely country lament” featuring Brian Wilson and Sturgill Simpson. All told, this is a “funny, feelgood blowing-away of cobwebs”, best listened to like a “lucky dip”.
There’s definitely less emotional nuance than on Rainbow and more banging tunes focused on joy and pleasure, said Michael Cragg in The Observer. The “genrehopping” does lead to the odd stumble. But overall this is a “never boring, often excellent” album that finds Kesha “returning to the party on her own terms”.
Louise Alder, Joseph Middleton: Lines Written During a Sleepless Night Chandos £14.99
This is a “really lovely disc” from two of “classical song’s brightest artists”, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian. Soprano Louise Alder and pianist Joseph Middleton start with Rachmaninov and end with Britten, taking in Sibelius, Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Medtner on the way: a musical mirror of the journey made by Alder’s great-grandparents – as refugees in 1916 – from Odessa to Finland, Norway and finally Britain. “Alder is in glorious voice, her soprano fresh and untethered”, while Middleton’s beautiful playing is “perfectly calibrated to support Alder, but huge in its expressive scope”.
Alder’s is a relatively light soprano, but “her artistry is such that she deploys a wideranging colour”, said Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times. And whether singing in Russian, Swedish, German or French, her linguistic skills are such that her expression remains direct and communicative. She is “as compelling in poetry of loss and despair as she is in Tchaikovsky’s airy Rondel or Grieg’s carefree Lauf der Welt, her tone always as lovely as her diction is clear”.