Albums of the week: three new releases
The mid-20th century Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz was also a renowned violinist and pianist, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian. And her writing for both is “exhilarating and absolutely fitted to the instrument” – combining “motoric energy” and folk rhythms with more “sweeping, lyrical numbers”. This outstanding disc from the Swedish pianist Peter Jablonski brings together the major solo piano works from Bacewicz’s prime, including the two piano sonatas and ten concert études written between 1949 and 1957. His “persuasive” interpretations bring Bacewicz’s music “magically to life”.
The least-familiar item in this “wellchosen programme” is the Piano Sonata No. 1: it was only published in an edition made by Jablonski in 2021, said Richard Fairman in the FT. It has concentration, energy and tenderness – “irresistibly driving forwards” in the manner of Prokofiev or Shostakovich. The composer’s own favourite among her solo piano music was the Sonata No. 2, in which Jablonski finds a pleasing “variety of colours”.
It’s ironic, said Mark Beaumont in The Independent, that Johnny Marr’s terrific fourth solo album should be overshadowed by Morrissey’s recent demand that Marr stop mentioning him in interviews. In fact, Marr rarely speaks about his former bandmate, and in his solo career he has created music which may be “laced with the brisk wistfulness” of The Smiths, but explores “sonic territories where the natives have barely even heard the dreaded M-word”. This double album ranges freely across “ambient atmospherics, dank funk, 1980s pop noir” – and also “electroclash synths” and “psychedelic goth metal”.
What we have here is Marr’s “magnum opus”, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. The opener, Spirit Power and Soul, has the “reverb-laden shimmer and broad lyrics” that “propelled U2 and Simple Minds into stadiums”. The closer, Human, is the kind of “acoustic guitar-led, hands-aloft anthem” that did the same for Oasis. In between, we find “one of Britain’s best guitarists working at the height of his powers”, and somehow not mentioning his ex-colleague even once.
The first Tears for Fears album for 18 years is a “barnstorming collection of new songs” that burst with the band’s familiar brand of “exhilarating melancholy”, said Helen Brown in The Independent. Formed by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith in Bath, back in 1981, Tears for Fears “flew the flag for the more soulful side” of the synth-pop scene, with songs that drew on childhood trauma and Cold War anxiety (Mad World being one of the best known). Forty years on, their trademark remains the exploration of personal pain and societal stresses alongside “pounding pop thrills” and “arena-sized catharsis”. Welcome back.
The title refers to the line between life and death, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT, and the album is infused with a “powerfully adult experience of anguish”: Orzabal’s wife, Caroline, died in 2017, following a long period of depression and alcohol addiction. The tragedy appears to have bound the musicians more tightly, and led to a renaissance: for a band that seemed to have settled for the “nostalgia circuit”, this is a bracing return to form.