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Album Reviews: Kathleen Edwards, Enter Shikari, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Milagres and Michael Nyman
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KATHLEEN EDWARDS
VOYAGEUR
***
Unveiling her new record to a Canadian newspaper last week, Ontario singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards revealed: “I’ve never felt so vulnerable before in my life.” This is, after all, a break-up album, that contains songs with titles such as Empty Threat, Change the Sheets, Going to Hell and House Full of Empty Rooms.
There’s a hint of Lucinda Williams in the melancholy country-rock of Mint; Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon, her new beau, adds affecting harmonies to A Soft Place to Land. The rocking Sidecar offers a hint of redemption after “feeling so lost for so long”, but For The Record ends the album on a soul-searching note, with Norah Jones in tow. Uplifting perhaps Voyageur is not; for Edwards’s sake, however, it’s clearly a record that she needed to make.
Enter Shikari
A Flash Flood Of Colour
****
The Hertfordshire heavy electrorock quartet’s third album finds them fine-tuning their mash-up of hardcore, emo, dubstep and drum’n’bass into something undeniably powerful.
The band have reportedly been listening to a lot of Noisia, a dubstep and drum’n’bass trio from Holland with a knack for speaker-flogging beats and basslines, and this is evident in the frequent eruptions of surging digital bass, which work surprisingly well amidst all the punchy riffing and ranting.
Lyrically, the album’s on a ‘capitalism stinks, war is rubbish’ tip (“I know that we’re gonna repeat history unless we sort this out, I know we’ve gotta find something new” laments Search Party), and the sentiments expressed are appropriate to the aggressive sounds.
Importantly, beneath all the impressively inventive shock and awe dynamics is strong songwriting and melodic suss – something which becomes apparent when the band strip things back to vocal harmonies and rhythm guitar, like on the intro to standout track Stalemate. And just so it’s not too heavy, the band throw in frequent dashes of tension-lifting humour.
CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG
STAGE WHISPER
***
IRM, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s last album, found the French actress and sometime singer in a somewhat dark place following her starring role in Lars Von Trier’s troubling pyschological horror film Antichrist and her own near-death experience when she suffered a head injury in a water-skiing accident. Stage Whisper is a warmer collection that comprises eight new songs and an 11-track live set recorded on her 2010 European tour.
The bulk of the new material was written by Beck Hansen and is a familiar mix of minor-key acoustic numbers and bluesy electronica, the pick of which is the itchy Paradisco. Also of note is Got To Let Go, a synth-pop duet with Charlie Fink, of Noah and the Whale, that threatens “a revolver to your head”.
Milagres
Glowing Mouth
***
It’s a shame the debut album by Brooklyn five-piece Milagres (Portuguese for ‘miracles’) is being released just weeks after they played at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds as anyone who gets a taste of its dark delights now will be disappointed to have just missed them.
Drawing comparisons with Grizzly Bear and British Sea Power, Milagres set themselves apart from other moody indie rock bands thanks to their deceptively involved chord progressions, an inventive, dynamic palette of sounds, multi-part vocal harmonies, and singer Kyle Wilson’s soaring vocals, which are like those of Coldplay’s Chris Martin’s stripped of any self-satisfied posturing.
With Wilson drawing inspiration from a scary near-crippling fall on a remote peak in British Columbia (most obviously referenced in the track Fright Of Thee – “See me spangle and spin/I’m gone, I’m gone/Into the light”), Glowing Mouth has a hypnotic slow-burning sound that evokes big, lonely spaces.
MICHAEL NYMAN
MICHAEL NYMAN
***
Originally released in 1981, this album was a bridge between Campiello, the composer’s “totally fake” 18th century Venetian street band, and his eponymous 13-piece ensemble that included Alexander Balanescu on violin and John Harle on saxophone.
Much of the music was written to accompany the early films of Peter Greenaway, notably Bird Anthem, whose choral pomp “transmigrated” into his scores for Man With a Movie Camera and NYman with a Movie Camera, and the shrill Bird List Song, whose undertow was to be sampled by the the Scissor Sisters.
Fans of Greenaway’s breakthrough film The Draughtsman’s Contract will be familiar with In Re Don Giovanni, a variation on a theme by Mozart which is Nyman at his catchiest; more challenging is Waltz, a piece written for art students at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham, (where Nyman taught in the 1970s), then “roughed up” by the improvisatory saxophonist Evan Parker and bass clarinettist Peter Brotzmann. As a signpost to where the composer was later heading, this is a key album.
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