Album reviews: Amy Macdonald | Barry Can't Swim | Wet Leg
With her first album in almost five years, Amy Macdonald upholds her admirable aversion to ballads across ten trim tracks, writes Fiona Shepherd
Amy Macdonald: Is This What You’ve Been Waiting For? (BMG/Infectious) ★★★
Barry Can’t Swim: Loner (Ninja Tune) ★★★★
Wet Leg: Moisturizer (Domino) ★★★★
In an age of free music streaming, who will buy? It’s an unresolved question which led singer/songwriter Amy Macdonald to take a recording sabbatical of close to five years before producing her sixth album. The title of Is This What You’ve Been Waiting For? sounds like something of a challenge from an old school artist who considers her albums as her creative shop window and the answer will be in the affirmative to those who want mostly more of the same from this MOR pop traditionalist.
That said, she sings of being alive to sensory stimulation – “light and sound it’s all around, I feel the noise beneath the ground” – on the opening title track against her usual moderately driving backing, while a moment later she is straining at the leash on Trapped, asking “can you break me out?”
The fun begins with Can You Hear Me? with its engaging ABBA-via-Texas chiming disco pop intro, pattering drums and lyrics of cosmic visitations. Macdonald started her career as a teenager, if an old soul, but this is her tipping her hat to the next generation, specifically the young audience who responded with such enthusiasm to her TRNSMT set a couple of years ago.
Age is on her mind as she sings with compassion from the perspective of an older, worn character in The Hope. Later, she is feeling her age over big shimmering synthesizers on It’s All So Long Ago.
Throughout, Macdonald upholds her admirable aversion to ballads with the skiffly drumbeat and blues guitar backing of We Survive, while One More Shot taps into slick Eighties pop territory. There is little new to report across the album’s ten trim tracks but she does at least have her eyes on the prize on the appropriately named Forward, pitching herself headlong into potential salvation in a new relationship (“I just knew when I saw you”) with a refreshed energy which is not always evidenced in her music.
Edinburgh-born Joshua Mainnie, better known and acclaimed as DJ/producer Barry Can’t Swim, came up through his student clubbing days/nights along the Cowgate to be nominated for the Brit Awards, Scottish Album of the Year Award and Mercury Prize for his 2023 debut When Will We Land?
Any pressure surrounding a follow-up evaporates on contact with the beautiful, easy electronica suite of Loner. The album opens with the decidedly indie gothic strains of The Person You’d Like To Be overlaid with a deadpan vocal sample of a motivational coach offering increasingly paranoid maxims such as “try not to laugh too hard at anyone else’s jokes”.
Klaxons blare and engines rev on the banging tuneage of Different but elsewhere Mainnie draws more on trance traditions, from the ecstatic Afro-Cuban refrain of Kimpton via the gentle gospel invocation of All My Friends to the beatific Balearic beat of the poetically titled Cars Pass By Like Childhood Sweethearts.
The samples of satirical self-affirmation are back on Machine Noise for a Quiet Daydream while the hypnotic hands-in-the-air atmosphere of Like It’s Part of the Dance should go down like a dream on his numerous summer festival dates. Childhood uses its euphoric Seventies soul sample to utterly feelgood effect while the swelling romantic strings and hazy trumpet of Wandering Mt Moon make for a thoughtful comedown.
The equally acclaimed Wet Leg also return with supreme confidence on their second album Moisturizer, settling into their role as the Isle of Wight’s premier musical export with a collection of songs inspired, often impishly, by new and all-consuming love. Singer Rhian Teasdale diagnoses herself as lovesick on the irresistible CPR, pledges extreme devotion on Davina McCall, brushes off all-comers on Catch These Fists and celebrates cosy domesticity on U and Me At Home, all with the playful intensity of a UK Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
CLASSICAL
Kantos: In Your Dreams (Delphian) ★★★★★
Better known north of the border as Engagement Conductor of the RSNO, Ellie Slorach reveals herself in a significantly different light here as founder and director of the Manchester-based Kantos Chamber Choir. The a cappella content in this debut Delphian album reflects the ensemble’s silken versatility, with music ranging from Vaughan Williams and Josef Rheinberger to Mátyás Seiber’s whimsical Nonsense Songs and Billy Joel’s Lullabye (Goodnight my Angel). Comforting contemporary voices such as Eric Whitacre (Sleep) contrast effectively with the rumbustious folksiness of Jaakko Mäntyjârvi’s Pseudo-Yoik, or the chuff-chuffing of Hungarian-born Kristina Arakelyan’s Train Ride. But the clincher is a format that operates as a sequential narrative what Kantos refer to as the “reimagining of the choral album as a single immersive dreamscape” – snippets of spoken Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson interwoven with illustrative music that is deliciously sung, artfully expressed and, for all its instant accessibility, both neatly accessible and challenging. Ken Walton
JAZZ
Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky (ECM) ★★★★
Paris-based Tunisian oud virtuoso Anouar Brahem renews his inspired partnership with bassist Dave Holland and pianist Django Bates, the quartet completed by Anja Lechner, whose cello is the first instrument we hear, joined by piano in the solemn beauty of Remembering Hind. We don’t hear Brahem’s oud until the spare elegance of the second, title track, the Arabic lute’s taut, springy tone replete with melancholic beauty. The title references Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish – “Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” – in response to the appalling humanitarian tragedy of Gaza, and while not overtly “protest” music, this quietly glowing album is haunted by events in Palestine, reflected in the poignant beauty of Edward Said’s Reverie and cello and piano accompanying Brahem’s gentle vocalising in Never Forget. Holland’s double bass is superb, too, driving The Eternal Olive Tree in lithe duet with Brahem. Jim Gilchrist
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