Album reviews: CMAT | Wolf Alice | Woody Guthrie | Bryan Adams
CMAT is a natural talent with a big voice, a social conscience and an impish sense of humour, writes Fiona Shepherd
CMAT: Euro-Country (AWAL Recordings) ★★★★
Wolf Alice: The Clearing (RCA Records) ★★★★
Woody Guthrie: Woody at Home, Vol. 1 & 2 (Shamus Records) ★★★★
Bryan Adams: Roll With The Punches (Bad Records) ★★
Ciara Marie-Alice Thompson - you can call her CMAT - has enjoyed one of the most deserved success stories of the last few years, building a bigtime cult following for her Celtic country tones with a twist. She’s a natural talent with a big voice, a social conscience, an impish sense of humour and a healthy dose of devil-may-care - how else do you explain the horrible sleeve image of her third album Euro-Country?
The title reflects her musical genre, Ireland’s place in Europe and CMAT’s anxieties about the current world order which she yodels over a plangent country backing and intrusive shuffling drumming on the title track.
Much of the album looks inward, however. CMAT reckons with her own anger triggers on The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station over an inexorable indie krautrock groove, which builds along with her ululating vocals. Country confessional Take a Sexy Picture of Me is her twist on the make-me-pretty prayer. She is a gloriously free performer but not immune to body shaming barbs.
The soaring easy listening soul of Ready is a declaration of willingness from a protagonist who is denied opportunity. “I’m 23 and everyone is having fun except for me” she sings on country soul lament Coronation Street, before purging her yearning on the luxurious Janis Joplining. And though it may sound like she wishes disaster to rain down on a certain broligarch, Lord, Let That Tesla Crash is actually a tribute to a late friend and encourager.
Wolf Alice also wield power thoughtfully on their excellent fourth album, The Clearing. This London four-piece have progressed well beyond their indie roots to evoke Blondiesque rapture on Bloom Baby Bloom as well as owning the swirling disco pop of Just Two Girls and the Stevie Nicks huskiness of Leaning Against the Wall.
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Ellie Rowsell is a bewitching singer, switching at will from soft and demure to tough and punky tones while her bandmates get stuck into the ELO odyssey of Bread Butter Tea Sugar with its rhythmic strings and soaring backing vocals. The Clearing is so much more than bread and butter.
In his relatively short lifetime, Woody Guthrie, the father of western protest music, wrote a stack of songs which remain unrecorded, let alone unreleased. Woody at Home, Vol 1 & 2 is therefore a rare treasure, a double album repository of previously unreleased home demo recordings from 1951-52.
Even divested of its vestigial hum, this is as far from fancy as it gets but puts you right in the room with a musical legend at a time of fragile health. His signature song, This Land Is Your Land, sounds curiously low-key and introspective here, while the intimate, conversational take on Deportee is a resonant reminder that any country can be measured by how it treats its most vulnerable.
Themes of peace, struggle, righteousness and the working man dominate. Backdoor Bum and the Big Landlord is a parable of hubris and humility, while Buoy Bells from Trenton concerns the Trenton Six, black men wrongly convicted of killing a white shopkeeper in 1948 - sadly as relevant as ever almost 80 years on.
Bryan Adams, meanwhile, is still pulling for world peace in a rock song with A Little More Understanding. His latest album, Roll With the Punches, is happy to trot out the commercial rock cliches, with the air-punching power rockers coming out on top of the chest-beating ballads.
The message is one of generalised positivity - Love Is Stronger Than Hate, Life Is Beautiful and the like - but he does take time out to tick off a philanderer on the marginally meaner squall of How’s That Workin’ For Ya.
CLASSICAL
Helen Grime: Chamber Music (Delphian) ★★★★★
In its sixth composer portrait for Delphian, the Hebrides Ensemble turns to Scots composer Helen Grime. The spotlight is on her chamber music, a panoply of works bearing an intimacy that is both engaging and thrilling. The opening work - Seven Pierrot Miniatures, commissioned in 2010 by Hebrides - is a masterclass in compositional clarity and concision, exploding with ruthless precision and scintillating freshness. Here, and beyond, the morphing Hebrides apply their characteristic virtuosity impeccably: in the shivering trio exchanges of Snow and Snow, the crystalline duetting of To See the Summer Sky, the lustrous French horn coupling in the Alexander McCall Smith-inspired Braid Hills, the bleak impressionism of Five North-Eastern Scenes (inspired by Joan Eardley’s paintings), and the evocative solo pianism of James Willshire in the nuanced colourations of Harp of the North. Into the Faded Air, for string sextet, serves up a luxuriant conclusion to a transfixing survey. Ken Walton
FOLK
Sarah-Jane Summers & Juhani Silvola: How to Raise the Wind (Eighth Nerve Audio) ★★★★
This strikingly characterful album from Norwegian based Highland fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers and guitarist Juhani Silvola finds them accompanied by a string quintet including such luminaries as Seonaid Aitken and Patsy Reid. The demonically skittering strings of the opening Trolls Resent a Disturbance undoubtedly reflect its title, and also that this is no ordinary fiddle album. Vividly inspired by Scottish and Norwegian folklore, traditionally accented tunes undergo dramatically contemporary transformations. Thus the ominous Visitor from the Sea sports distinct touches of Pink Floyd, while a swooping, Irish-sounding air, The Enchanted Sons of Kings, also features desert blues-style guitar. Let Me Stay Till I Dance This Reel does just that, with smeddum. The beguiling closer, Psalm, sees a stately string keening giving way to stratospherically sliding guitar – a Highland lament going interstellar, the original air finally emerging as unadorned as a piobaireachd ground. Jim Gilchrist
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