Album reviews: David Byrne | Suede | Big Thief
On his new album Who is the Sky? David Byrne fuses the weird and wonderful in idiosyncratic and accessible pop style, writes Fiona Shepherd
David Byrne: Who is the Sky? (Matador Records) ★★★★
Suede: Antidepressants (BMG) ★★★★
Big Thief: Double Infinity (4AD) ★★★
David Byrne’s 2018 solo album, American Utopia, was a gem of a creation which spawned a glorious beast of a show featuring a troupe of musicians formation dancing around the stage to Annie-B Parson’s choreography with their portable instruments playing some of the most uplifting music known to man. In other words, a hard act to follow.
Byrne returns with a similarly sociable and typically offbeat offering, collaborating with 15-piece New York chamber ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra, producer Kid Harpoon and a host of guests including St Vincent, Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams, drummer Tom Skinner and American Utopia percussionist Mauro Refosco.
Who is the Sky? opens with the come-all-ye celebration of Everybody Laughs, replete with gamelan-like percussion and ticklish strings, and proceeds in quirky fashion with the likes of My Apartment Is My Friend, a more jocular take on the sentiments of The Beach Boys’ In My Room, characterfully arranged with clarinet, marimba and mariachi horn flourish.
There is further personification on the positively twinkling A Door Called No, a bittersweet rumination on life opportunities offered and denied. Next, he goes for outright abstract philosophizing in the sultry company of Williams. What is the Reason For It? is a giddy whirl with flamenco intonations.
If the quest is to stretch the lyrical parameters of pop music, then I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party and Moisturizing Thing both meet the criteria, the former a beautiful act of bathos, the latter a tribute to the wonders of a skin care regime with an undercurrent of age concern.
Byrne consistently uses humour to sneak in some thoughtful notions. She Explains Things to Me salutes the art of womansplaining, while I’m An Outsider presents as a whimsical caricature of VIP culture, which gives up waiting to be allowed behind the velvet rope and heads off on its own fantastical odyssey. He also goes winsomely for the jugular on The Avant Garde, pondering the vagaries of art for art’s sake. As for Byrne himself, he has once again delightfully fused the weird and wonderful in idiosyncratic and accessible pop style.
While Britpop nostalgia rages around them, scene trailblazers Suede are too busy living for the moment to engage. The London five-piece remain a sizeable cult rather than a cultural juggernaut but they continue in rude health, fully cognisant of their vintage while attacking their live shows like men half their age.
Frontman Brett Anderson considers their 2022 album Autofiction to be a year zero punk blast, making Antidepressants their more adventurous post-punk statement of intent. Anderson continues to cough up a lung, pushing his vocals into foghorn territory on the likes of Dancing With the Europeans but also experimenting with a Howard Devoto-like semi-spoken delivery on the title track and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, guitarist Richard Oakes stirs up a gothic maelstrom of Banshees proportions on the likes of Sound and the Summer and Disintegrate. Criminal Ways considers toxic relationships to an Adam and the Ants stomp while Trance State even flirts with the New Romantic. But there is also room for the quintessential Suede melodrama of Somewhere Between an Atom and a Star and the epic mantra of Life Is Endless, Life Is a Moment.
Big Thief return as a trio but recruit a veritable junkyard orchestra of New York musicians to create the lush, comforting, softly finessed sound of new album Double Infinity. Adrianne Lenker’s voice sounds dreamy and wistful across a diverse palette of lovelorn country, indie mantras and carefree canters, including the samba-like circular rhythms, perky strummed guitar and devotional dub vocals of Words and loose percussive feel, soulful strings and beseeching vocals of How Could I Have Known.
CLASSICAL
Harriet Burns & Ian Tindale: a short story of falling (Delphian) ★★★★
Themed song recitals can go either way: embrace the listener through exploratory ingenuity, or become stifled by self-confinement. With one as imaginatively-devised as this, versatile soprano Harriet Burns and pianist Ian Tindale are on fertile ground. Conceptually, they leave themselves ample freedom to explore “metaphorical, literal and mystical” ways to fall. As such, the theme becomes intriguingly subliminal, ultimate enjoyment arising from a colourful range of repertoire and styles, from Coleridge-Taylor, Quilter and Vaughan Williams to Judith Weir, James MacMillan, even the whimsical frippery of Donald Swann. More obscure names widen the fascination : Christopher Churcher’s shimmering Skysongs, Muriel Herbert’s seductive Renouncement, Morfydd Owen’s folksy William among them. Burns is a dramatic tour de force in Weir’s unaccompanied King Harald’s Saga; Tindale asserts his own solo prowess in Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s star falling. Together they form a symbiotic, often captivating duo. Ken Walton
FOLK
Karen Marshalsay: Edarainn a’ Chruit – Between Us the Harp (Cramasie Records) ★★★★
Harpist Karen Marshalsay’s second album vividly showcases not only her musicality and compositional skills but also the three particular harps associated with Scottish music. One lovely set on lever harp features two Burns classics, Sweet Afton and Ae fond Kiss, and a venerable lute tune, Adew Dundee, introduces the weirdly buzzing bray harp, the buzzing doubled when she’s joined by her mentor, harpist Alison Kinnaird for MacDonnell’s March. The earthy vocals and smallpipes of piper and scholar Allan McDonald join Marshalsay’s singing in the ever-mysterious Uamh an Òir, “The Cave of Gold”, while the bell-like ringing of the clarsach chimes out variations of the piobaireachd The Little Spree in utterly hypnotic measure. Violist Kathryn Nicoll and indefatigable flautist-singer Cathal McConnell join her for Valley of Knockanure, and she multi-tracks on all three harps plus whistle for her wistful composition Leaving Bellevue. Jim Gilchrist
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