Herb Alpert - Music Volume 3 Herb Alpert Reimagines The Tijuana Brass, album review

No Assassinations

This is a lightly fun Sunday listening morning, the new Herb Albert a ‘modernising’ of the songs of my boyhood, the Tijuana Brass pretty much a radio stalwart of my growing up in 60s America.

Hugely familiar songs like Spanish Flea, Work Song, Green Peppers, A Taste of Honey and Spanish Harlem are repackaged with funky beats, some loops, vocal/voice inserts and other modestly applied effects, never losing their innocent sweet melodies and all of the inherent hopefulness of their time and that young boy’s assimilation of it all.

It isn’t all change and never radical. Just enough to occupy before breakfast and reading the papers; memories of home and how some alterations aren’t so bad in a world where you can get away with anything really, not that Herb has taken any appalling liberties with this music: A Taste of Honey playing as I write that, sweeping strings wafting across a slowed but pronounced beat, echo on the horn, some buzzing sounds, some staccato ‘heys’, and still as if it was nearly yesterday.

Space Music 27

Paul Weller - True Meanings, album review

Swayed by the Wash

There are a number of supporting carriers for the mantle of John Martyn, yet I would give this mainly to John Smith as someone who currently seems best to embrace not just Martyn’s guitar styles and earlier folk leanings but also other folk echoes of the late 60s and 70s, especially on his latest album Hummingbird, reviewed here. Another strong contender is, perhaps surprisingly, Paul Weller, most notably the opening song The Soul Searchers from his latest release True Meanings.

Weller’s new largely acoustic and at times orchestral album may not be Jam aficionados’ favourite, but it plays to my pretty-music sensitivities, and it isn’t as if he hasn’t been here before, many times, but obviously on Stanley Road where he then provided echoes of Nick Drake and Richie Havens.

The Soul Searches uses both a climbing melodic line that reminds of Martyn’s I Don’t Wanna Know About Evil and then also his slap style of playing guitar – but it is that melodic repeat which most reminds, happily so. The album isn’t all this: there’s the jazzy and again orchestrated Old Castles, as well as the chamber pop of Gravity performed on last night’s Later…with Jools Holland where it sounded as sweet as it is meant to be.

This is a calm and soothing album, no doubt reflecting other wider comforts in Weller’s life. Lucky guy, even though he sings about a world full of pain on What Would He Say? and ruminates similarly in Aspects,

Crippling aspects
Of life with no rhyme
Nor that of reason
Or that of time

To find true meanings
And patterns in things
Symbols in making
These moments exist

so there is a paradox in the lyrics and the surface mood, but lament has always been a feature of the pretty, and here we are talking about the varying dispositions of love. The plucked and layered strings as well as choral backdrop to these two verses will cloy for some, I’m sure. And the harpsicord. But I sway with the wash if I don’t think too hard.

I have plenty of raucous stuff to turn to when I want/need. Here in the still quite early morning of listening to the album and writing this, I’m content enough to be stroked rather than animated.

Hands 48

Connan Mockasin - Jassbusters, album review

Sweet Originality

This is the first time I have heard Mockasin’s work, and opener Charlotte’s Thong intrigues immediately, a slow funk groove with a subtle and quite original guitar lead, and then when Connan sings there is the immediate fragility of a voice with its falsetto breaks, and other breakages. That guitar is really quite beautiful, and the vocal does have a slight dissonance that pulls against, but this is the energy in an otherwise soothing instrumental. And then as the song enters into its seventh minute, the in-and-out guitar tuning meanders around the overall prettiness like an insinuation. Then a sudden stop.

Second Momo’s is gloriously sweet and harmonising, more guitar work plucked delicately as the vocal continues to develop, a spoken accompaniment along the sung melody. Something squeaks in among the dialogue and distant-dialogue that opens third track Last Night, and this becomes a Prince-esque ballad, the vocal as falsetto-perfect and playful as its precursor. In researching, I have read that vocals on previous albums have often been pointedly spirited, yet I don’t think that is what is happening here. But it is quite distinctive, and continues with what makes this sound genuinely original.

You Can Do Anything indulges in more bended guitar playing, here creating a strange imposter of the oriental, and I have to say again it is intriguing – seemingly new and fresh in establishing a signature. Con Conn Was Impatient continues the slow pace of these songs, the voice a falsetto slur around another clear guitar line. Eerily beautiful.

Listening to so much sameness these days, even when excellent within that frame, this album is a superb divergence and development. Can’t wait to listen again.

Hands 47

Eric Clapton 'Happy Xmas' and Matt Berry 'Television Themes', album reviews

Yin Yang Yang Yin

Here are two albums so similar and yet so different. One is from a part-time musician [really, though he is, by all accounts, steeped in music more widely] and the other is a legend, quite correctly. Both albums take music that will be hugely familiar to their prospective audiences, different in scale for all kinds of obvious reasons, but each having a pervasive knowableness that makes them inherently immediate and fascinating because of being interpreted. Both are at times quite hilarious, one intentionally, the other not so.

I am not adverse at all to Christmas music/albums, though at Christmas and not in October, but Clapton’s effort – cynical xmas creation or passionate impulse, you decide – was too interesting to avoid having a quick listen. I have over many years enjoyed Christmas recordings from heavy metal to bluegrass to jazz, and in fact rate James Taylor’s Jingle Bells as quite simply one of the funkiest songs ever – so again I would stress Clapton’s attempt at ‘making it his own’ would, if it did, fall on welcoming ears. White Christmas opens the album and to a degree delivers its remit which is a bluesy interpretation – nothing original or stunning but pleasant enough. This is followed by Away in a Manger which is absolutely dreadful, its slowness and thus focus on the lyrics simply tedious. Perhaps a ‘believer’ would be tuned in – I don’t know. Not a carol as such but I’d happily listen and enjoy if sung by a choir. But this is terrible.

Starting Matt Berry’s album is such a joy [though I’ll be honest straight away and say I don’t feel the quality is sustained]. But Are You Being Served? begins with a nano-second’s thought that this is Pink Floyd’s Money [how easily one can forget] and then it quickly grooves into the well-known theme tune, and it is a jazzy gem – the horns perfect [though on the original?] – drums and bass providing some spunky funk until the ‘tannoy’ voice lays down the quintessential familiarity of this song. The Good Life follows and this is pretty much a straight representation, but in the context of TV themes music it delivers precisely that, again the drumming and bass lines providing some element of spark. Thames Television is just the opening horn bit at 7 seconds. Genius. Dr Who obviously allows for some electronics to spark that one up. World in Action is one of the strongest, probably because as a theme tune it isn’t as obvious as the others – for this listener anyway. All of that said, by this point in the album, I feel my delight has been sated.

Back to Clapton, his Jingle Bells rings like a programmed ditty looped to its electronic oblivion as we listen. It ain’t the blues. Lonesome Christmas does take the blues and use it aptly; Merry Christmas Baby is again fully in the blues groove. These both work. Then Silent Night asserts with a dirge of a single drum beat and a fairly laid-back choral backdrop. What was the point?

Neither will make my Christmas/2018 Best music list.

Hands 46

Adrianne Lenker - Abysskiss, album review

Folk Like, Surely

This is delicate, sometimes fragile solo acoustic music; contrary at times as in the discordant Out of Your Mind – mimetically so perhaps – though a further divergence within this song is its sweet harmonies. I like that mix of things, and as I have no previous knowing of her work [never listened to Big Thief] it is a pleasing discovery.

I have much re-listening to do I suspect to hear the lyrics that do seem intense – well ‘seems’ is silly as she speaks of her own death in opener Terminal Paradox, the title itself intentionally thoughtful/introspective. The finger-plucked guitar of Cradle is as lullabyish as the title suggests, the drifting vocals of the song over this full of more harmony. Next Symbol is more finger-plucking with a vocal litany over this, until a melody arrives, percussion as simple quick beats, and the poetry is intriguing,

Fly make flea make haste make waste eight makes infinity
Times I've tried to make breaks, embrace for the enemy
Meet my face to face time try to find the diamond
Counting time as time counts me, the river to the island

such sounds as mesmerising as any music. That dissonance emerges again in Blue and Red Horses, and as a liker of prettiness in folk music [this is certainly folk-like, even if overstating because of the solo acoustic core] I have to stifle an innate questioning. And you question ‘folk-like’? Well, listen to following abyss kiss and there it is, the vocal quite folk-pretty, and the guitar playing more developed than elsewhere, though a relative term. I like this. Next What Can You Say is similar as is my response.