10 1GT Friday November 27 2020 | the times
music reviews
You could
argue that, as
the leader of
the pop punks
Green Day,
Billie Joe
Armstrong has
been doing cover
versions his entire career, albeit ones
with new lyrics and slightly altered
tunes. Here he offers an album of
covers recorded during lockdown, and
it’s a great selection. Johnny Thunders’
peerless junkie lament You Can’t Put
Your Arms Around a Memory is played
straight, while Armstrong brings out
the rebelliousness of the Eighties
teenage star Tiffany’s I Think We’re
Alone Now, itself a cover of a hit by
Tommy James & the Shondells.
Armstrong also does a wonderfully
shouty take on Wreckless Eric’s cult
classic Whole Wide World. Driven by
buzzsaw guitar and impassioned
delivery, this is a simple celebration
of great songs, democratised by
Armstrong’s punk-rock spirit.Billie Joe Armstrong
No Fun Mondays
Wa r n e r
{{{((s
ver
ntire careeralbeitonesMondays
Megan Thee Stallion
Good News
300 Entertainment
{{{{(A TikTok dance craze based on her
hit Savage and a Time magazine cover
has made Megan Thee Stallion the
breakout star of 2020. On the strength
of the Texan rapper’s superb debut
album, she has claimed her place in
the pantheon of classic hip-hop as
well. Outrageous boasts and crude
innuendoes are tempered with a lot of
humour. “All them bitches scary cats, I
call them Carole Baskin,” she raps with
a nod to the Tiger King star on Body.
Her energy and ultra-sharp flow
belong more to the Nineties golden
age of hip-hop than its present mood
of auto-tuned lethargy. All of this
comes after she was shot in the foot,
allegedly by her fellow rapper Tory
Lanez — an incident detailed on the
ruthless Shots Fired.Miley Cyrus
Plastic Hearts
Sony
{{(((pop
breaking music’s pigeonholes.
Boundaries aren’t secure either in
the music of Joe Cutler, the British
composer of pieces that perplex and
give the listener lots of fun. Two
bone-shaking items in his impressive
new album benefit from the pugnacity
and élan of the Dutch ensemble
Orkest de Ereprijs, captured in spirited
live performances. Smoother sounds
emerge from the BBC Concert
Orchestra in Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii,
although the composer’s mind and the
saxophone soloist Trish Clowes still
execute startling leaps in a work
reflecting a recurring Cutler theme:
musicians struggling to break free
from their surroundings. Cutler, I
note quietly, has now been the Royal
Birmingham Conservatoire’s head
of composition for 15 years.
Geoff BrownSilkroad
Ensemble
Falling Out of
Time
In a Circle Records
{{{((Joe Cutler
Hawaii Hawaii
Hawaii
Birmingham Record
Company
{{{{(R
emember Osvaldo Golijov?
This Jewish, Argentine-born,
US-based composer created
a splash in 2000 with the
Stuttgart premiere of his
St Mark Passion, dressed up in the
rhythms and colours of a Latin-
American carnival. Classical music was
liberated from European traditions,
and the audience, in party mood,
cheered for 25 minutes. Further works
followed, but by 2010 inspiration
had shrunk. Commissioned pieces
were never delivered. There was a
plagiarism spat. Bad times for Golijov.
Rebirth came last November with
the Silkroad Ensemble’s presentation
of Falling Out of Time, a “tone poem
in voices” inspired by the Israeli
author David Grossman’s poetic
autobiographical novel about parental
grief. Blending Middle Eastern motifsand moods with American jazz and
blues, the 80-minute work proves the
value of Golijov’s melting pot. Yet
there’s less melting this time round;
less drama too. And no party spirit,
inevitable when the libretto tells of
grieving, sometimes screaming parents
faced with the loss of a child.
This dynamic recording, extracted
from early live performances, thrusts
us right among the personable
vocalists (Biella da Costa, Nora
Fischer, Wu Tong) and an ensemble
sprinkling “classical” instruments with
world music spice. There are heart-
piercing moments, although I wasn’t
moved as much as the work appears
to expect; too much structural
disarray, maybe, or too many cloudy
words and phrases such as “everything
now is yes”. Yes? No. But I’m still glad
that Golijov is back before audiences,A treasured melting pot has gone off the boil
The Smashing Pumpkins
Cyr
Sumerian
{{(((With the exception of the bassist
D’Arcy Wretsky, Billy Corgan’s
dysfunctional alternative behemoths
are back to their original Nineties line-
up. You would never guess, though,
from this overlong slog of an album.
It’s a folly of goth and progressive rock,
with one mid-tempo, synthesizer-led
dirge after another and none of the
electricity of band members firing off
one another. Instead there are
humourless lyrics about the colour of
love being grey and diamonds slicing
through your heart — it sounds like
the product of a man without anyone
to temper his creative excesses. There
are some nice moments, such as the
cop-movie-style title track, but at
least half of the 20 songs pass by in
a dull, atmospheric blur.classical
Miley Cyrus
looks the part, but
doesn’t quite work
as a rocker, says
Will Hodgkinson
O
n the face of it Miley Cyrus
is the perfect rocker. She
has a fantastically throaty
vocal style. She looks
glamorous but tough —
the blond mullet and multiple tattoos
could work equally well at biker bars
and awards ceremonies.
She’s rebellious, shaking off her
wholesome image as the child star of
Hannah Montana in 2013 to outrage
everyone by swinging about naked
on a wrecking ball. She announced
recently that going sober after
falling off the wagon saved her
from joining the notorious “27 club”,
whose members include Kurt Cobain,
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Yet
this journey into classic rock never
quite gets there.
In a sense, Cyrus set her own trap by
inviting rock greats to collaborate with
her. Edge of Midnight combines Stevie
Nicks’s Edge of Seventeen with Cyrus’s
Midnight Sky and features Nicks on
co-vocal duties, but it serves chiefly to
highlight the genius of the Fleetwood
Mac singer’s original song. Night
Crawling has a guest spot from Billy
Idol, which may be why it sounds quite
a lot like Idol’s Eighties wedding disco
favourite Rebel Yell. Joan Jett pops up
on Bad Karma, on which Cyrus claims
to do whatever she likes, but it lacks
the authentic, tougher-than-leathergrit and attitude of Jett’s Bad
Reputation and I Love Rock ’n Roll.
There are plenty of references to
rock’s past. Plastic Hearts begins with
the samba rhythm and simian yowl
à la Mick Jagger of the Rolling
Stones’s Sympathy for the Devil
before descending into a tale of
partying too hard at the Chateau
Marmont hotel. A straight rendition
of Blondie’s peerless Heart of Glass
shines a light on that song’s
superiority over anything else here.
Cyrus is at her best, in fact, when
being true to herself as a lifelong
occupant of the pop/celebrity system.
Prisoner is a duet with her fellow
ultra-shiny star Dua Lipa and captures
fantasy and emotion in an Eighties-
style disco/soft rock song about fatal
attraction, all wrapped up in a catchy
tune with shades of Olivia Newton-
John’s Physical.The sentimental Never Be Me
touches on the pop-country that
Cyrus grew up with as the daughter
of the Achy Breaky Heart singer
Billy Ray Cyrus, and its message
to a lover about not relying on
her sounds heartfelt. These
mainstream songs provide the
album with its best moments.
Plastic Hearts ends with a reflection
on Miley Cyrus’s young life in public
so far. On the unfortunately named
but pretty Golden G String she
confesses that she stripped off and
shocked everyone to feel alive, to
make people love her, to give the
papers something to write about.
“And still I’m trying to work it out,”
she concludes. Her rock album,
essentially a tribute to the people
who have influenced her, sounds like
another phase in that process.Taking a wrecking
ball to rock’n’roll
It lacks that
tougher-than-
leather grit