The Times - UK (2022-03-18)

the times | Friday March 18 2022 9

music reviews

W

hen big labels sign

contracts with

musicians at the edges

of the age range, they

almost always focus

on the extremities of youth. Take the

composer Alma Deutscher, now

teenaged, but signed to Sony Classical

in 2013 when she was eight. Decca has

broken the mould, however, with the

American pianist Ruth Slenczynska,

right, in 1929 and today, who recorded

her recital last June, when she was 96,

an age when flexible fingers can’t be

expected.

Hearing My Life in Music,

recollecting favourite pieces and

significant teachers (such as

Rachmaninov), no one could deny her

clarity and precision, especially when

she’s playing Bach, sampled at the end

in an enjoyably sprightly Prelude and

Fugue. For the rest, 19th-century fare

predominates, as it did in her earlier

This Welsh band are among the great

survivors of the 1990s guitar boom,

recovering from the suicide of their

drummer Jon Lee to find the link

between heavy metal and the acoustic

expansiveness of the Verve.

Their latest release is not hugely

different — solid, if not exactly subtle.

“If we all come together before it all

goes down,” sings Grant Nicholas on

The Healing, and although he never

tells us what will happen if we do, you

get the feeling it has something to do

with the future of humanity in the face

of impending catastrophe. Topical,

although the broad-brushstrokes

rock is a bit too conservative to do

justice to the message.

Originally from Fife, Johnny “Pictish

Trail’’ Lynch has for the past decade

been living on Eigg, the tiny Scottish

island in the Inner Hebrides with a

population of about 100. It made the

news in 1997 after the islanders, fed

up with various absentee landlords,

clubbed together and, with the help

of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, bought

the place.

Island Family is a tribute to the

community and its island, but don’t

expect hearty folk songs about the

beauty of the rugged landscape: this is

a noisy, mostly electronic album that

Lynch made while trapped on Eigg

with no hope of escape and as such it

sounds far more tortured than you

might expect. It is exciting, though,

Natural Successor in particular; a

riot of intensity with shades of the

Flaming Lips.

Midlake: folk-rock

sophisticates

flow. Cherish this album at least for its

positive outlook and humane spirit.

Our second pianist this week,

Britain’s Martin James Bartlett, signed

with Warner Classics three years ago,

when he was 22. After an

accomplished debut album, cheerily

titled Love and Death, there’s a populist

touch about Rhapsody, centred on two

pieces neither of which, in principle at

least, needs a new recording.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, heard

in its symphonic scoring of 1942, is

efficiently dispatched. But the

performance that matters is Bartlett’s

splendidly dashing and tender account

of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a

Theme of Paganini. Other pluses:

the excellence of the London

Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted

by Joshua Weilerstein, and top-notch

sonic engineering. I look forward to

hearing Bartlett when he too is 96.

Geoff Brown

of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Fairport

Convention and other hairy Seventies

types who believed that the right

kind of music could lead to a better

tomorrow.

Feast of Carrion is deeply affecting,

with its plangent piano, pastoral flute

and Pulido begging the crows of the

title to “come release me” like some

medieval supplicant. This is timeless

music, sophisticated and elegant.

There is a kind of idealism running

throughout the album, which makes

you think of that famous line from

the Eagles’ Hotel California: “We

haven’t seen that spirit here since

1969.” If current wisdom holds that

the hippies were a bunch of deluded

fools who couldn’t accept the reality

of humanity’s essentially violent

nature, someone forgot to tell

Midlake about it.

On For the Sake of Bethel Woods,

named after the place where the

original Woodstock happened, Pulido

sings about dreaming of returning to

“a time and a place where peacefulness

once stood”. It doesn’t sound like such

a bad idea. Perhaps, when we get

there, this evocative, transporting

album will be playing in the

background.

life of a librarian to fronting a

seriously good folk-rock band on the

up. It has taken this long for the band

to recover from it.

After Smith left, in 2013 the guitarist

Eric Pulido took centre stage and

Midlake released Antiphon, a pretty

good indie rock album, but one that

missed the mysterious, ancient quality

that set the six-piece apart. After that

the realities of adult life sent the band

members off in various directions until

the flautist/keyboardist Jesse Chandler

had a dream in which his recently

departed father, who had attended the

original Woodstock festival, told him

to get the old gang back together. And

here we are, eight years later, with

Midlake returning to the elemental

power of Roscoe on a rich, involving

album that reveals its charms in an

unforced, unhurried fashion.

Midlake came together as students

of Denton’s prestigious jazz school and

there are traces of that influence here

— gentle woodwind on Gone, Nina

Simone-like piano and shuffling drums

on The End, jazz-funk guitar runs

fiddly enough to make Steely Dan

proud on Glistening. What really

appeals is the mood, which connects

to the romantic but earthy traditions

The 96-year-old pianist giving hope to us all

Rosalía

started out as

a flamenco

singer, but the

Catalonia-born

29-year-old has since gone way

beyond the genre’s traditions. On her

latest album she combines avant-garde

dissonance with the kind of

ultra-modern production more

commonly associated with rap, while

infusing it all with a typically Iberian

emotional intensity.

Genís is such a beautiful tune that

you hardly notice how weird Rosalía

sounds on it, while Chicken Teriyaki

sounds like a playground chant from

the future. At least Hentai is a

traditional ballad... until things go

weird towards the end.

It isn’t the easiest listen, and

sometimes you wish Rosalía’s pure

voice would be allowed to breathe

without being swathed in effects, but

this is experimental music, all the

more powerful because of the sweet

sentiment at the heart of it.

BARBARA FG

Midlake’s classy,

evocative new

album transports

Will Hodgkinson

B

ack in 2006 Midlake

released a song called

Roscoe. An arcane

vision of rustic

simplicity about a

time when “the

mountaineers gathered

timber” and village life

was all that anyone needed or

expected, it only consisted of a few

chords, yet the song had some kind of

magic that created an indelible impact.

So much so that this band from the

small, dusty town of Denton in Texas

helped to revive an interest in bucolic

English folk rock; an interest that the

similarly minded American band Fleet

Foxes ran with to festival-headlining

success. Meanwhile Midlake struggled

to match the giddy heights of Roscoe,

not least after their singer Tim Smith

bailed, thinking he might prefer the

Jazz album

A top American organ

trio mark 30 years

together. Reviewed at

thetimes.co.uk/arts

Rosalía

Motomami

Sony

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Feeder

Torpedo

Big Teeth

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Pictish Trail

Island Family

Fire

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Midlake

For the Sake of

Bethel Woods

Bella Union

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pop

Ruth

Slenczynska

My Life in Music

Decca

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Martin James

Bartlett

Rhapsody

Warner Classics

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classical

A folky, jazzy gem from deepest Texas

spell as a Decca artist in the 1950s and

1960s. And in this area, there’s a

lingering quirk: stately speeds.

It’s not unusual to find her reaching

the final bar of a cherished piece up to

two minutes later than many other

recorded artists. If the music still

convinces, of course, who’s going to

watch the clock?

The worries start when the

imaginary dancers in Chopin’s Grande

valse brillante seem over-preoccupied

watching their feet, and when

Debussy’s famous Fille aux cheveux

de lin trips

up not over

her flaxen

hair, but the

pianist’s

generous

rubato.

Spontaneity

is imperilled,

as is lyrical