Album reviews: Miley Cyrus, Loney Dear, Van Morrison, Pere Ubu, and more

Miley Cyrus, Younger Now

★★★☆☆

Download: Younger Now; She’s Not Him; Bad Mood; Inspired

Career development for the female pop performer is these days largely a matter of change, whether it takes the form of a character change or a shift in musical approach. Both Beyoncé and Kesha have used the latter-day pop lingua franca of reproach and betrayal to project new, no-nonsense, assertive personalities; Katy Perry went from Christian pop to something sleazier, and Taylor Swift made a ruthlessly efficient move from country to mainstream pop.

As a former child actor, Miley Cyrus has gone through more changes than all of them, journeying from bubblegum icon to edgy, sexually charged pop star and beyond, eventually ending up as a bona fide rock music outlier through her association with the Flaming Lips on the bonkers psych-rock freebie Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz. For all its manifold delights, however, that album clearly proved a step too far for most of Miley’s followers, which is why Younger Now finds her in the invidious position of rowing back sharply on that drug-fuelled experimentation to reconnect with her core fanbase and the vast country music market of alienated midwesterners. As she observes in the title track, “no one stays the same ... change is a thing you can count on, I feel so much younger now”.

As you’d expect from such a seasoned shape-shifter, the change is made with brazen confidence, the Democrat-supporting singer claiming her newly resurgent wholesomeness is a deliberate attempt to build healing bridges to more conservative Americans. At which, the more cynical might raise a dubious eyebrow about her motives – though, in truth, the move towards country music made on Younger Now is fraught with potholes that she and producer Oren Yoel rarely manage to avoid.

The main problem is the half-heartedness of the move. Time and again tracks are caught mid-stool between genres, as on like “A Week Without You” and “Miss You So Much” – their country intentions compromised by the failure of nerve resulting in lumpy, synthetic productions that satisfy neither as pop nor country. Miley’s delivery, especially on “I Would Die For You”, is exemplary in its yearning country twang, but as so often here, the drab material just isn’t up to the task: Nashville supports a huge network of assured tunesmiths and song doctors, and Younger Now demonstrates why. Meanwhile, the way that the Dolly Parton duet “Rainbowland” – a worthless bit of jaunty, utopian fluff about how we can all make a difference and create the eponymous lovely land – is bookended with Dolly’s answerphone messages to Miley simply underscores the phoned-in nature of the performances.

A few uplifting moments paper over the cracks. Showing she’s not completely sold out, “She’s Not Him” is a brave expression of her pansexuality and LGBT sympathies, while the eerie “Ghost Riders In The Sky”-style backing vocals and cantering groove make “Bad Mood” the most interesting of the album’s country stylings. And there’s a certain, ironically stubborn, bravado about the way she opens and closes Younger Now with impassioned appeals to change, the concluding “Inspired” bringing things full-circle back to the title track’s wake-up call. Fair enough: but is this change for the better?

Loney Dear, Loney Dear

★★★★☆

Download: Pun; Humbug; Isn’t It You?; Sum

Listening to Loney Dear’s eponymous album, I had to check that it wasn’t the pseudonymous work of John Grant, so alike, both in looks and musical sensibility, is Loney’s alter ego, Scandi-popster Emil Svanangen. His clear, soaring falsetto is best heard over the chattering synth-pop of “Humbug”, a typically Grant-like reflection on how we erroneously associate beauty with kindness, and in “Sum”, its triumphal tone expressing victory over setbacks.

Loney’s chief appeal, however, lies in the way his musical settings evoke sometimes perverse lyrical matters: the coolly stalking synth pizzicato accompanying the painful co-dependency of “Hulls” (“I grab your arm hard, to make you hit me”); the soft, airy pad embodying the obscuring “static of you and me” in “Isn’t It You?”. He’s just as imaginative when the meaning is uncertain, spectacularly so in the devotional opener “Pun”, where dry, skittish jazz drumming and a descending melodic motif are partly obscured by montaged birdsong, morse code and looped gospel testifying. An elegant, understated pop masterpiece.

Van Morrison, Roll With The Punches

★★★☆☆

Download: Transformation; I Can Tell; Roll With The Punches; Ride On Josephine

Roll With The Punches is a fairly generic Van Morrison album – which is to say, although unimpeachable in terms of feel and artistry, it doesn’t pack the life-changing punch wielded by his earliest work. Back then, a song title like “Benediction” would herald some deep, pantheist rumination; here, the Mose Allison number simply thanks God for, ahem, “self-love”. And the change anticipated in “Transformation” likewise tiptoes nimbly along the secular/sacred divide, deftly aided by Jeff Beck’s liquid guitar curlicues and a welcome bout of “Caravan”-esque scat-singing at its close.

Beck is the standout guest here, adding delicious slide breaks to the title-track and the low-slung R&B swing of “I Can Tell”, one of a couple of Bo Diddley songs on an album which draws heavily from a noble heritage of T-Bone Walker, Sam Cooke and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Elsewhere, Van’s fellow Brit-blues icons Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and Paul Jones take turns to duet, in a relaxed manner which exemplifies the overall mood: comfortable rather than inspirational.

Pere Ubu, 20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo

★★★★☆

Download: Monkey Bizness; Funk 49; The Healer; Howl; Red Eyed Blues

“You don’t want to let these thoughts get in your head,” warns David Thomas, and he’s probably not wrong. But then, he has just been singing about a big toe he keeps in a cage, occasionally releasing it to fly like “a bird of prey”. It seems mad on paper, but when dressed in squawking clarinet, whining synth and distant, driving drums, it sounds just fine.

Most of the time, though, Thomas comes perilously close here to sensual turmoil: “Howl” is a Howlin’ Wolf homage, earthy and carnal, while “Monkey Bizness” finds him in lascivious Beefheart mode, snarling about “sex clowns” and monkeys “bouncing around” as guitars inscribe an itchy riff over a warped, wheezing synth montage. It’s the most animated Ubu has been in ages, with an atmosphere of vertiginous dark energy accreting around the jagged guitar riff of “Red Eyed Blues”, while even the slower, more subdued melancholia of “The Healer” wields a strangely sinister poignancy as a desolate Thomas regretfully confesses, “I see too much”. But what visions!

Thelonious Monk, The Centennial Edition

★★★★☆

Download: Round Midnight; Well, You Needn’t; Hackensack; Portrait Of An Ermite; Off Minor

It’s impossible to imagine the impact that Thelonious Monk made during his first visit to Paris in 1954. Still virtually unknown and barely recorded, the innovative pianist’s idiosyncratic sense of melody and rhythm must have baffled even the most clued-in of French jazz fans – as they evidently did the pick-up bassist and drummer he was forced to use on the handful of live shows played that week.

The disjunction must have been even more puzzling on this album recorded during his stay, where his jerky, quixotic teasing of tempo and melodic extemporisation lack even the anchor of a rhythm section against which to measure his progress. But this same solitariness showcases Monk’s daring singularity as he pursues a seemingly haphazard musical logic through some of his signature pieces, including “Round Midnight”, “Well, You Needn’t”, “Hackensack” and “Portrait Of An Ermite”. When he returned to Paris seven years later, it was as the genius whose post-bop innovations had transformed jazz.

Valentin Silvestrov, Hieroglyphen Der Nacht

★★★★☆

Download: Drei Stucke; Elegie; Moments Of Silence And Sadness; Lacrimosa

ECM used to proclaim its releases “the next best sound to silence”, in which sense Valentin Silvestrov may be the ECM composer par excellence. Like John Cage and especially Morton Feldman, Silvestrov seeks to expose the surprisingly large world afforded by smaller, more circumscribed sounds – often little more than musical hieroglyphs, to use his titular metaphor. Here, his sonic outlook is reduced to mostly solo cello: even those pieces on which Anja Lechner is joined by a second cellist, the two instruments are meant to be played as if one, “four hand” style.

On “Elegie”, sibilant tam-tams are used softly, lending subtle depth behind her sparse cello line; but otherwise it’s an inventive journey through a single instrument’s melancholy sound-world. In “Echo Of A Waltz”, the second of “Drei Stucke”, her tentative, prickly pizzicato evokes a predatory insect positioning its most deadly attack, while in the elegiac “Moments Of Silence And Sadness”, similarly furtive triplets provide an intermittent anchoring figure for her quietly exploratory bowed part.

Various Artists, Soulsville USA: A Celebration Of Stax

★★★★★

Download: Green Onions; Your Good Thing (Is About To End); Soul Man; (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay; Who’s Making Love; Respect Yourself; That’s What Love Will Make You Do

It may have been Ray Charles who originally devised the soul formula of fusing R&B romp with gospel spirit, but nowhere was that principle more fruitfully pursued than at Stax, as spectacularly illustrated on this 3CD set summarising the Memphis label’s progress. Dubbed “Soulsville USA” in echo of Motown’s “Hitsville USA”, Stax likewise established its own house style through in-house writers and a session crew based around Booker T & The MGs, augmented by The Memphis Horns’ punchy brass.

But unlike Motown, and astonishingly given the racial tensions in the American South at the time, Stax was a firmly integrated operation, exemplified in the MGs line-up. Standards like “Soul Man”, “Theme From Shaft”, “Respect Yourself”, “Green Onions” and “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” are inextricable parts of pop’s weave, but this set offers the opportunity to explore rarer delights such as the aching heartbreak of Mable John’s “Your Good Thing (Is About To End)” and Little Milton’s itchy funk-blues “That’s What Love Will Make You Do”.