Album reviews: Ryley Walker, Lakuta, Blind Pilot and more

Ryley Walker, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung

★★★★★

Download this: The Halfwit In Me; Funny Thing She Said; Sullen Mind; The Roundabout; Age Old Tale

Last year’s Primrose Green elevated Ryley Walker from the status of virtuoso solo guitar throwback to the likes of Jansch and Renbourn, to a more complex and alluring figure whose exploratory blending of folk and jazz drew comparisons with John Martyn, Van Morrison and Tim Buckley.

On Golden Sings That Have Been Sung he extends that impulse further, with semi-improvised songs created from discrete lyric lines piled softly on one another, to create a stream-of-consciousness flow, containing scraps and fragments of his personal life, as if we’re overhearing his mind as it wanders abstractedly: “You cry like you’ve never seen water/Come to think of it, my dad wanted a daughter”; “I only have a Christian education/And with a sullen mind I carry it”; “Funny thing she said to me/I could see you giving me a child”; and in the quirky locution which provides the album’s title, “Golden sings which have been sung/Wiseass wisdom, wasted on the young”.

The music likewise avoids the structural rigour of verse and chorus, instead developing rolling, cyclical grooves of guitar, bass and drums, with brief efflorescences of astringent lead guitar or piercing flurries of electric piano erupting through the gentle acoustic band textures of songs like “Sullen Mind” and “A Choir Apart”. In “Funny Thing She Said”, a picture of separation whose conversational tone recalls Buckley’s Lorca, the becalmed manner of the bowed basses, reeds and guitars evokes a relationship that’s run its course; while the oblique guitar and clarinet figures opening “The Halfwit In Me” aptly convey the incorrigibility of a self-destructive character, rescued by the nimble tracery of guitar creating a web-like matrix of melody.

As with many great albums, successive hearings reveal more clearly the elliptical tunes at the heart of these eight quietly intense pieces, climaxing with the eight-minute “Age Old Tale”, a masterly band performance which shifts from an opening bricolage of abstract guitar scrapings, pluckings and harmonics, through a passage of shimmering harp glissandi, cymbals and bass reminiscent of Alice Coltrane, ultimately developing a calm, wave-like momentum, over which Walker scatters seemingly unconnected images that coalesce into a montage of his emotional state. It’s a risky, high-wire way to make songs, but Walker is brave enough to try, and skilled enough to succeed this well.

Momus, Pubic Intellectual: An Anthology 1986-2016

★★★★☆

Download this: I Was A Maoist Intellectual; The Hairstyle Of The Devil; The Sadness Of Things; Life Of The Fields

Nick “Momus” Currie has for three decades occupied a position combining philosophical drollerie and lubricious, ironic wit: a blend of the intellectual and the sexually explicit that has guaranteed his absence from UK airwaves, a cultural ignominy jauntily predicted in “I Was A Maoist Intellectual”. But then, how would you cue up songs such as “Murderers, The Hope Of Women” – damning marriage as a life sentence – or “Bishonen”, a Mishima-influenced tale of gay paedophilia and disembowelling, gently related over harpsichord arpeggios? This 3CD retrospective is equally enjoyable for Currie’s amusing annotations as it is for the dilettantish diversity of his music, from the scuttling synths of “Hairstyle Of The Devil”, a Pet Shop Boys-style account of the “inexplicable charisma” of a love rival, to the faux-folk pastoralism of “Life Of The Fields”.

Lakuta, Brothers & Sisters

★★★☆☆

Download this: Bata Boy; Rice & Peace; Changanya; Mr Serious

Brighton-based international groove collective Lakuta sets out its stall with passion and energy here on Brothers & Sisters’ opening track “Bata Boy”, an urgent, turbulent tirade of Fela-style Afro-Rock with proudly riffing horns supporting Siggi Mwasote’s rejection of homophobic attitudes: “We will not stand for this, we will say yes no more”. The rebellious spirit extends into the poverty protest “Rice & Peace”, built around a lovely, cyclical soukous guitar figure, and “Kansan”, where Mwasote calls on a Yoruba warrior-goddess to join her declaration of war in support of the downtrodden and overlooked. Elsewhere the internationalist message is conveyed in music: shakers underscore kora, flamenco guitar and soloing soprano sax on “Changanya”, while balafon and mbira spice up the highlife groove of “Mr Serious”.

Marconi Union, Ghost Stations

★★★★☆

Download this: Sleeper; Abandoned/In Silence; Riser

For their follow-up to Weightless, Marconi Union have settled on a sequence of musical meditations loosely based around the themes of absence and railways. “Sleeper” opens proceedings with quiet ambient tones, gradually developing a sleek, chugging momentum akin to The Necks, pulsing along with a blend of keyboards and reeds that recalls Terry Riley. It’s a beautiful, smooth evocation of being whisked through darkness, perched on the cusp of anticipation. “Riser” features Jaki Liebezeit-style tom-toms behind cosmic contrails of synth trapped in a cavernous ambience; while string synth and wordless vocal keening drape like fog around “Abandoned/In Silence”, whose clarinet line establishes accidental but apt echoes of the theme to Exodus.

Blind Pilot​, And Then Like Lions

★★★☆☆

Download this: Umpqua Rushing; Joik #3; Don’t Doubt

This folk-rock sextet’s latest album plumbs dark spaces, with songwriter Israel Nebeker reacting to the death of his father from cancer and the collapse of a 13-year relationship. But within its shadows can be glimpsed the faint light of recovery – as with the faint twinkling of vibes in “Don’t Doubt”, and the poignant trumpet at its climax, or the horns imbuing uplift into “Seeing Is Believing”, written for his father. Throughout, the band’s gorgeous harmonies temper the sombre mood embodied in things like the wan, fluting mellotron and yearning vocal of “Umpqua Rushing”, and the droning strings of “Joik #3”, prime examples of Nebeker’s Jackson Browne-like knack for transmuting tragedy into beauty.

Various Artists, Celestial Blues

★★★☆☆

Download this: Fire; The Free Slave; The Almoravid

In the early ‘70s, jazz was in a quandary. Its audience had evaporated, and its grip on cool seemed as dated as its tuxedos. Even Miles Davis was casting around for new directions, accommodating the funk innovations (and visual style) of Sly Stone. Subtitled “Cosmic, political and spiritual jazz 1970 to 1974”, Celestial Blues tracks some of the less well-known contributions distilled from a blend of Miles’s jazz-funk, Sun Ra’s questing cosmic strains and Coltrane’s spiritual search. “Fire” offers a brilliant alliance of Joe Henderson’s searing tenor sax and Alice Coltrane’s piano and harp, while elsewhere drummers propel with distinction: Roy Brooks’ “The Free Slave” rocks gently on his great shuffling groove, while Joe Chambers’ “The Almoravid” is an African-influenced ferment of drums, congas and marimba.

Lawrence Arabia, Absolute Truth

★★★☆☆

Download this: A Lake; Sweet Dissatisfaction; Mask Of Maturity

Lawrence Arabia is a New Zealand singer-songwriter trapped in a 1960s West Coast time-warp. Absolute Truth sounds like a Left Banke outtakes compilation, with Bacharach-style trumpet heralding “Sweet Dissatisfaction”, and string quartet draped over the soft-rock psychedelia of “A Lake”. In the latter, Arabia rakes over an old relationship in queasy falsetto tones, regretting how his lover had to negotiate “the obstacle course of my mind”. Clearly, it’s never not about Arabia himself, which becomes clear when he admits “I’m a giant adolescent” in “Mask Of Maturity”. It’s well-wrought and entertaining for the most part, though there are moments, as in “The Palest Of Them All”, when the archness becomes top-heavy and capsizes the song.