Album reviews round-up: Lisa Hannigan, Dolly Parton, Nels Cline and more

Lisa Hannigan, At Swim

★★★★☆

Download this: Fall; Snow; Undertow; Ora; We, The Drowned

Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan first drew attention as the beguiling second voice on Damien Rice’s debut O; fourteen years on, her own third album suggests she’s every bit his equal in tracking the heart’s mysterious emotional undercurrents.

The term is apt, for as the title suggests, At Swim is dominated by themes of suffocation and submersion, of being carried by one’s feelings into deep waters. It’s perhaps most directly expressed in “Undertow”, where Hannigan’s desire “to flow on every word you say” is set to a sequenced pulse of her own wordless humming, like a current tugging her vocal along. It’s just one of several subtle but ingenious effects devised by producer Aaron Dessner (of The National) to capture Hannigan’s songs at their most bewitching. In “Lo”, a song about insomnia, the passage of dread to delirium is deftly suggested by Dessner’s cyclical guitar figure and the rapid heartbeat of bodhran, while “We, The Drowned” is suspended between Hannigan’s high, keening double-tracked vocals and the sinister, oceanic deeps of looming brass rising beneath simple piano chords.

Even on dry land, the mood of suffocation persists. The enveloping, character-concealing nature of love is brilliantly evoked in her analogy, in “Snow”, of how “You were the snow falling down/I was the city losing colour and sound”. The delicate tracery of guitar, violin and high, wheedling synthesiser floats over the anchoring piano and a beat akin to oars scudding the sea, as she depicts the lovers “sunk like treasure”. Elsewhere, “Tender” and “Funeral Suit” capture romantic moments lost in the union of dance, while “Anahorish”, Hannigan’s acappella version of a Seamus Heaney poem, recalls Fleet Foxes’ take on WB Yeats.

But the album’s theme and mood is perhaps best summed up, in “Ora”, by her own slant on the river’s invitation: “You’ll be the boat and I’ll be the sea, won’t you come with me?”. If you do, be aware: these seemingly calm waters conceal dark depths of emotion.

Dolly Parton, Pure & Simple

★★☆☆☆

Download this: Never Not Love You; Kiss It (And Make It All Better)

Although not up to the standard of recent offerings such as Backwoods Barbie and Blue Smoke, Dolly’s Pure & Simple sticks for the most part to an agreeable neo-traditional approach. The title-track’s expression of a love “so pure it’s almost sacred”, for instance, canters gently along to trilling mandolin and glistening steel guitar, while “Say Forever You’ll Be Mine” is tremulously delivered over simple guitar arpeggios and fiddle. The album also confirms Dolly’s deft songwriting skills, with “Never Not Love You” cleverly using the double-negative as payoff for a list of things she’ll probably never get to do, and both “Kiss It (And Make It All Better)” and“I’m Sixteen” illustrating her knack for illuminating adult emotions through childhood memories. Rather less welcome is the glutinous “Mama”, which makes “Grandad” seem a work of taste and subtlety.

David Brent & Foregone Conclusion, Life On The Road

★★★☆☆

Download this: Native American; Life On The Road; Slough; Electricity

In comedy, bad is readily funny; mediocrity, less so – which is perhaps the most impressive aspect of Ricky Gervais’s David Brent, here extended through the album of the film of the midlife crisis. It’s elegantly wrought – the Elton John pastiche “Lonely Cowboy” is exact down to details like the Davey Johnstone-soundalike guitar break – but there are rather too many ersatz American road songs like “Ooh La La” and “Freelove Freeway”, all trumped in the title-track by references to Sidcup and Widnes. But there’s copious outrage potential in songs about Princess Di, dying children and the disabled, as too with the bumbling bathos of Brent’s bogus chanting on “Native American”, whom we are informed is able to “soar like an eagle, sit like a pelican”.

Nels Cline, Lovers

★★★★☆

Download this: Intro/Diaphanous; It Only Has To Happen Once; Cry Want; The Bed We Made; Beautiful Love

Best known for adding a touch of free-jazz spice to US indie-rockers Wilco, guitarist Nels Cline here eschews his more avant-garde inclinations for a double-album themed around romance. Effectively, it’s a 21st century update of the notion of “mood music”, blending Cline originals and recent covers with reimagined standards by the likes of Jerome Kern and Rodgers & Hart, all realised in beautifully enigmatic arrangements which wrap woodwind, horns, strings and tuned percussion around Cline’s guitar. Throughout, atmosphere is paramount: there’s a Morricone-esque mystery and menace about “It Only Has To Happen Once”, while Jimmy Giuffre’s “Cry Want” becomes a melancholy creep of marimba, winds and guitar. It’s brilliantly sequenced, too, with side four slipping seamlessly between Sonic Youth, Annette Peacock, Henry Mancini and Cline’s own closer “The Bond”.

Roosevelt, Roosevelt

★★★★☆

Download this: Night Moves; Belong; Moving On; Colours

German DJ Marius Lauber, aka Roosevelt, could well follow Daft Punk to a mainstream pop crossover. This debut album has a slick sonic design and retro flavour akin to Random Access Memories, but ratrher than the 70s, he’s gazing fondly back at the early rave era: tracks like “Night Moves” and “Moving On” feature the sleek, relaxed interlocking of acid-house synths, filter sweeps and shuffling Chic-esque disco grooves, building a gentle momentum of satisfying logicality. Elsewhere, the sun-kissed Balearic togetherness espoused in “Belong” recalls The Beloved, while the lyrics throughout focus firmly on nightlife escapism and the kind of E-fuelled emotional openness that once had hooligans hugging: even disappointment is couched in sweetly synaesthetic terms, as in the plaint “When you left, you took your colours with you”.

Ensemble Signal, Steve Reich: Double Sextet/Radio Rewrite

★★★★☆

Download this: Double Sextet; Radio Rewrite

Ensemble Signal brought a youthful energy to last year’s recording of Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians, which put a new spring in the step of an old favourite, an approach that works even better on these more recent compositions. “Double Sextet” is built upon the charged, urban pulsing of paired pianos and vibes, with violins sawing away like thread being shuttled across a loom, and colourful detail embroidered by high woodwind, while “Radio Rewrite”, based on melodic fragments of two Radiohead songs, alternates fast and slow sections of pianos, vibes, strings and woodwind, eliding from driving, staccato syncopation to more haunting, meditative passages stained by the source material’s melancholy. Both pieces offer intriguing glimpses of how Reich, 80 this year, seems to be drawing ever closer to rock music.

John Paul White, Beulah

★★★★☆

Download this: The Once And Future Queen; Make You Cry; I’ve Been Over This Before; I’ll Get Even

On John Paul White’s Beulah, the dark emotions of tracks like “Fight For You” and “Hope I Die” mingle with the bitterness of “The Once And Future Queen” and the low self-esteem of “I’ll Get Even” to create a strangely subdued portrait of emotional turmoil, couched in Southern folk and country modes. The latter song, a calm expression of frustration at his shortfall of virtue, is one of several songs here by The Civil Wars’ songwriter that sound like new country standards, along with the engaging “I’ve Been Over This Before” (“…I won’t get over it again”) and “Make You Cry”, a deceptively sweet expression of a sour sentiment. Elsewhere, “The Once And Future Queen” is effectively “It Ain’t Me Babe” with a gentler, more simpatico tone, softened with subtle tints of lap steel and electric piano.