Album reviews: Craig David – The Time Is Now, Mary Gauthier – Rifles & Rosary Beads, Buffy Sainte-Marie – Medicine Songs, and more

Mary Gauthier, Rifles & Rosary Beads

★★★★★

Download: Soldiering On; The War After The War; Bullet Holes In The Sky; Brothers; Rifles And Rosary Beads; It’s Her Love

Mary Gauthier’s reputation as one of today’s greatest songwriters, admired by peers such as Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, is rooted in her relentless commitment to honesty and accuracy – most notably in the autobiographical song-cycle The Foundling, which dealt with her abandonment as a baby, becoming a teenage runaway, and drug and alcohol addiction. Her work may not always be easy listening, but the bell-like ring of truth resonates throughout.

With Rifles & Rosary Beads, she’s created her most impressive and affecting work yet. It grew out of the Songwriting With Soldiers project, which brings war veterans together with songwriters tasked to tell their stories. It’s a noble project: on average, more than 30 American veterans take their own lives every day, a huge toll partly caused by the wider world’s sheer incomprehension of their experiences. Many participants in the programme have confirmed its healing, even life-saving, effect, in encouraging “post-traumatic growth”.

Few of the 400 songs it’s so far produced, though, can be as searingly effective as Gauthier’s 11 epistles from the emotional frontline, which reveal the hidden toll of army life, the issues often smothered by codes of courage and fellowship. Set to galumphing folk-rock arrangements of guitar, piano, mandolin, fiddle and drums, which evocatively capture the feel of trudging through the Big Muddy with a backpack and an M-16, they convey a complex mixture of pride, guilt and despair, related by Gauthier with a blue-collar grace that recalls a less gravelly Lucinda Williams.

“Soldiering On” opens proceedings with a firm statement of duty, to which is appended a caveat that casts a shadow across the rest of the album: “I was bound to something bigger, more important than a human life,” it asserts, “but what saves you in the battle can kill you at home.”

This lingering trauma is examined in “The War After The War”, which presents the quandary faced by service spouses unable to unlock the partners they once knew, their plight all but invisible to the outside world. “Who’s gonna care for the ones who care for the ones who went to war?/ There’s landmines in the living room, and eggshells on the floor”, it asks. The situation is further complicated in the heartbreaking “It’s Her Love”, where, over brooding harmonium drone and violin, Gauthier voices a Veteran’s gratitude for the sanctuary provided by his wife from flashback nightmares, the frail thread sustaining his sanity.

Elsewhere, the additional burden of sexual harassment faced by female soldiers, and their struggle to be regarded as equals, is outlined in “Brothers” and “Iraq”; while the Veterans’ Day Parade depicted in “Bullet Holes In The Sky” masks bitter misgivings: “They thank me for my service and wave their little flags, they genuflect on Sundays – and yet they’d send us back.”

A large part of the problem, it seems, is the lingering guilt felt for fallen comrades – something ignored by distant politicians insulated from the effects of their decisions, but which hangs huge and heavy on the shoulders of those at the sharp end. As a dull drumbeat pulses like helicopter blades through “Morphine 1-2”, the crippling regret oozes from the tearful claim, “Even now, I’d take their place”.

It’s just one of a tranche of recollections and regrets that cut to the very quick on Rifles & Rosary Beads. If you know someone in service, or their partner, treat them to this album: it may help them to know they’re not alone.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Medicine Songs

★★★★★

Download: No No Keshagesh; Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee; You Got To Run; Little Wheel Spin And Spin; Universal Soldier; Starwalker

Buffy Sainte-Marie manages to shrink the gulf between past and future, employing a keen awareness of cutting-edge technology in the service of ancient wisdom. This retrospective set combines newer material with re-recorded versions of early Sixties protest classics such as “Soldier Blue” and “Universal Soldier”, in which she tackled issues of eco-consciousness and personal responsibility long before they became common discourse.

Since then, her protests have been articulate and specific: the systematic oppression of Native American culture (including the forced re-education of children) in Canada; the black-ops-backed mining of uranium on Native territory; the profit principle underlying “The War Racket”. Against these dark forces she posits the power of indigenous healers and wisdom keepers, underscoring her arguments with arrangements which combine rousing powwow chants in hypnotic collusion with cyclical guitar figures, mouth-bow drones and pulsing grooves. The result, in tracks like “You Got To Run” and “No No Keshagesh”, is uniquely uplifting, a powerful affirmation of steely spirituality.

Craig David, The Time Is Now

★★☆☆☆

Download: I Know You

In a week featuring inspirational releases by strong, articulate women, it’s embarrassing that the most prominent new male offering should be as unambitious as The Time Is Now, Craig David’s attempt to refloat his becalmed career on the flimsiest of generic grooves and autotuning tropes. It’s wearily repetitive and almost aggressively underwhelming, with David’s bland romantic entreaties carried by frisky shuffles and the sparest of keyboard hints supplied by producers like his guitarist-turned-hitmaker Fraser T Smith and Steve Mac, who on “Brand New” recycles the kalimba keyboard sound he employed on Ed Sheeran’s “The Shape Of You”, minus the allure.

The late-night alliance depicted in the single “I Know You” is the best song here, but elsewhere things are far less evocative, reaching a nadir when David’s reduced to singing “blah blah blah, yah yah yah” in “For The Gram” – though, since the alternative is his encouragement to “speak in emoji, wink wink smiley”, perhaps we should be thankful he’s actually using what might pass as words.

​Dirtmusic​, Bu Bir Ruya

★★★☆☆

Download: Bi De Sen Soyle; The Border Crossing; Go The Distance

Australian/American duo Dirtmusic’s globe-trotting collaborative spirit is further extended on Bu Bir Ruya, though their locus has shifted from the Malian associations of albums like BKO to Turkey, where they’ve been working with saz player Murat Ertel. The style and spirit remain much the same, however: pan-cultural shuffles like “Bi De Sen Soyle” and “Go The Distance” sprout whirling tendrils of guitar and saz over steadily pulsing grooves steeped in dubwise depth, while Ertel, Chris Eckmann and Hugo Race extemporise lyrics about hapless refugees and “despots making deals to cover up their crimes”. It’s engagingly infectious for a while – “The Border Crossing” is like an Arabic Bo Diddley groove, itchily evoking the refugee’s desire to move on – but slips into an amorphous miasma in places; and the sententious political declamations fail to excite in the manner of, say, Buffy Sainte-Marie. But there’s much to admire here, particularly their determination to “take the wrong road”.

Bert Jansch​, A Man I’d Rather Be (Part 1)

★★★★★

Download: Strolling Down The Highway; Needle Of Death; Angie; It Don’t Bother Me; The Wheel; Tic-Tocative; Black Waterside

Packaging together Bert Jansch’s first three albums – Bert Jansch, It Don’t Bother Me and Jack Orion – along with Bert And John, the collaboration with fellow six-string wizz John Renbourn that sowed the initial seeds that gave rise to Pentangle, this box set represents the motherlode of Sixties folk guitar. Jansch possessed the entrancing ability to deliver knuckle-knotting bouts of bravura fingerpicking like “Angie” and “Black Waterside” with a languid grace that belied the dazzling technique involved: where others’ pursuit of precision sometimes led to stiltedness, his integration of bluesy bent notes and flourishes gave Jansch’s performances a deceptively offhand character, underscoring the tone of weary, scuffed acquiescence in his delivery of songs like “Strolling Down The Highway” and “It Don’t Bother Me”. Initially writing most of his own material, including the delicately devastating drug requiem “Needle Of Death”, by 1966 Jansch began drawing on traditional songs such as “Nottamun Town” for Jack Orion, a crucial catalyst of the British folk-rock resurgence. All in all, a condensed dose of casual genius.

HC McEntire​, Lionheart

★★★☆☆

Download: Quartz In The Valley; When You Come For Me; One Great Thunder; A Lamb, A Dove

For her debut solo album, Mount Moriah frontwoman HC McEntire shifted direction away from her former indie-rock inclinations, seeking rapprochement with her Southern roots through country music. The Baptist underpinnings of her Appalachian heritage are most discernible in “A Lamb, A Dove”, a quietly passionate expression of sacred and secular love; but the problem of resolving staid tradition and individuality is most directly addressed in “Quartz In The Valley”, a rolling country-rocker which reveals her gayness through elegant lines like “When your lashes tagged all my pillows black”. In places, McEntire’s wordiness gets the better of her – the line “Allegiant to the teething of a hundred surrogates” sticks an abrupt spanner into the gently chugging “Baby’s Got The Blues”. But the most effective songs here are those which reach out directly to her family: the valedictory tribute to her late grandma, “One Great Thunder”, wreathed in layers of lamentation; and “When You Come For Me”, anticipating eventual reunion in death within “the land I cut my teeth on [but] wouldn’t let me call it home”.

Sheku Kanneh-Mason​, Inspiration

★★★★☆

Download: Cello Concerto No. 1; Evening Of Roses; The Swan; No Woman, No Cry; Hallelujah

On his eagerly-awaited debut, young cello virtuoso Sheku Kanneh-Mason pays tribute to the huge talents that inspired him, with pieces famously performed by such as Pablo Casals, Jacqueline du Pré and Mstislav Rostropovich – the latter emulated here in the centrepiece recording of Shostakovich’s “Cello Concerto No. 1”, the piece which secured Sheku the 2016 BBC Young Musician award, and a formidable indication of his ambitions. It’s a work of dramatic shifts in tonal colour and mood which he negotiates deftly, moving smoothly from the contorted, capering Allegretto into the involved Moderato, with its wild sweeps between epic and manic, intimate and overwrought.

By contrast, “Evening Of Roses” fondly acknowledges a sweetly sentimental Jewish tune he used to perform in a klezmer band. The album closes with two pop tunes: a solo cello arrangement of “No Woman, No Cry”, in which the sparseness of sound and the instrument’s emotional timbre brings out the song’s bittersweet tang; and a string quartet setting of “Hallelujah”, with pizzicato quietly stalking around his lead line.