Album reviews: St. Vincent - Masseduction, Robert Plant - Carry Fire, Beck - Colors

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St. Vincent, Masseduction

★★★★☆

Download this: Pills; Masseduction; Sugarboy; Happy Birthday, Johnny; New York

Annie Clark’s industriously idiosyncratic manner on previous St. Vincent releases has often given the impression that she’s trying to distract her listeners, wreathing songs in such swirls of sonic invention that one sometimes loses track of which direction they’re headed, or what they’re about. That’s not so much the case with Masseduction, which is appropriate for an album Clark claims to be her most personally revealing, focusing on themes of “power and sex, imperiled relationships and death”. So: life itself, and all that good stuff.

She certainly has a distinctive take on matters of the heart, perpetually teetering on the brink of obsessional extremity. Over the glitch-soul beat and sliding synth melody of opener “Hang On Me”, she fantasises about saving a lover from plane and car crashes, before admitting in the title-track, “I can’t turn off what turns me on/I hold you like a weapon” - an unsettling image underscored by the way that jagged bursts of guitar noise lurk just beneath the calm but predatory groove. The androgyne appeal and fast, chattering synths of “Sugarboy” recall the sensuous entreaties of Goldfrapp, establishing a more direct electropop style also used on “Fear The Future”, which hurtles into uncertainty on a juddering synth pulse, and the punningly-titled single “Los Ageless”, a snarky dig at vampiric Hollywood celebrocracy.

Clark herself is not a natural habitue of that milieu – her somewhat reclusive personality, one suspects, is more accurately conveyed in her attitude to the vibrant throng in “Slow Disco”: “I’m so glad I came, but I can’t wait to leave”. And she’s clearly more of a Big Apple person, anyway: the most emotionally and musically naked piece here is “New York”, a fond recollection of both a beloved stamping-ground and a soulmate, “the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me”. Set to little more than piano, it’s a heartfelt memory echoed in tone and temper by another simple, poignant reminiscence, “Happy Birthday, Johnny”, which concludes streaked with trickling tears of pedal steel guitar.

That closing touch is typical of the more subtle way that Clark employs her eclectic musicality here, compared to previous works. There’s less sense of misdirection, as sudden changes carry a clearer purpose – nowhere better illustrated than on “Pills”, a paean to better living through chemistry (or not) which opens in busy, scuttling speed-freak manner with a nursery-rhyme chant of “Pills to wake, pills to sleep, pills pills pills, every day of the week”, before a distorted guitar-break heralds a disarming slower breakdown section eventually leading to a more engaged conclusion. A brilliantly-realised evocation of addiction building to crisis-point before the inevitable comedown heralds a change in priorities, it gives some idea of what Clark herself may be building towards.

Robert Plant, Carry Fire

★★★★☆

Download this: The May Queen; New World…; Season’s Song; Carry Fire; Bluebirds Over The Mountain

Download this: The May Queen; New World…; Season’s Song; Carry Fire; Bluebirds Over The Mountain

On Carry Fire, Robert Plant interrupts his prevailing amorous quest for “a heart that never falters, a love that never dies” with a clutch of politically motivated songs that find him in unusually critical mood. “New World…” is the most potent, a potted history of American pioneer spirit in three verses darting swiftly from a happy landing at Plymouth Rock to violent genocide Contrasting sharply with the declamatory guitars slashing across the rumbling groove, Plant’s disarmingly understated vocal is characteristic of his approach throughout the album: only on “Bones Of Saints”, a damning blast at religious-rooted militarism, does he come close to unleashing his more leonine delivery. But it’s the elemental romantic urges of songs like “The May Queen” and “Season’s Song” which best embody Plant’s ability to blend a sort of ageless rusticity with pop-rock warmth. With the skirling, Arabic-tinged drone-rock textures of his band The Space Shifters augmented by cello and Seth Lakeman’s violin, the album’s miasmic charm imbues even the rockabilly standard “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” with new, mysterious depths.

Beck, Colors

★★★☆☆

Download this: Dreams; Seventh Heaven; Colors

Recorded over the past four years by Beck and his co-producer, go-to guy du jour Greg Kurstin, Colors tacks sharply away from Beck’s melancholy Morning Phase, into more animated territory heralded by the 2015 single “Dreams”, whose busy pop-rock brio was inspired by MGMT. Like them, Beck’s work here has a brittle charm, featuring languid funk grooves stuffed with sonic activity, layered harmonies and quixotic imagery: the song “Seventh Heaven” alone includes the phrases “guillotine rose”, “apple fever doggerel” and “filigree of energy”, for instance. The overall impression is of a euphoric re-engagement with life’s possibilities – and also with Beck’s old record collection, judging by the recurrent echoes poking into some songs, notably “No Distraction”, which attempts to disguise its Police roots in a welter of conflicting overdubs. Which is ironic, given that it’s about information overload. Less happily, “I’m So Free” just sounds like Weezer with logorrhoea. All told, it’s pretty crowded territory, with too many jams.

Dolly Parton, I Believe In You

★☆☆☆☆

Download this: Imagination

While in no way wishing to disparage Dolly Parton’s intentions, and especially not her literacy charity, recipient of all proceeds of this childrens’ album, there is something so gob-smackingly awful about I Believe In You that it may become a bad-taste classic. Set to bargain-basement arrangements featuring synthetic brass that even John Shuttleworth would shun, it opens in depressingly gung-ho manner courtesy of the title-track and similar homilies like “I Am A Rainbow”, before the finger-wagging admonishments of “Responsibility” and “Makin’ Fun Ain’t Funny” curdle the mood of forced jollity like a sugar-free cake at a birthday party. Elsewhere, the value of “Imagination” is more persuasively outlined, despite lacking the wry charm of Sesame Street singalongs in similar vein. But the knockout punches come right at the end, when, faced with the mis-judged enthusiasm of “Chemo Hero” and “Brave Little Soldier”, one’s left reeling like the disbelieving audience in The Producers: did I really hear that?

Wretch 32​, FR32

★★★☆☆

Download this: Colour Purple; His And Hers (Perspective); Power

Perhaps stung into action by the meteoric successes of Skepta and Stormzy, Wretch 32 returns with almost indecent haste just a year after Growing Over Life. The opening salvo of “DPMO” (“don’t piss me off”) and “Gracious” establish a mood of pressurised celebrity that seems beneath him: aren’t these just the sort of rote complaints we’ve heard countless times before, from lesser talents? Wretch’s skills are better employed playing both sides of the sharply-observed gender battle “His And Hers (Perspective)”, and outlining early experiences of racism, and the emergence of pride and self-awareness, in “Colour Purple”; while even a routine streetlife rap such as “Thugs Prayer” contains cute throwaway barbs like “Everybody fly, but ain’t none of us pilots”. The limp, autotuned love song “Happy” and drearily positivist “Good Morning” are lazy nods to the mainstream, but elsewhere Wretch is better served by the dark sparkle of arrangements featuring grimy sub-bass synths and itchy electro beats tinted with eerie vocal samples, thumb-piano and synthetic pan-pipes.

Tim Buckley, The Complete Albums Collection

★★★★★

Download this: Once I Was; I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain; Buzzin’ Fly; Chase The Blues Away; Starsailor; Song To The Siren; Sweet Surrender; Make It Right

Blessed with an extraordinary, soaring six-octave tenor and an interest in avant-garde jazz, Tim Buckley was a mercurial, protean talent whose approach changed radically from album to album, taking in folk-rock, art-rock, folk-jazz, avant-garde jazz, erotic funk and AOR soul. His restless stylistic innovations meant that each of his albums was markedly different from its predecessor, sometimes unfathomably so – a situation which prevented him from establishing more than a hardcore cult following. Though it excludes his final two albums, this box set covers his most vital works, from the baroque folk-rock of Goodbye And Hello via the languid folk-jazz of Happy Sad and Blue Afternoon to the more outré experimental excursions of Starsailor, including the title-track’s multi-overdubbed acappella soundscape, a piece which owed more to Cathy Berberian than Bob Dylan. It’s a trove of diverse enchantments, and a reminder of how much territory an artist can cover in just seven years, if the spirit takes them.

Ray Wylie Hubbard, Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can

★★★☆☆

Download this: Lucifer And The Fallen Angels; Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can; Dead Thumb King

Grizzled Americana veteran Ray Wylie Hubbard cooks up a steamy stew of voodoo magick and rock’n’roll mythos on Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can, a title whose droll self-deprecation is reflected in the weary sprechstimme style with which Hubbard delivers his narratives, homages and sermons. Set to a chain-gang slouch of sparse guitar and percussion, “God Looked Around” opens the album with a deadpan account of the Creation which has the deity drawling “Well shucks, let there be light”, before “Dead Thumb King” conjures a witchy mood from sundry juju totems and “some dirt from Lightning Hopkins’ grave”. He’s not the only bluesman honoured here: “Old Wolf” offers stolid tribute to Howlin’ Wolf, while “Spider, Snaker And Little Sun” celebrates Hubbard’s former Minneapolis folk-blues mentors Koerner, Ray & Glover. Best of all, maraccas and rasping slide guitar bowl along Hubbard’s wry account of giving the devil a lift en route to Nashville in “Lucifer And The Fallen Angels”.