Album reviews: Bruce Springsteen - Chapter and Verse, Okkervil River - Away, Warpaint - Heads Up, Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition, and more

Also Devendra Banhart - Ape in Pink Marble, Robert Glasper Experiment - ArtScience

Bruce Springsteen, Chapter and Verse

★★★☆☆

Download: The River, My Father’s House, Brilliant Disguise, Wrecking Ball

Autobiographies are more lucrative for old rockers than albums these days, so a soundtrack to Springsteen’s new book makes commercial sense. The lure for longtime fans is five unreleased songs from his New Jersey pre-history. Like Bowie’s Sixties apprenticeship, they show him passing unremarkably through earlier ages of rock than we’re used to, one more callow face in a crowd. With his band the Castiles in 1966, “Baby I” is a Kinks-fuelled yowl of teenage frustration. By the next year’s cover of Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge A Book By the Cover”, taped the week before he turned 18, you can hear the low hum of the local crowd as Hammond organ and harmonica drive the tumbledown, high-energy playing, and Springsteen refines his gruff growl.

1970, and Steel Mill are making more soulful heavy rock. The crude narrative of “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song)” vaguely asks for sympathy for a vengeful wife-killer, Springsteen the agonised moral arbiter of later years not yet on show. 1972’s “The Ballad of Jesse James” is an Eagles-era, superficial glance at American heroism, made memorable by the singer’s testifying shriek at the end, his singing if not lyrical voice all but found.

This juvenilia could be almost anyone’s. But by connecting it to Chapter and Verse the book, we’re invited to hear this collection as personal too, from a songwriter thought of as a chronicler, not confessor. When the heatedly Dylanesque, word-drunk urban fantasias of a final unreleased track, “Henry Boy”, gives way to songs we know very well, the New Jersey landscape of beaches and boardwalks in “4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy)” is vividly fond. The headlong rush of “Born to Run” then sets a struggling young singer-songwriter free. What follows in “Badlands” and “The River”, with its vividly sensual, painful dreams of demolished hope, is mired in the doom of not leaving home. He sings this through clenched teeth, as if biting down to stop from screaming, the depression revealed in his book perhaps somewhere in view. The most revelatory song of the now mature songwriter is, though, “My Father’s House”, from Nebraska (1982). There’s a sluggish, nightmare feel as Springsteen dreams of a bramble-tangled house in a haunted field, a home where he’s no longer known; a past he can’t return to. The merits of this rough, questionable compilation lie in such small revelations.

Okkervil River, Away

★★★★☆

Download: Okkervil River R.I.P., The Industry, Comes Indiana Through the Smoke, Frontman in Heaven

“I was turning 38, I was a horrible sight,” Will Sheff reflects in “Okkervil River R.I.P.”, a quietly defiant requiem for his band and youth, mourning extended elsewhere to include the music industry and his beloved grandfather. Sheff’s songwriting was once admired by Lou Reed. But after bandmates quit and more heavy blows rained down, he retreated to a cabin, where these wonderful songs poured out. “Frontman In Heaven” is one of several which both mourn and resurrect the idiocies and potent faith of the rock’n’roll age. In “Comes Indiana Through the Smoke”, meanwhile – the USS Indiana was his grandfather’s Second World War ship – acoustic guitar and orchestral brass gorgeously describe the vanishing life of a big, heroic man. “You can’t even keep your childhood bride,” Sheff sings, his lachrymose, yearning croon finding its perfect role. “But it’s okay, she’s crying.”

Warpaint, Heads Up

★★★☆☆

Download: Today Dear, Dre, By Your Side

Warpaint’s considerable cult popularity has been fostered by sometimes gloomily intense records and more inspiringly expansive gigs, a gap they try to bridge on this third album. They stand out from their peers with a still too rare all-female perspective, and unusually restless rhythms and arrangements. While not exactly dance music, there are allusions to its hedonism here, as on the techno breakdown of “So Good” – though this typically morphs into dry, chilly Eighties guitar. Woozy guitars flash by like a panic attack on “Don’t Let Go”, and blood is spilled in “Today Dear”. “By Your Side” recalls murky romantic business with an urgent, harried vocal, accompanied by steel-pipe echoes and hip-hop beats, and concluding in tentative female solidarity: “God, my girl, I’m not alone.” Songwriting points remain shrouded, and voices drowsy, but an understated fearlessness pears through the mist.

Van der Graaf Generator, Do Not Disturb

★★★★☆

Download: Alfa Berlina, Room 1210, Almost the Words, Gone

Peter Hammill’s prog-rock veterans work more fatalistic, anxious terrain than any of their peers, as Hammill continues to explore the hubris of human existence. He’s often best, though, when he ventures off-track into more warmly specific tales – “Alpha Berlina”, for instance, when Hugh Banton’s Hammond organ gives a nostalgic soul shimmy, and Hammill is away remembering lost days in the titular car, when Van der Graaf swaggered across dangerous Seventies Europe with the innocent bravery of prog Don Quixotes. There’s a moment caught between wolves above and glinting water below, when they were never “more recklessly alive”. “Room 1210”, by contrast, is a precise vignette of a hotel room’s interzone, which finally claims its occupant in a quiet horror story. Such strong songs fill side two of the Abbey Road-mastered vinyl, which is well worth pursuing.

Danny Brown, Atrocity Exhibition

★★★☆☆

Download: Really Doe, Ain’t It Funny, Today

Detroit rappers and rockers usually feel like outsiders, even when they rise from this remarkable, ruined city to become kings. It’s “Detroit vs. Everybody”, as a track Danny Brown shared with Eminem declared. Kendrick Lamar’s presence as a guest rapper on “Doe” shows Brown’s wider status, but he remains a nervy, abrasive, sometimes clownishly provocative figure. This fourth album is produced by south London’s Paul White, and a shared taste for Talking Heads and especially Joy Division (the LP is named after their song, more than JG Ballard’s novel) takes it way off the mainstream hip-hop map. Paranoia swirls around Brown on the likes of “Rolling Stone”, matched by greyly echoing, post-punk synth-funk, Eighties Manchester finding common ground with the Motor City. But the present iniquity of police murdering black men chills him most, on “Today”’s martial, clamouring blues.

Devendra Banhart, Ape in Pink Marble

★★★☆☆

Download: Good Time Charlie, Lucky, Saturday Night, Fig In Leather

Devendra Banhart seemed an out of time, unworldly hippie when he materialised from LA, by way of his mother’s native Caracas, a decade ago. He’s not that foolish or innocent, but there’s often a vaporous quality to his music, with lyrics built from surreal non sequiturs and whimsy, the substantial craft of his Laurel Canyon forebears staying elusive. His persona this time is as a gauche Seventies playboy, mixed with a touch of Ian Dury in “Fig In Leather”, a sung-spoken disco paean to a “top-quality lady”. Bubbling synths and glistening ripples of acoustic guitar adorn these tales of elite bohemians. A Jonathan Richman song is cheerfully “borrowed” from in “Jon Lends A Hand”, and McCartneyesque melody suggested. It can seem a pretty pastiche of straighter singer-songwriters. Only in “Mourner’s Dance” is a deeper spiritual intent glimpsed.

Robert Glasper Experiment, ArtScience

★★★☆☆

Download: This Is Not Fear, No One Like You, Find You, Human

Robert Glasper’s jazz standing was shown when he produced the Miles Ahead soundtrack and attendant Miles remix album this year. His Grammy-winning breakthrough album Black Radio (2012), though, attempted to reclaim a middle ground where positive soul, jazz and hip-hop met. The Robert Glasper Experiment became crucial pioneers in the breakdown of jazz barriers the likes of Kamasi Washington have since rampaged through, playing non-jazz clubs with vocodered vocals and hip-hop style. ArtScience tries to return to band basics after last year’s Covered and countless collaborations. “This Is Not Fear” begins with straightahead, skittering, improvised acoustic jazz, before morphing into hip-hop. “Find You”’s screaming rock guitars and Radiohead-recalling Glasper piano lines add to the variety. The Experiment’s increasingly obvious fault, though, is how close they keep to the middle of their many musical roads.