Album reviews: First Aid Kit – Ruins, Calexico – The Thread That Keeps Us, Tune-Yards – I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life

Also: The Residents – The Third Reich’n’Roll, Glen Hansard – Between Two Shores, Starcrawler – Starcrawler, and Daniel Taylor, The Trinity Choir – The Path To Paradise

Calexico, The Thread That Keeps Us

★★★★★

Download this: End Of The World With You; Voices In The Field; Bridge To Nowhere; Under The Wheels; Dead In The Water

Now expanded to a full-time septet, Calexico display a new resourcefulness and determination on The Thread That Keeps Us, which may be the album that finally hoists this most undervalued of American bands to their rightful place alongside the likes of R.E.M. and Wilco. The intimacy and evocative atmosphere of previous releases has been retained, but there’s a fresh, barnstorming spirit brought by the team surrounding the core duo of Joey Burns and John Convertino: where earlier releases sometimes felt too meticulously crafted, this one has the sound of a proper band, its members constantly egging each other into uncertain territory.

Instead of their familiar border stomping ground of Arizona and Mexico, Calexico recorded The Thread That Keeps Us in a ramshackle studio overlooking the Pacific coastline, and it’s suffused with the spirit of endless possibilities often triggered by California dreaming. Hence, perhaps, the brief instrumental interludes like “Shortboard” and the Neil Young-style guitar-noise abstract “Spinball”, which are the sound of open-ended oceanic daydreams. Hence too the edgy, piercing guitar lines twirling around each other in songs such as “Voices In The Field” and “End Of The World With You”, which recall the hippie heyday of Haight-Ashbury staples like the Dead and Quicksilver.

Not that Calexico’s Tex-Mex roots are completely abandoned, however. Jacob Valenzuela’s trumpet brings a mariachi poise to several songs, while the cumbia beat and accordion lend norteno elegance to “Flores y Tamales”. And one of the standout tracks, “Under The Wheels”, has a nifty polka twitch akin to Los Lobos, whose genius for blending heritage with contemporary concerns is also emulated in a lyric about political impotence: “Deep in the war machine, always someone else’s schemes”.

This reflects the thread of social uncertainty, intertwined with fervent hope, that gives the album its core strength. On the one hand, songs like the simple eco-fable “Girl In The Forest” and anthemic “Voices In The Field” yearn for a new spirit of care and communality, while on the other, the lengthening shadows cast by recent political shifts loom large over the tableaux of “Eyes Wide Awake” and “Thrown To The Wild”, whose listless protagonists seem adrift in currents beyond their control. And there’s no doubting who’s the target of “Dead In The Water”, a brutish demagogue who boasts, “I make the law, and I decree a new kind of wrath”. Swathed in dark menace, its terse guitars, hammered monotone piano and chimes ratchet up the tension as this blowhard threatens to “take you and the whole world with me”.

Elsewhere, there’s a more general anxiety about “Bridge To Nowhere”, which ingeniously blends Radiohead-esque descending minor-chord unease with plangent Everlys-style harmonies. It brilliantly evokes the contrasting moods which give the album its drive and energy, a dichotomy heralded, in the opening “End Of The World With You”, by Joey Burns’ determination to seek “love in the age of the extremes”.

First Aid Kit, Ruins

★★★☆☆

Download this: My Wild Sweet Love; Rebel Heart; It’s A Shame

The Soderberg sisters’ first album in four years is aptly titled. If 2014’s Stay Gold expressed a deep desire for change, then Ruins rakes through the rubble left by those changes – both the sisters’ separation (subsequently reconciled) and the collapse of Klara’s relationship which arguably triggered her departure. Songs such as “Rebel Heart” and “Fireworks” are fraught with regret over her self-destructive tendencies, and “Ruins” itself confronts the impossibility of trying to rebuild what’s irretrievable; while the sparse setting of “To Life A Life” evokes the dawning realisation that “there is no other way to live a life, I’m alone”. It’s tough stuff, tempered by the Soderbergs’ instinctive harmonies, which remain as sweet as ever, and the inventive folk-rock arrangements textured with typical empathy by producer Tucker Martine, involving members of R.E.M., Midlake and Wilco. The lightly skimming “My Wild Sweet Love” is a standout, and elsewhere the rolling tom-toms, organ, piano and jangly guitar help salve the pain of “It’s A Shame”.

Tune-Yards, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life

★★★★☆

Download this: Coast To Coast; ABC-123; Now As Then; Home; Hammer

Expanded to a duo by bassist Nate Brenner’s promotion to full-time accomplice of Merrill Garbus, Tune-Yards’ characteristically confrontational approach acquires a new brusque confidence on this fourth album. Brenner’s sinuous basslines lend a new strength to Garbus’s jittery, staccato drum programmes, allowing her keening high-register commentaries on womanhood and “white centrality” to float above sometimes rickety assemblages of samples, keyboards, ukulele and reeds. Her attitudes are upfront and unapologetic in both words and music: ethnic affinities underpin the electro-reggae skank “ABC-123” and the African-flavoured depiction of male oppression “Hammer”, while Garbus’s angelic harmonies signal her empathy for the destitute bag-lady in “Home”, with its cautionary observation “When you’re cheering for the winner, the song remains the same”. The haunted “Coast To Coast” offers an oblique commentary on the creeping intolerance and violence of America; but neither is Garbus herself free from her own critiques, ironically noting in “Colonizer” how “I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories of travels with African men”.

The Residents, The Third Reich’n’Roll

★★★★☆

Download this: Swastikas On Parade; Hitler Was A Vegetarian; Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life; Satisfaction

Originally released in 1976, and reissued here with a plethora of outtakes, live cuts and singles, The Third Reich ’n’ Roll remains perhaps the most stubbornly transgressive album ever recorded. Its two side-long suites, “Swastikas On Parade” and “Hitler Was A Vegetarian”, take a fond cudgel to Sixties pop, melting familiar hits like “Land Of 1000 Dances”, “96 Tears”, “It’s My Party” and “Telstar” into audaciously discordant new forms that have since, despite their atonal abrasiveness, acquired a warm familiarity of their own. The sleeve, featuring a cartoon of US pop gatekeeper Dick Clark in Nazi uniform, signalled The Residents’ suspicions about pop’s sinister mob mentality (it remained banned in Germany until reissued with each of its 135 swastikas covered in a CENSORED! sticker, an image just as ludicrous as its original comic overload). Bonus tracks here include the group’s angst-drenched mangling of “Satisfaction” and their extraordinary Beatles montage “Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life”, alongside five excerpts of hitherto unreleased “German Slide Music”, which beg uneasy questions about what the slides might be showing.

Glen Hansard, Between Two Shores

★★★☆☆

Download this: Roll On Slow; Why Woman; Movin’ On; One Of Us Will Lose

On his third solo outing, Glen Hansard (Oscar-winning co-writer of the musical Once) gives his Van Morrison influence free rein, particularly on the track “Movin’ On”, where his guttural moans and 12-string stylings irresistibly bring to mind St. Dominic’s Preview. Elsewhere, Hansard’s sepia R&B tones are underpinned by brooding horns and organ to lend a Southern deep-soul ambience to “Why Woman”, one of several songs here which present him as a biased plaintiff of a broken relationship. But while the one-sided “Heart’s Not In It” is crippled by blame-laying, “One Of Us Will Lose” is an edifice of aching melancholy, with streaks of slide guitar threading currents of loss and despair through its descent into the depths. It’s not all that pessimistic, though: the recriminations of “Wheels On Fire” are tempered by a confidence that “we will overcome” which gives the song a political gestalt, while the opening “Roll On Slow”, with punchy horns underscoring its hook, has a lithe, bluesy swagger that’s equal parts Springsteen and Stones.

Starcrawler, Starcrawler

★★★☆☆

Download this: Love’s Gone Again; I Love LA; Tears

Ever since punk, rock music has periodically short-circuited back to its barest basics, and LA’s hotly touted Starcrawler represent the latest incarnation of this cyclical process. Sympathetically produced in full analogue glory by Ryan Adams, this debut album is awash in buzzsaw guitar riffs and splashy cymbals, while the wild-child vocals of Arrow De Wilde channel the jaded disdain of Courtney Love (minus the rage), occasionally peaking in a Lene Lovich-like squawk. It’s a formula which works best on “Love’s Gone Again”, which has something of the elemental primitivism of Pink Flag-era Wire as it treats perverse carnal urges to a dose of distortion. The simple appreciation of streetlife in “I Love LA”, melodically reminiscent of Nirvana’s “In Bloom”, is an apt evocation of bruised fruit. But it’s hard to re-inject this kind of teen spirit back into rock without stumbling into familiar potholes: the oral-sex theme of “Pussy Tower” is gauchely handled, while the swirling guitar effects of “Chicken Woman” can’t hide its essential leadenness.

Daniel Taylor, The Trinity Choir, The Path To Paradise

★★★★☆

Download this: Miserere Mei, Deus; Miserere; Libera Nos; Magnificat

The influential impact of John Eliot Gardiner’s work – particularly with the monumental series of Bach Cantatas – on choral recordings continues to ripple outwards. Here, Daniel Taylor and The Trinity Choir offer a small but impressive survey of religious a cappella music which seeks to dissolve the boundaries between old and new, home and abroad, by including Renaissance masterpieces by Byrd, Tallis and Allegri alongside modern settings of traditional texts by Arvo Part. Taylor suggests he’s trying to restore, to the cold stone surroundings of today’s churches, something of the former light and colour which once dazzled congregations, and he does just that with Byrd and Tallis’s separate settings of the “Miserere” and John Sheppard’s less well-known “Libera Nos”. There’s a seamless passage between Renaissance polyphony, plainsong and Part’s shifting tintinabulli, climaxing in an enchanting arrangement of Allegri’s “Miserere Mei, Deus” of unusual calm and charm, particularly in the recurrent descending high ornaments, so often strident but here bathed in balm.