Album reviews: Kendrick Lamar - Black Panther: The Album, Joshua Homme​ - In The Fade, and more

Also: Various Artists – The Voyager Golden Record, Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet, Wild Beasts, Belle And Sebastian and I’m With Her

Various Artists, Black Panther: The Album

★★★★☆

Download this: Black Panther; I Am; Bloody Waters; King’s Dead; Redemption; Pray For Me

Curated and pretty much dominated by Kendrick Lamar, Black Panther: The Album is the Super Fly of its era, an attempt to bring a broader measure of cultural resonance to an indulgent action fantasy. The central concern is front and centre in “Black Panther” itself, Lamar acknowledging “I know several responsibilities put me here” and asking “What do you stand for?”, duties later refuted in a different persona’s assertion that he’s “not your father, not your brother, not your reason, not your future”. In between, the film’s dramatic and romantic strands are broadly paralleled in streetwise cuts shared with guests both famous (The Weeknd, James Blake) and upcoming, notably the African duo Zacari and Babes Wodumo, whose effusive love plaint rides the grimey twitch of “Redemption”, and UK star-elect Jorja Smith, her aching realisation in “I Am” that “when you know what you got, sacrifice ain’t that hot” swathed in miasmic strings and strangulated guitar. Though not as powerful as Lamar’s own albums, it’s similarly diverse, with elements of boudoir R&B, sinister street creep and ebullient electro dancehall stippled with a variety of sonic detail, such as whistle and kalimba, reflecting the film’s African setting. The grandeur of tracks like “Pray For Me”, “Bloody Waters” and “Black Panther”, meanwhile, is similarly reflective of its (and Lamar’s) concern with the majestic.

Various Artists, The Voyager Golden Record

★★★★★

Download this: The Sounds Of Earth; Brandenburg Concerto No. 2; Ketawang: Puspawarna; Sokaku-Reibo; Mugam; Liu Shui

Back in the late ‘70s, a committee chaired by astronomer Carl Sagan put together a broadly representative compilation of Earth sounds and music, their selection pressed onto gold discs attached to the two Voyager space probes launched by NASA in 1977.

It’s been surmised that these offerings, now some 21 billion kilometres away from Earth, may be the final remnants left behind by our civilisation; so it’s fitting that this 40th anniversary edition, the first publicly-available issue, should have been funded by the most successful music Kickstarter of all time. Overseen by the original project producer Timothy Ferris, it’s a (literally) marvellous thing, a rare example of something designed by a committee that succeeds completely.

Mind you, I’d advise any aliens cueing up their hi-fi to skip the first few tracks, which feature greetings in 55 languages – including one blending human voices with whale songs – and start with “The Sounds Of Earth”, a 12-minute montage incorporating dripping water, rippling river, beastly howls and roars, morse code, foghorn, industrial noises, engines, rocket launch and baby’s cry. It’s a more studied, artless version of the early musique concrete collages of Pierre Schaefer and John Cage, its contrasting extremes of peace and agitation presenting an accurate realisation of both natural and man-made sounds.

But it’s the musical selections that impress the most. Of course, you could say that it’s showing off a bit to start with Bach, particularly the brilliant, lucidly ornamented interpretation of the first movement of the 2nd Brandenburg Concerto performed by the Munich Bach Orchestra, packed with precise winds, deft trills and dextrous fingering; but the key to the project’s success is the sequencing, so the Bach is followed by passages of elegant Indonesian gamelan, infectious metallic percussion from Benin, the layered chanting of a rainforest tribe, and aboriginal didgeridoo, an enthralling diversity of sonic enchantments.

The range of moods and sounds enables some remarkable sequencing coups – as with the shift from the brio of Mexican mariachi to the swaggering swing of Chuck Berry, then via hypnotic Papuan flute to the poised shakuhachi depiction of nesting cranes in Goro Yamaguchi’s entrancing “Sokaku-Reibo”; or when the crepuscular, musky duduk flute of Kamil Jalilov is supplanted by the intense drama of the “Sacrificial Dance” from The Rite Of Spring. You’d spin the dial a long time to settle on the station eclectic enough to programme these.

It’s not completely comprehensive, of course. There’s no Elvis, Beatles or Dylan – indeed, no rock at all besides “Johnny B. Goode”; no country music; no R&B save for a Blind Willie Johnson blues moan; just one operatic aria, from Mozart; and jazz’s sole representative is Louis Armstrong, when Sun Ra or Coltrane might have added a spacier spice to proceedings. Likewise, having Stravinsky represent the entirety of contemporary classical music suggests a lack of either courage ot knowledge.

There’s an obvious temptation, of course, to offer retrospective revisions: I’d include the opening of The Goldberg Variations rather than The Well-Tempered Klavier, the close of Beethoven’s 9th rather than the start of his 5th, a passage of Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians, Hank Williams, some Kraftwerk, T-Bone Walker, Tinariwen, Howlin’ Wolf, Satie, Little Richard, Morton Feldman, Big Youth… in fact, far too much to stick on the side of the planet’s biggest rocket ship. Though as a snapshot of a world at a specific point in time, this could probably not be bettered. But hey – imagine if some alien spun this disc, and the only language they understood was the whalesong? And what might the whales be saying about us?

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet, Landfall

★★★★☆​

Download this: The Electricity Goes Out And We Move To A Hotel; Dawn Of The World; Nothing Left But Their Names; Everything Is Floating

There’s always been an element of loss in Laurie Anderson’s work, so the havoc caused by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy is a natural subject for her to reflect upon in this first commission for the Kronos Quartet. Her text muses on things swept away – dreams, memories, old equipment, extinct animals – while the music, some drawn from pieces they’d been working on for years, has retrospectively acquired storm-specific titles, echoing the way that floods literally place things in different contexts. Some are perfectly matched: the cycling strings of the poignant “The Electricity Goes Out And We Move To A Hotel” are like waves lapping at a wall, while the darting bricolage of scraping bow and “close-up” violin brings a real sense of desperation to “Dawn Of The World”. Anderson’s characteristic air of matter-of-fact wonder, meanwhile, lends a gentle charm to the epiphanies of “Everything Is Floating” and “Nothing Left But Their Names”, in which she decides that lists of the lost – respectively, memorabilia and extinct animals – are adequate embodiments of their nature.

Wild Beasts, Last Night All My Dreams Came True

★★★☆☆

Download this: Wanderlust; A Simple Beautiful Truth; All The King’s Men

If it’s a shame that Wild Beasts have chosen to throw in the towel just after reaching a career high with 2016’s Boy King, it’s an even bigger shame that they should wave farewell with as ambivalent an album as Last Night All My Dreams Came True, which is simply a “live studio” recording of previously issued material, mostly sourced from Boy King. Though not a bad album as such, it just seems rather timid and defeatist for a band whose swashbuckling panache was once conveyed in lines like “I would lie anywhere with you/Any old bed of nails will do” and “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck”, the latter entreaty opening this set with the frantic, scuttling electropop of “Wanderlust”. It’s a burly collection, with the band’s flanged guitars and proggy synths asserting their refusal to follow any set style, and Hayden Thorpe’s bristling vocals similarly stretching indie constraints; but when the only “new” track is jerry-rigged together from two old tracks, it all seems a bit unnecessary.

Belle and Sebastian, How To Solve Our Human Problems

★★★★☆​

Download this: The Girl Doesn’t Get It; Show Me The Sun; A Plague On Other Boys; Poor Boy

With this collation of Belle And Sebastian’s recent triple EP series, an overall theme of change and ageing becomes apparent, most of the 15 tracks reflecting on the subtle shifts in perception and attitude to which maturity condemns us. As such, it’s wreathed in regret for how “the years came and turned it upside down”, for the paths not taken and the love left unrequited – though rarely have these wistful sighs been as tenderly couched as here, in observations like “There’s a roped-off part of every human heart for the first one you loved”. With the final EP, the approach shifts to a dual aspect in songs such as “Poor Boy” and “Everything Is Now”, with one party’s self-pity cauterised by the curt disdain of his old crush – if you felt that way back then, why didn’t you say so? Subtle tints of woodwind and strings lend a baroque-pop charm to the genial strummage and bustling electropop, while the harmonies have a blithe but melancholy tone fondly reminiscent of The Mamas & The Papas. Quite, quite lovely.

Joshua Homme​, In The Fade

★★★☆☆

Download this: Superhero; Dead Man Walking; The Bronze; The Chase

Director Fatih Akin was apparently listening to a lot of Queens Of The Stone Age whilst making his film In The Fade, and felt it embodied something of his vengeful heroine’s character: “It has a self-destructive attitude,” he explains, “and somehow the film is about self-destruction.” That certainly comes through strongly in Josh – sorry, Joshua – Homme’s soundtrack pieces, which punctuate a handful of suitably alienated song choices from the likes of Courtney Barnett, Lykke Li and Faith No More. There’s a suitably malevolent torpor about the looming industrial drones and dark, bowed burrs of such brief, fragmentary cues as “The End”, “Suicide” and “Dead Man Walking”, with only “The Chase” affording Homme the longer space to stretch out with furtive, chugging strings, high synth whines and metallic sounds. Of the songs, FNM’s galloping diatribe “Superhero” and QOTSA’s “The Bronze” apply the most effective blend of brooding discontent and squalling guitars.

I’m With Her, See You Around

★★★☆☆

Download this: See You Around; Ain’t That Fine; Wild One; Ryland (Under The Apple Tree)

As with the splendid case/lang/veirs project, I’m With Her yokes together the talents of three singer-songwriters on the cusp of folk and country – in this case, Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan. The songwriting is not quite as enigmatic as on that precursor project, sticking fairly closely to romance and relationships – from the darling rustic love song “Ryland (Under The Apple Tree)” to the more claustrophobic alliance depicted as an endlessly tiresome car journey in “I-89”. But the trio’s strengths lie mostly in the natural sweetness of their harmonies, a heartbreaking union of glowing melancholy underscoring the life lessons of songs such as “See You Around” and “Ain’t That Fine”, a bluegrass reflection on past mistakes in which the claim “I’ve got a story, a dotted line” hints at the ongoing ellipsis of life. Elsewhere, they help temper the desolation of Gillian Welch’s “Hundred Miles”, and add gently yearning wonder to the young girl’s desire to escape the safe valley of familiar expectations in “Wild One”.