Album reviews: Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Bjork, and more

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – Who Built The Moon?; Bjork – Utopia; Sufjan Stevens – The Greatest Gift; Aretha Franklin with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – A Brand New Me; Jim Byrnes – Long Hot Summer Days; Naomi Bedford & Paul Simmonds – Songs My Ruiner Gave To Me; Wilco – Being There: Deluxe Edition

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Who Built The Moon?

★★★★☆

Download: Holy Mountain; It’s A Beautiful World; She Taught Me How To Fly; Be Careful What You Wish For

Seven tracks into Who Built The Moon?, and the jangly guitar arpeggios heralding “Black & White Sunshine” remind you of what’s been missing so far – or to put it another way, of how far Noel Gallagher has come since Oasis. As it happens, with references to “glory days for the waifs and strays” and “you got the nerve, I got the brains”, it’s easy to read that song as being about that gilded past, recalled with wistful euphoria; but that was then, and this is now, and Noel has other fish to fry.

And tasty fish they are, too. As might be expected from such an inveterate musical magpie, there are plenty of moments here that summon memories from pop history. But encouraged by the eclectic ears of producer David Holmes, these aren’t the kind of classic-rock influences that once routinely featured on Oasis albums, but more rarefied stitches from rock’s rich tapestry, referencing everything from Krautrock to soundtracks, voodoo to Velvets, world music to Wall of Sound. It’s a riot of musical colour, ingeniously marshalled by Holmes into a series of infectious, punchy pop cuts that allow Noel’s melodic instincts to cut through more clearly than in some while.

The siren-like guitar sounds of “Fort Knox” offer a suitable hint of his ambitions, with jet planes swooping by, and drums battering in: it’s like a fanfare overture to the album, promising drama and panache. The single “Holy Mountain” is the first instalment of that drama, a chugging stomp with keening backing vocals, horns and a ticklish tin-whistle hook behind Gallagher’s monotone machine-gun vocal, rather like a fatter “Ça Plane Pour Moi” crossed with “She Bangs the Drums”.

The pulsing electric piano groove of “Keep On Reaching”, again punctuated with funky horn stabs, sustains the energy into the itchily insistent shuffle of “It’s A Beautiful World”, which with its grinding guitar groove and quixotic association of sex and death recalls the Velvet Underground: “I sing a song of love, and you can teach me what you know of death.”

I love “She Taught Me How To Fly”, featuring Noel’s treated vocal floating above a juddering Neu!-beat motorik; and the brief instrumental “Interlude (Wednesday Pt 1)”, which extends the European flavour by adorning a cyclical acoustic guitar figure with organ, chimes and lead guitar, to create a kind of Euro-thriller character. Of course, there have to be a few Beatles references, but this time they’re blended into the one song, “Be Careful What You Wish For”, which sounds like “Come Together” done in the production style of “Instant Karma”, a loping, reverberant groove that carries his vocal like a camel crossing the desert. But the key to its success may be the backing vocals, which evoke both Dr John’s witchy Gris-Gris and the Trio Bulgarka’s polyphony. The result is moody, cool and mysterious, and quite magnificent.

Of course, it’s not a perfect album. Sleigh bells and sonic opacity give “If Love Is The Law” a Spector-esque feel, but it’s the kind of yearning romance Noel could write in his sleep, and maybe did; and while the widescreen production of “The Man Who Built The Moon” strives to deliver the drama promised by “Fort Knox”, it doesn’t quite succeed. But it’s still by far his best post-Oasis work, an album which doesn’t try to challenge that heritage, but strikes out to explore new territory.

Bjork, Utopia

★☆☆☆☆

Download: Courtship; Utopia

Although Utopia is posited as a paradisiacal contrast to Bjork’s “heartbreak” album Vulnicura, there are more similarities than differences between the two works. The main change is the sonic palette, which eschews strings for airy wind timbres, including a 12-piece Icelandic flute section and copious birdsong. But the glitchy, stutter-splash beats are retained, as is Bjork’s irritating delivery, which isn’t so much singing as mannered recitation, drained of emotional inflection. This isn’t so bad during the earlier stages, when she’s “in love with being in love”, but by the time she’s lecturing the little ones about “the f***-ups of the fathers” in “Tabula Rasa”, it’s simply unbearable, like being expected to enjoy being lectured about attitudes you don’t hold.

The flute arrangements lend a frisky, birdlike mood to “Courtship” and “Utopia”, but there’s a complete failure of melodic potency throughout, a shortcoming exacerbated by the way that the beats, flutes, and voices have only the most marginal, possibly accidental, relationship with each other. Achingly dull, and self-regardingly solipsistic.

Sufjan Stevens, The Greatest Gift

★★★★☆

Download: Wallowa Lake Monster; Drawn To The Blood; Death With Dignity; John My Beloved; The Greatest Gift; All Of Me Wants All Of You

That rarity, an album themed around bereavement, Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell is such a heartfelt, intimate work, full of personal revelations and emotional turmoil, that it’s the last thing you’d expect to be remixed. That this “mixtape” selection of out-takes, remixes and demos succeeds so well is tribute both to the sensitivity of the remixers and to Stevens’s remarkable talents.

His iPhone demos of “Carrie & Lowell” and “John My Beloved” have the delicate, exposed purity of dew-spangled webs, while out-takes such as “The Greatest Gift” and “Wallowa Lake Monster” are so of a piece with the original album, in terms of mood, technique and tonal colour, that one seems to have encountered them already. The latter, which opens this collection, is another example of the way Stevens seamlessly blends youthful reminiscence and adult regret into his narratives, while Helado Negro’s remixes of “Death With Dignity” and “All Of Me Wants All Of You”, in particular, ingeniously tease subtle delay echoes into gentle grooves without endangering their fragile meniscuses.

Aretha Franklin with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, A Brand New Me

★★☆☆☆

Download: (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman; You’re All I Need To Get By

Before Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler hit upon the idea of pairing Aretha Franklin’s searing gospel passion with the lean Southern soul grooves forged at Fame Studios in Alabama, Columbia Records struggled for six years to find the right vehicle for her talents, often corseting her voice in cabaret orchestrations. So what, one wonders, is to be gained by replacing those original fatback Muscle Shoals arrangements with bloated strings and horns for this latest RPO makeover? And the answer is, in most cases, less than zero: the likes of “I Say A Little Prayer” and “Respect” don’t need this treatment – they were already perfect. And the dramatic soul-jazz overture plonked onto the start of “Think” just sets up expectations summarily dismissed by the actual song’s opening bars. The only semi-successes are “You’re All I Need To Get By” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, on which the string caresses are more apt; but it’s still a case of polishing away the patina that’s an intrinsic part of the performances.

Jim Byrnes, Long Hot Summer Days

★★★★☆

Download: Step By Step; The Shape I’m In; Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City; Out Of Left Field

Sometimes a performer needs to grow into their voice; sometimes, they need to unearth the right material to fit that voice, and sometimes, this may take quite some time. A perfect case in point: notwithstanding previous successes like My Walking Stick and Everywhere West, Jim Byrnes has never sung as impressively as he does here, perched on the cusp of his seventh decade. The songs are perfectly picked for his worn, smoky baritone, while the bluesy arrangements created with long-term producer/guitarist Steve Dawson brilliantly elucidate his unbowed character: The Band’s “The Shape I’m In” is taken at a weary slouch, while springy guitar gives “Everybody Knows” a jauntier, less bitter character than the Cohen original. Occasionally augmented with lowing, gospelly backing vocals and sepia-tint horns, the soul-funk settings recall the Seventies heyday of Little Feat, ingeniously applied to Byrnes’s originals like “Deep Blue Sea” and covers of such period classics as “Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City” and “Out Of Left Field”. An entirely pleasurable experience, recommended to Daptone fans everywhere.

Naomi Bedford & Paul Simmonds, Songs My Ruiner Gave To Me

★★★★☆

Download: The Cruel Mother; The Still Want You Blues; Misty, Golden Road; Ballad Of A Self Made Man

Naomi Bedford & Paul Simmonds are the UK equivalent of Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: folk artists able to channel traditional mythic concerns through modern sensibilities, in settings acknowledging the gamut of Anglo-American roots musics. Hence Simmonds’s “Ballad Of A Self Made Man”, a satanic encounter in which the devil is publican of a dive bar, preying on human weakness; and Bedford’s arrangement of “The Cruel Mother”, a tragic trad-folk tale of infanticide well suited to the “high lonesome” warble of her voice. In similar vein is Percy Shelley’s poem of clerical meanness “Young Parson Richards”, set to a febrile mix of keening slide guitar, fiddle and mad piano, while at the opposite end of the cheer scale, banjo and wistfully soaring fiddle drive “Misty, Golden Road”, their paean to touring America. Friends like Justin Currie and Andy Summers help bring out different shades of their character, as when the latter’s slide guitar and beat highlights the bluesy edge to Bedford’s voice, akin to Maria Muldaur, on “The Still Want You Blues”.

Wilco, Being There – Deluxe Edition

★★★★★

Download: Misunderstood; Monday; Outtasite (Outta Mind); I Got You (At The End Of The Century); Outta Mind (Outta Sight); The Lonely 1

Upon its release in 1997, Wilco’s second album was a dramatic statement of intent, demonstrating both Jeff Tweedy’s fecundity as songwriter, slipping between introvert and extrovert, naturalist and surrealist, and the band’s easy command of diverse rock modes, from wistful country-rock to raggedy-ass punk and Stonesy raunch-rock. One of the few double albums that wouldn’t have been better as a single album, it’s now become a quadruple set through an additional trove of out-takes and demos, here presented as two vinyl gatefold doubles in a slip-case. Unearthed tracks such as “Late Blooming Son” and “Losing Interest” add further wrinkles to the original album’s overarching theme, which grappled with the duties and delusions of rock’n’roll from both sides of the stage curtain. Most notably, “The Lonely 1” offered a sharply-observed insight into the symbiotic nature of the artist/fan relationship, while for “Misunderstood”, the band switched instruments to bring a ramshackle charm appropriate to the reluctant ambitions of its slacker musician protagonist. A landmark album.