Album reviews: Arab Strap | Dexys Midnight Runners | Mari Wilson | Valerie and the Week of Wonders

Arab Strap: Half-Told Tales (Rock Action) ★★★★

Dexys Midnight Runners: LOVE (Heavenly Recordings) ★★★★

Mari Wilson: Girl About Town (Beehive Records) ★★★

Valerie and the Week of Wonders: Rhythm of Lies (LNFG Cartel) ★★★★

Hands up for a middle-aged Arab Strap? The erstwhile priapic twentysomethings succeed in bodyswerving any midlife crises to mark 30 years of no (or minimal) regrets with a potent powerhouse of a ninth album. Half-Told Tales allows Aidan Moffat to plough fertile topical territory from new angles and gives Malcolm Middleton the latitude to take the music wherever he fancies, from disco to stadium rock.

They hit the ground running with I Get Noise, a suitably bad-tempered rebuff of online noise (“you pollute my air… you overshare and overbear”), with unexpected funky soulful saxophone adding to the general urgency. In contrast, You You You is an offbeat dance prayer of devotion with Moffat listing all his attributes/ailments, while the Giorgio Moroder-inspired minimalist electro backdrop gradually gives way to towering post-rock noise.

Next on the agenda: politics. Moffat is old and grizzled enough to know that the new boss is the same as the old boss. Fighting For You combines his gruff narration with tribal drums and Charlie Burchill-style axe-wielding. The gothic prowl of Glamour Magic is an intense, pitch black pastiche of the wellness industry, a Cronenbergian journey into the ever more desperate and exploitative pursuit of eternal youth.

Gape provides a breather of sorts, manifesting as whimsical storytelling over a twanging guitar mantra before marching into the land of too much information. On Under Offer, Moffat makes the mistake of looking at his old home’s online schedule, rueing what the latest owners have done to his memories in a property culture which doesn’t always value home. In contrast, Mr Splitfoot is a delightful outlier, with Moffat dictating his paranormal notes in Half-Told Tales of the Unexpected style. Happy Birthday, sirs!

Unlike Arab Strap, Dexys Midnight Runners’ return to recording action over the past 15 years has not yielded consistent results. However, LOVE largely rewards frontman Kevin Rowlands’ single-minded risk-taking, with producer David Holmes emerging unscathed from the encounter.

The album is bookended by the openly autobiographical My Life In England Pts.1 and 2, written over 20 years ago and delivered, diary-style, with syllables added at will. The rest of the album weaves deftly between the elegant disco soul of You’ve Got the Love, the pleasing melodrama of Once A Man and Twice a Child and the odd sentimental croon of I Want to Be Holding You Next Christmas. It wouldn’t be a late period Dexys album without an awkward duet - It’s Over Now fits the bill with its anatomy of an arguing couple - while Old Love is rich, strange and honest, a portrait of Rowland himself.

Rowland’s contemporary Mari Wilson was the Sophie Ellis Bextor of the 80s. Her first album of new material in ten years also homes in on the agony and ecstasy of love, pitching straight into the girl group romance of Good News. Bubblegum pop number Lost on the Dance Floor is a tribute to her early 80s London clubbing days (“dressing up’s what we stand for”), while the 60s twang and swagger of Man About Town is more Soho than Camden.

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Industrious indie label Last Night From Glasgow continues to find gainful employment for Scotland’s would-be 80s pop stars. Valerie and the Week of Wonders were part of the early 80s Glasgow gold rush, signed to a major label and dropped after one single. Led by painter Gerard M Burns, they have reconvened to record the debut album that never was, released in tribute to guitarist Brian McFie who passed away recently and whose artwork graces the sleeve. Rhythm of Lies is a classy time capsule, finding the urban romance in their home city and common cause with their dreamy Liverpudlian peers.

CLASSICAL

Anthony Hopkins: Life is a Dream (Decca) ★★★

Fourteen years ago, actor Anthony Hopkins came out as a closet composer with an album of not-too-shabby music written “from the heart” at his own piano, reflecting what he described as his improvisational tendency “to think in clouds of thoughts”. Some of that music reappears on this new Decca album, featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra under Gustavo Dudamel, singers from the Bach Choir and Winchester Cathedral, Argentine pianist Sergio Tiempo and Venezuelan cellist Gregorio Nieto. If the cast is epic, so is the music in an opulent, cinematic sense. The opening Fanfare and March is Tinseltown to a T; the 2 Pieces for Orchestra combine exotic magnitude and effect; the 1947 Suite for Piano and Orchestra is a whirlwind of breathless frenzy and jazzy sentimentality. Contemplation abounds in the intimate, Welsh-inspired Margam and My Fatherland, also in the lyrical sincerity of Stella Aria, Farewell My Love and Tara. Ken Walton

FOLK

Fraser Fifield: The Inchcolm Antiphoner (Own Label) ★★★★

Saxophonist and piper Fraser Fifield has spent a highly productive four years as traditional artist in residence at Edinburgh University’s Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, delving deeply into the department’s archives to produce some memorable projects. He finishes his residency with perhaps the most unusual of these, his arrangement of Scotland’s oldest known musical manuscript, The Inchcolm Antiphoner, for saxophone quartet. Dating from around 1340, the Antiphoner was a collection of songs, notated on vellum, associated with the Augustinian priory on Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth. To arrange these for saxophone quartet – Fifield on soprano sax, Sue McKenzie alto, Martin Kershaw tenor and Allon Beauvoisin baritone – may seem perverse but, given Fifield’s regard for the voice-like quality of these instruments, it has paid off surprisingly and beautifully, as their reedy tones sing out, revivifying and harmonising these originally monophonic liturgical cadences in all their serenity. Jim Gilchrist

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