Album reviews: Ariana Grande | The Strokes | Trashcan Sinatras | The Durutti Column

Ariana Grande: petal (Babydoll Music/Republic Records) ★★

The Strokes: Reality Awaits (RCA/Cult) ★★★

Trashcan Sinatras: Ever the Optimist (TCS Recordings) ★★★★

The Durutti Column: Renascent (London Records) ★★★★

Understandably, Ariana Grande has been tied up in recent years with her role in the blockbusting Wicked franchise, but she remains a music-making machine. Her eighth album, petal, arrives amid the usual promotional blizzard and conceptual speculation, doubtless fascinating if Grande is your pop idol but otherwise insipid.

With its connotations of blooming health, petal is themed around the positives in breaking up and moving on. Grande reckons it is more feral than delicate but the music does not bear out her interpretation. Working again with Iranian-Swedish producer Ilya Salmanzadeh, she delivers 12 songs in a trim 36 minutes. This is distilled Grande with no guests to dilute the vision. If only. What emerges is a bland if pretty pop R&B album with the occasional lyrical spike.

It’s hard to tell from Grande’s delivery alone where she stands on Hate That I Made You Love Me but the kiss-off is in the lyrics: “…cause I barely tried”. Grande uses her higher range to fluttery effect on the title track but makes no big revelation that her public and private personas don’t tally: “tired of painting endless pictures of a life that isn’t mine, trying different boys on for size, if this is my curse I’ll let it ride”.

Big Feelings, a silky tribute to high emotion, slightly ups the ante without any accompanying musical earthquake. Despite the prevailing over-production, Freak stands out among the tastefulness with its folky flute sounds and more robust melody though the sentiments remain generic.

Elsewhere, Grande offers her spin on rap braggadocio in pop R&B robes: “keep my heels tall, my ego small, but I’m still grande”. Never Get Over Me begins with some heavy vocoder, before delivering a chorus which might actually stick, while Bad Thing (Bunny Hop) provides a much-needed energy injection before the mellow run-out of Nowhere, Nobody.

READ MORE: Mika, Glasgow review: 'majored on pop confection'

The Strokes hit the ground 25 years ago with a momentum they were unable to sustain, but the New York quintet have conducted themselves with enough residual cool to appeal to a fresh generation of indie kids. Their seventh album leans too heavily on autotuned vocals, to particularly distancing effect on the bittersweet ballad Falling Out Of Love. Elsewhere there are some nice flourishes such as the 80s metal riff on Going To Babble On, the playful fuzz synth break on Lonely in the Future and the trilling guitar on Going Shopping but the quality is piecemeal.

Trashcan Sinatras may boast a fraction of The Strokes’ profile but need no lessons in how to maintain the freshness in their 40-year tenure as a band. Their ruby anniversary album is also their first in a decade, combining muscularity and wistfulness on the title track and conveying mellow majesty on The Bitter End. Joining the gentle revels are Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell, who makes a great vocal partner for Frank Reader on the insouciant yet melancholic Bad Husband, while Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside adds further sweetness on Hold On To Today. Following the announcement of the death of guitarist John Douglas, the album stands as a tribute to elegant brotherhood.

It has been 15 years since improvisational guitarist Vini Reilly last released an album as The Durutti Column. Renascent arrives on the heels of a tribute event at the Harry Styles-curated Meltdown. Styles has good taste - Reilly’s plangent, beatific guitar playing meets at the crossroads of punk, New Age, Spanish and neo-classical, and that’s just the 90 second opener, Echoes in the Memory.

For Friends Everywhere is a reworking of a 1980 track, For Belgian Friends, featuring mournful brass, glistening percussion and tremulous strings. Vocals are used sparingly but effectively with Caolfhionn Rose guesting exquisitely on Agonistes and Saragasso Sea and Reilly adding his own penitent intoning to the burnished sound of Liars.

CLASSICAL

Beethoven: The Last Three Piano Sonatas (Decca) ★★★★★

Beethoven’s last three Sonatas represent the absolute peak of his solo keyboard canon - structurally liberating, spiritually contradictory and technically uncompromising. For Mitsuko Uchida, in performances recorded live at Japan’s Suntory Hall, fresh discovery and effortless virtuosity align with profound intellectualism and emotional maturity. As always with this now 77-year-old pianist - think back to those blissful Mozart concertos she charmed SCO audiences with in the 1980s - the overriding emphasis is on purity and respect. Take the opening E major Sonata, Op 109, a subliminal fantasy-like first movement, vigorously countered by abrupt Scherzo before the radiant reconciliation of the final variations, captured here with worldly wisdom. Op 110 is especially remarkable for Uchida’s magisterial control of its reverential Finale, itself a psychological preparation for the initial rhetoric and contrapuntal frenzy of Op 111, prior to the ultimate serenity of its closing variations. Uchida’s naturalness highlights the introspective adventurousness of this often otherworldly music. Ken Walton

FOLK

Spell Songs: In Thin Air (Hudson Records) ★★★★

When author Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris published their glowing counterblast against vocabulary erosion, The Lost Words, in 2017, they couldn’t have imagined just what they were launching. It was seized upon by an inspired musical collective, Spell Songs – Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Rachel Newton, Kris Drever, Seckou Keita, Beth Porter and Jim Molyneux – who have already produced two fine albums. Their third, In Thin Air, couched in its own sumptuously illustrated volume, casts a delicate magic of its own in response to Macfarlane and Morris’s latest, The Book of Birds. There’s floating serenity in Julie Fowlis’s An Calman (The Dove) and she and Keita glide sublimely together in The Lullaby of the Birds, while Seika’s kora laces Drever’s exhilarating Senegal. Elsewhere, a natural world in jeopardy encompasses fractured humanity, as in Newton’s A Life Begun and in Polwart’s hauntingly compassionate Bells Fall Still. Jim Gilchrist

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