Album reviews: Jungle | The Womack Sisters | The Anchoress

Jungle: Sunshine (Caioloa Records/AWAL) ★★★★

The Womack Sisters: The Womack Sisters (Daptone) ★★★★

The Anchoress: As We Once Were (Last Night From Glasgow) ★★★★

Cool London outfit Jungle emerged fully formed 12 years ago with an intoxicating signature sound featuring the unison falsetto vocals of founder members Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland applied to an uplifting soul and funk-influenced club-friendly backing. Their debut hit Busy Earnin’ remains a benchmark - sleek, streamlined, rich yet undemanding, replete with feelgood vibes and delivered by two somewhat anonymous figures.

Their fourth album Volcano knocked their sales and profile up a notch and they netted the Brit Award for Best Band in 2024. Their reply has been to promote long time guest singer Lydia Kitto to the official line-up. Hers is the first voice heard on their latest album, the aptly titled Sunshine.

Come Back To Me is a light doowop breeze with a scattering of ska which recalls early Saint Etienne singles. Like Saint Etienne, Jungle reap influences from around the world but still sound like a resolutely London group. The title track radiates similar joy, a walk in the park with airy strings, twittering birdsong and summer house music style.

The shimmering, brooding soul track Where Are You Now? betrays the subtlest hint of wistfulness before diaphanous disco delight Move Like You Do suitably puts some pep in its step. Sudanese-American rapper Bas brings some Daisy Age hip-hop elements to Romeo II, while Carry On is luscious psych folk pop with dreamy backing vocals.

The Wave is perfect beach listening, with its soca-infused Ibiza chill out ambience, Reflection is utterly blissful and steel drums resonate subtly on Someday, Somewhere to deliver a simple but exquisite dose of “late summer Jungle optimism”. Sunshine clocks in at a shade over 30 minutes, delivering its sonic panacea with precision panache.

There is more heavenly harmonising from The Womack Sisters, the next generation of the soul dynasty which produced Uncle Bobby and parents Cecil and Linda, not to mention grandfather Sam Cooke. Were those credentials not impressive enough, they release their debut album on Brooklyn’s esteemed Daptone Records, the old school soul revivalist label which rediscovered the likes of Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley in later life.

This mighty soul sisterhood deploy similar tropes and tricks to many a male doo-wop outfit, but their delivery is shot through with a strong R&B ache on the retro soul rapture of The Chauffeur. If You Want Me borrows stylishly from the call-and-response and smooth harmony tradition of the 60s girl groups, while the coquettish If I Let You evokes the tropicalia movement with its summer brass, vibraphone and Latin rhythmic arrangement.

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Kucha, Zeimani and BG wield latent power on the the accusatory You Went Away Too Long and sultry brush-off Didn’t Mean Much To Me, and there is more R&B rasp and piercing attitude on All Around. Meanwhile, the spirit of Uncle Sam hovers over them on the sorority pledge of My Sisters and Me.

Past, present and future have inspired the latest album from Welsh auteur Catherine Ann Davies, aka The Anchoress. As We Once Were was inspired by the discovery of a recording of her grandmother’s voice, the opportunity to play with Pete Townsend’s collection of vintage analogue synthesizers and becoming a mother after numerous attempts.

She hits the ground running, aided by squawking saxophone and James Dean Bradfield’s burnished guitar on Throw Over Your Man. Fellow Welsh siren Gwenno joins her for the sardonic I Had a Baby Not a Lobotomy, then it’s onwards to the glistening 80s synth pop of title track and the stately orchestration and torch balladry of All I Really Want is Peace via further guest appearances by her peer Hannah Peel and young London singer/songwriter Eaves Wilder.

CLASSICAL

John McCabe: Symphonies 2 & 3 and Cello Concerto (Signum Classics) ★★★★

John McCabe, who died in 2015, belongs to that vital stream of 20th/21st century British composers whose modernist aspirations at a time of stylistic soul-seeking fed the inspiration of today’s more relaxed modernism, but whose own exposure waned posthumously as a result. All credit to the BBC SSO and conductor Kenneth Woods for redressing the balance with an illuminating package of McCabe’s Second and Third Symphonies (both 1970s) and his 2007 Cello Concerto, Songline. These are impressive, clean-cut performances, capturing vividly the precision engineering of McCabe’s texturing, but equally the warmth that softens any underlying austerity. The Symphony No 2, a febrile, crystalline reflection on human violence, sizzles with translucent dynamism. Compare that to the lusher density of the Third Symphony (“Hommages”), or the excitable fluidity of the Aboriginal-inspired Songline with cellist Raphael Wallfisch as inspired protagonist, and the distinctiveness of McCabe’s music is plain to see. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Tim Kliphuis Trio: Rhapsody in Blue (Lowland Records) ★★★★

Dutch jazz-classical violinist Tim Kliphuis, guitarist Nigel Clark and double-bassist Roy Percy celebrate their 20th anniversary as a touring trio by grabbing Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody by the scruff of the neck, hauling it away from the concert grand and into a steamy jazz joint where it can really sizzle. That famous opening glissando transfers from clarinet to Kliphuis’s fiercely trilling fiddle before Clark and Percy step in and the music swoops, struts and swings with the brio of a Grappelli-Reinhardt session. Several Gershwin song covers include The Man I Love, which erupts from bluesy languor into sassy swing, a beautifully tender Someone to Watch Over Me, while I Loves You Porgy becomes a graceful solo guitar spot. Hoedown for the Common Man, meanwhile, is a zany Aaron Copeland mashup with folk and baroque interludes – and not without a whiff of Emerson Lake and Palmer. Jim Gilchrist

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