Album reviews: Lady Gaga | Throwing Muses | Jason Isbell | Racecar

Throwing Muses: Moonlight Concessions (Fire Records) ★★★

Jason Isbell: Foxes in the Snow (Southeastern Records) ★★★

Racecar: Pink Car (self-released) ★★★★

Artistic all-rounder that she is, Lady Gaga has always cast her creative net wide, so when she claims that her latest album is a return to her eclectic roots, that could mean she’s firing off in any number of musical directions.

In practice, much of Mayhem sounds like something she’s done before. Gaga tends to push the boundaries on her visuals while sticking to mainstream musical ideas and her latest is a reassuringly banging dance pop collection for the most part, opening with singles Disease and Abracadabra. The former floats easy metaphors on her curative powers while the latter conjures an onomatopoeic chorus reminiscent of Bad Romance.

The extrovert Garden of Eden re-animates the well-worn trope of escapist encounters on the dancefloor with its throbbing bass drops and semi-rapped vocals. From this point, Gaga is as good as her word, ranging from commercial rocker Perfect Celebrity to the disco melodrama of Vanish Into You, ballsy ballad Blade of Grass and overblown power rock of The Beast.

She is brazen in her appropriation of terse Prince licks on Killah and Blondie vibes on the shimmering Eighties hip-hop/funk pop melange of Zombieboy, and all but lifts the synth hooks of Yazoo’s Only You for How Bad Do U Want Me.

Die With a Smile, her international hit duet with Bruno Mars, is an outlier, programmed at the end of the album where its smooth, flowing, comfortably old-fashioned arrangement won’t kill her dancefloor buzz. Even so, it shares some of the Eighties R&B production flourishes she deploys boldly elsewhere.

Cult US outfit Throwing Muses return with nine short but vital dispatches on their latest album. Moonlight Concessions matches its musical pithiness with frontwoman Kristin Hersh’s punchy poetry and bracing bursts of dialogue: “Question: what happened? Answer: everything”. But it’s not all sharp edges. Theremini is a moody, slightly gothic prowl infused with Hersh’s ghostly intoning.

The malevolent blues of South Coast is a direct product of the album’s composition and recording in South California and New Orleans, while Albatross is an unexpectedly raucous ode to avian life and survivalism. Sally’s Beauty is a plangent rhapsody next to the austere, brutalist arrangement of Drugstore Drastic, and there is nothing fluffy about You’re Clouds with its clanking guitars, hissing shakers and brooding cello.

Jason Isbell is a more direct storyteller. Foxes in the Snow is the first all-acoustic album from an esteemed alt.country artist better known for whipping up a roots rock storm with his band the 400 Unit, and it was recorded in five days using one guitar following his divorce from fellow musician Amanda Shires. Their severance is addressed most explicitly on Gravelweed and the regret-tinged Good While It Lasted.

A touch of bitterness creeps in to True Believer (“why are you all examining me like I’m a murder suspect?”) while the spry folk title track is a Loudon Wainwright-style ode with snippets of wit (“I like the carrot but I really like the stick”) and Wind Behind the Rain captures the last-forever optimism of fresh love.

Edinburgh trio Racecar also trace the progress of a relationship - hooking up, breaking up, and making up – across the course of their second album Pink Car, motoring through an ever-changing landscape of influences, from prog pop to power rock and even old school metal, often crammed into the one track.

The uplifting rave rock outro of The Big One signifies the partying of the protagonists on the night they meet, violinist Lissa Robertson and cellist Graham Coe ride the rhythmic waves of Zephyr, while Hard to Have One is another left turn, a lovely legato croon from singer Izzy Flower set to a brass band arrangement.

CLASSICAL

The Sixteen: Angel of Peace (CORO) ★★★★

As the world witnesses hostility and uncertainty, music that centres on peace and tranquility has to be a welcome panacea. Not that Harry Christophers and his ace choir The Sixteen would necessarily have foreseen the timely correlation. Angel of Peace is a sublime sequence of music that ranges from the purified medieval plainchant of Hildegard of Bingen (poignantly underpinned by a timeless drone) and resplendent Renaissance polyphony of John Taverner’s Gaude Plurimum and O Splendor Gloriae, to more modern meditations by Estonian Arvo Pärt (the diaphanous simplicity of his Tribute to Ceasar and 1989 Magnificat), plus recent Sixteen commissions from Will Todd (I shall be an angel of peace) and Anna Clyne (Orbits) distinguished by the interweaving violin obbligatos of Sarah Sexton. Todd’s meditation conjures an enchanting calm. Clyne’s music, a world premiere recording, unleashes rustic joy and carefree optimism, but hope and contentment are never far away. Ken Walton

FOLK

Liz Overs: Nightjar (Own Label) ★★★★

This poetic and atmospherically charged debut solo album from Sussex-based singer-songwriter Liz Overs reflects immersion in tradition, folklore and the natural world, right from her opening solstice invocation, Prayer to the Year: “East of the sunlight and west of the moon.” Mixing her own, often beguiling compositions with traditional song, her breathy and at times eerie intonation is expertly complemented by guitarists and multi-instrumentalists Neill McColl, David Tomlins and double-bassist Ben Nicholls, the latter also playing banjo and concertina. Traditional ballads include Cruel Sister, her delivery ethereal yet compellingly spinning the fateful tale, its unspooling ushered along by guitar and bass which – here and in Overs’s own Honeysuckle on the Vine – are strikingly reminiscent of classic Pentangle. Other compositions include the lovely Snow Moon with its ethereal multi-tracked vocals, inspired by the 16th-century English poet and farmer Thomas Tusser, and the mysterious nocturnal whisperings of the title track. Jim Gilchrist