Album reviews: Mavis Staples | A New International | Xan Tyler & Dusty Stray

Mavis Staples: Sad and Beautiful World (ANTI- Records) ★★★★

A New International: Operation Internation (self-released) ★★★★

Xan Tyler & Dusty Stray: Home (Last Night From Glasgow/Stereogram Recordings) ★★★★

Calamity was averted a couple of years ago when the magnificent Mavis Staples reconsidered her intention to retire. At 86, she’s still got the music in her and, boy, do we need the soothing balm, gospel uplift and soulful authority of her voice and message as much as ever.

With her father and siblings in the Staple Singers, she soundtracked the civil rights struggles of the Sixties and Seventies but she isn’t done yet. Over the last two decades, she has released a succession of albums, working with Ry Cooder, Ben Harper, M Ward and especially fellow Chicagoan Jeff Tweedy to create a late body of work not dissimilar to Johnny Cash’s American albums series.

Now, it is the turn of producer Brad Cook to be the Rick Rubin to her Cash. On Sad and Beautiful World, he brings the songs and lets Staples do the rest, breathing peace into inflamed situations, delivering universal lyrics which are political but never partisan. Little wonder that a host of musicians from subsequent generations are queuing up to catch some of those good vibes, with MJ Lenderman, Bon Iver, Katie Crutchfield aka Waxahatchee and Sam “Iron & Wine” Beam all providing backing vocals.

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The latter appears on the opening track, a right rumpus of a take on Tom Waits’ Chicago, with guest guitaring from Buddy Guy, arguably the prime exponent of Chicago blues on the planet. From here on in, she switches from rousing to reeling in the listener with her southern soul rendition of Beautiful Strangers, which she delivers as a commission to the next generation, investing the line “if I lose my voice, if I have no choice but to go quiet, won’t you sing for me” with a gravitas that even its writer Kevin Morby couldn’t muster.

Other song choices are similarly germane, from Curtis Mayfield’s We Got to Have Peace to Frank Ocean’s Godspeed. The wise country standard Satisfied Mind is embellished with mellow backing choir, Bonnie Raitt brings additional class to Everybody Needs Love, while Jeff Tweedy and his son Spencer reunite with her on Gillian Welch’s modern classic Hard Times.

Staples is speaking to present times throughout, and there is a new song in her armoury which stands comfortably with the rest. Hozier and Allison Russell penned Human Mind especially for her and it captures her voice perfectly as she sings “this far down the line, I find good in us sometimes” with natural integrity and a touch of aching grief. The album ends with Staples’ throaty chuckle - like her music, a beacon of joy and hope.

Glasgow ensemble A New International’s latest album has been “only 16 years in the making” but it arrives with a signature flourish as if its 20 songs fell naturally into their collective lap. Operation Internation is wide in sound and scope, taking in everything from klezmer instrumentals to secular choral hymns, from the easy listening Bond balladry of Montreal to The Capitalist Manifesto, a droll Latin waltz inspired by the 1978 World Cup theme. Kim’s Theme is a drowsy half speed spy ode to Mr Philby while History Will Be Ours splices Weimar cabaret knees-up with a tune akin to The Turtles’ Happy Together.

Glasgow-based vocalist Xan Tyler and Amsterdam-based Jonathan Brown, aka Dusty Stray, team up for an outwardly serene album of “endings and beginnings”, though their covers of Skeeter Davis’s The End of the World and Daniel Johnston’s True Love Will Find You In The End are both devastating dispatches in their way, the latter accompanied by drone and percussion. Their own material is winsome and graceful, elevated by the satisfying clash of Stray’s slightly weathered indie Americana tones with Tyler’s dreamy croon.

READ MORE: Gwenno & Quinquis, Glasgow review: 'bewitching'

CLASSICAL

Nowel: Advent & Beyond (Delphian) ★★★★

While Christmas releases can wait a bit, Advent will soon be upon us, so here’s a refreshing take on the Advent Carol Service that sequences mostly modern settings alongside readings by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Common to all are the homogenous voices (and sundry instrumentalists) of Toby Ward’s Ensemble Pro Victoria, flawlessly pure in such established favourites as Howells’ A Spotless Rose, Byrd’s Lully, Lullaby and the traditional German choral Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, but equally surprising us with the inclusion of the tragically suicidal Hugo Distler’s 1930s Choral Variations on Die Weihnachtsgeschichte (as skilfully polyphonic as any of Bach’s), Piers Connor Kennedy’s affable Nowel el el for harp and male voices (clearly modelled on Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols), and carols by other living composers David McGregor and Philip WJ Stopford. If the time has come to set the Yuletide mood musically, this’ll do. Ken Walton

FOLK

Isla Ratcliff: The Scottish Four Seasons (Own Label) ★★★★

Many have had their way with Vivaldi’s perennial favourite, from Tim Kliphuis’s Hot Club swing to Max Richter’s “recomposition”. Here, Edinburgh fiddler and composer Isla Ratcliff’s re-imagining takes Vivaldi’s concerti on an engaging, Scots-accented jaunt, supported by a sterling string ensemble of Kristan Harvey, Megan Henderson, Lauren MacColl, cellist Natalie Haas and double-bassist Charlie Stewart, plus pianist Iona Reid. Following an ebullient introductory Meltin o the Snaw, Vivaldi’s Viennese imaginings are transposed to the Highland landscape (with a sleeve note poem by Ratcliff for each track), through spring to winter, ranging in mood from the drowsy Flower’s Lament to the belligerent jig time of The Rut. There’s a stately drift to Red Autumn Moon, while a highlight is Winter Storm, driving against thrumming accompanying strings with echoes of the original’s inexorable oncoming, and a knowing postlude enshrines the Scottish climate in Four Seasons In One Day. Jim Gilchrist

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