Album reviews: Michael Kiwanuka | Kim Deal | Father John Misty | Dominic Waxing Lyrical

Kim Deal: Coast (4AD) ★★★★

Father John Misty: Mahashmashana (Bella Union) ★★★★

Dominic Waxing Lyrical: Diminuet (Innes Orr Records) ★★★★

Michael Kiwanuka’s music is the very definition of quiet storm, the late night radio genre of easy listening R&B which soothed the US airwaves from the mid-Seventies onwards. Following his self-titled Mercury Prize-winning third album, Small Changes is pure soulful ear candy with a quiet power, nowhere more eloquently expressed than on the title track.

Producers Danger Mouse and Kiwanuka’s fellow Londoner Inflo complement his love of delicious symphonic soul on opener Floating Parade with its spiralling strings, springy bassline and subtle aching sentiment, while the mesmeric reverie of Lowdown Parts 1 and 2 draws on the conscious soul of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield and the Bill Withers-like invocation One and Only thrums with light-touch jazzy guitar resonance.

Stay By My Side adds swirling electronics and skittering beats to a mellow jazz soundscape, while The Rest of Me exudes cool Eighties R&B vibes (legendary Janet Jackson producer Jimmy Jam drops by as a guest player on the album).

Bathe in the sound and drill down for the enriching emotion from this master of the art of understatement.

Former Pixies bassist/vocalist and Breeders frontwoman Kim Deal has almost 40 years of music-making experience to draw on for her debut solo album and it is as surprising yet assured as any fan could hope for.

Coast has been around a decade in the making with a team of compadres including her twin sister Kelley Deal, the late producer Steve Albini and Teenage Fanclub’s Raymond McGinley.

Opening track Nobody Loves You More is a delightful cocktail of fragile vocals, delicate percussive backing, sighing strings and then an all-out Burt Bacharach-influenced orchestral punch and those uplifting horns are back on the title track alongside twanging guitar and mariachi touches. Summerland is another ravishing retro symphonic pop odyssey and Are You Mine? is a devastating dreamy waltz inspired by her mother’s dementia.

There are spikier, arguably more typical Deal nuggets on offer too, from the grungey Disobedience and fuzzy, fidgety Crystal Breath to the curt poetry and thorny punk landscape of Big Ben Beat while Wish I Was showcases her idiosyncratic blend of innocence and experience. Like Pixies in their prime, you never quite know what angle she is going to hit you from, but there is a joy in being blindsided by her sonic curveballs.

Singer and showman Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, is an old hand at the caustic crooning and goes Nelson Riddle big band bonanza from the off on his latest psych country opus Mahashmashana, with an expertly marshalled title track which grows to an almost hysterical climax.

She Cleans Up is a funky pop maelstrom with a cameo reference to Scarlett Johansson riding around the Scottish countryside in the cult sci-fi film Under the Skin and Screamland is a cathartic ride on a diabolic funfair, contrasting with the languid melancholy of Summer’s Gone. Most audacious of all is I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All, a slick disco-infused odyssey with shimmying saxophone in the style of the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons.

Edinburgh-based musician and poet Dominic Harris returns as Dominic Waxing Lyrical with an album recorded in a wintry Bible Belt and released as the weather turns chilly again. There is an unvarnished stridency to Harris’s vocal style which lends itself to the raw storytelling of cautionary folk tales (Rock Pool) and the swaggering theatricality of Weimar cabaret (Graphite) - the latter garlanded with a chamber string arrangement by Robert McFall of Mr McFall’s Chamber - but also suited to the desolate grace of The Yard Arm and a closing rendition of Schubert’s Gute Nacht.

CLASSICAL

SCO: Schubert Symphonies Nos 5 & 8 (Linn) ★★★★★

Schubert’s Fifth Symphony shoots off the starting block like a medal-hungry Olympic sprinter - light-footed, physiologically tuned, with its focus firmly on the winning post. This is Maxim Emelyanychev and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra unleashing without hesitation, and with instant gratification, the Mozartian spirit of a work Schubert conceived under the influence of the latter’s chamber music. The playing is exquisite, a masterful interaction of the symphony’s intertwining textures, silken poetry from the strings, a sound world calibrated perfectly to scale. Emelyanychev’s grasp of the textural perspectives is sheer magic. The chamber influence is especially powerful in the third movement trio, a moment of subliminal intimacy. How much more powerful, then, the ensuing mystery of the “Unfinished” Symphony, its contrasting thoughtfulness amplified by a haunting stillness of the vibrato-less strings and gorgeously nurtured wind phrasing. The Rondo in A (violin soloist Stephanie Gonley) is effectively a rewarding encore. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Colin Vallon: Samares (ECM) ★★★★

Swiss pianist Colin Vallon, in his tightly knit trio with bassist Patrice Moret and drummer Julian Sartorius, creates a delicately impressionist sound world, chamber jazz that can be hauntingly melancholy or introspective. Faintly oriental chimes and distant drum rolls herald the opening track, Racine, with tentative piano, setting a stealthy, nocturne-like vibe, before the subsequent track, Mars, unfolds into a steady flow that exemplifies the trio’s combination of expressive power and restraint. Lou is gracefully contemplative, the piano given at times a faintly metallic jangle, otherwise gently spelling out its pensive melody against shadowy drums. Similarly, in Timo, a repetitive pattern on prepared-sounding piano and bass becomes compelling as the drums finally cut loose. A samara is a winged seed, and the intro to the title track eddies and swirls accordingly, while the album closes with the meditative stillness of Brin, all of it music that rewards repeated listening. Jim Gilchrist