Album reviews: The Proclaimers | Kasabian | Mackenzies | Hanna Tuulikki & Tommy Perman
The latest Proclaimers album shows they are still a band with plenty to say, writes Fiona Shepherd
The Proclaimers: You May Offend (Cooking Vinyl) ★★★★
Kasabian: Act III (Sony) ★★★
Mackenzies: A Dog’s Breakfast (Last Night From Glasgow) ★★★★
Hanna Tuulikki & Tommy Perman: Echo in the Dark (KIN-TU) ★★★★
Sharp lyrics, soft tunes, big energy - every artist should want what The Proclaimers are having. Their 13th album is as vibrant, big-hearted, scornful and mischievous as a hungry debut. For a band who are every bit as adept at capturing the political moment as examining their own lives and concerns, there is clearly still plenty of grist to their mill in the headlines of the day.
You May Offend takes off with a punkish energy, rambunctious melody and Manic Street Preachers’ frontman James Dean Bradfield keeping pace with some lightning guitar licks on Knock It Down. The album title could be a warning or an invitation. The title track itself is a whimsical waltz with a sting in the tale, meditating on the perils of frankness: “speech is free, so are we, I am assured, but too much rational thought needs to be cured”.
Their sober anger is reminiscent of Elvis Costello on the mournful twang of But It Is, which sums up the national psyche in one short, sage phrase: “we say that’s not who we are but it is”. Over sweeping romantic strings, they lament “we lecture others on morality, while wi’ the de’il we sup” and return to the frustration of hollow rhetoric on There’s No Plan, which says it all: “failed as an old parachute, course we don’t know what we are doing and there’s no plan”. Widescreen ballad The Grooming, meanwhile, is a cautionary tale on what we teach our kids about national pride, a Shipbuilding for the drone warfare age.
Yet none of this is portentous or heavy because it is delivered with such effortless melodic acuity and leavening humour: “I got this bruise when I walked into a door” they breeze on A Little Bit Late, a chiming, upbeat ode to playing with fire, while Easy Rhyme is one for those who revel in the Reids’ signature love of language. What a pleasure to hear a band who still have something to say.
Kasabian continue to boss the crossroads of indie rock and blaring dance music, though their latest album is punctuated with undulating ambient interludes. Act III is frontloaded with singles, the Gorillaz swagger of Superpowers being by far the most interesting of the bunch. The rest of the album pays greater dividends, not least Silver Apple Eyes’s uplifting indie electro in the vein of Empire of the Sun. Hyper//Rising is typical of their taut, belligerent fuzz rock, mixing Sabbath strut with 70s power pop but they end with the soulful, languid Say You, a hopeful hand on the shoulder, demonstrating that there is power in tenderness.
Another week, another veteran cult Scottish band gets a second bite of the cherry. Punk-funk outfit Mackenzies achieved cult immortality on the NME’s influential C86 cassette compilation of bright young things but have only now recorded their debut album 40 years on, revisiting older songs and adding new material. The title track of A Dog’s Breakfast makes a more-ish meal of clamorous guitar, squawking saxophone, propulsive rhythms and dynamic breakdowns while groovy, angular fanfare Anomaly marshals cacophonous elements with the funky flair of A Certain Ratio.
Experimental musicians Hanna Tuulikki & Tommy Perman build on their “silent bat raves” of 2022 with an album of dance music based round ultrasonic bat calls rendered audible to the human ear. Each track is inspired by a different bat from around the British Isles. On this evidence, one can only assume the Serotine Bat is a fan of heady electro disco and that the Great Horseshoe Bat favours a slower BPM and slinkier house style. Echo Locate is a slowburn sensual call to the dancefloor, while the chirruping of pipistrelle bats is folded into a dreamy retro synth soundscape of Falling Free.
CLASSICAL
Enescu: String Octet | Piano Quintet in D major (Chandos) ★★★★
The term “child prodigy” is often overused. Hardly so in the case of George Enescu (1881-1955), the Romanian-born composer and violinist who entered the Vienna Conservatoire aged 7, graduated at 12, and by his late teens had already attracted considerable respect as a composer. Violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster’s flexible Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective reinforce the evidence here with two representative early works: the thoroughly Brahmsian Piano Quintet in D of 1896, and the more daringly progressive 1899 String Octet. The former casts a meaty, confident, lyrically enticing spell which the players latch onto with a convincing combination of considered passion and invigorating bite. The Octet is a more complex challenge, Enescu’s stylistic aspirations already knocking on the door of early Schoenberg, driven by ardent adventurism, and with it encountering moments of directional uncertainty. Yet the performance plays to its strengths: characterful rhetoric and a determined drive. Ken Walton
FOLK
Hamish Napier: The Hill (Strathspey Records) ★★★★★
The fourth album in Hamish Napier’s ongoing pentalogy celebrating his native Strathspey area, this is the most rewarding yet, his flute and keyboard skills accompanied by a crew of renowned musicians including string quartet while an illustrated 14,000-word booklet combines gazetteer with Gaelic glossary. Music ranges from minimalist to orchestral, reflecting the topography: Sheiling features Napier’s solitary flute accompanied only by birdsong and burnwater, while the opening Wind is appropriately tempestuous. Fiddler Duncan Chisholm brings a gorgeous ache to the slow air of Am Monadh, Ridge and Glens are exhilaratingly upbeat, while Sarah-Jane Summers’s Hardanger fiddle joins flute to evoke Dipper in a strathspey and Fraser Stone’s drums stir the mercurial temperament of Faeries. To close, a stately piobaireachd, piped by John Mulhearn, morphs into Gaelic song in an eloquent commemoration of Napier’s grandfather, Findlay Cumming, who died in a climbing accident in these beloved hills. Jim Gilchrist
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