Album reviews: Twin Atlantic | Johnny Marr | The Yummy Fur | Hank Tree

Twin Atlantic: Separation from the Animals (Dance to the Radio) ★★★

Johnny Marr: The Age of Everything (BMG) ★★★

The Yummy Fur: Everybody’s Talking About The Weather (Upset the Rhythm) ★★★★

Hank Tree: Care I (Permanent Damage Records) ★★★

Almost 20 years since forming Twin Atlantic, frontman Sam McTrusty had his do-or-die moment, wondering if he would continue with the band. In 2024, he moved to Toronto, an upending life moment by any standards. But not even that could derail this most stoic of bands. Twin Atlantic became transatlantic.

The move did mean that the songs on their eighth album, Separation from the Animals, began as solo bedroom efforts, with McTrusty turning ever more inwards to address family life in his lyrics, from the deferred pain of being a child of divorce to the bonds which hold his own family together. “We made it - and you’ll make it too” he tells his young daughters on the opening lullaby Your, The End, a bold choice with which to kick off the record.

Meanwhile, his band family are there for him - not just longtime wingman Ross McRae but founder member Barry McKenna, who left the band in 2019, and original drummer Craig Kneale, who returns to turbo-charge the album’s two rockiest songs. First single Don’t Quit It is an old school leather and bourbon rocker infused with slick 80s funk, while Confidant provides another blast later in proceedings.

Otherwise, the songs are planted in that safe middle ground between rock and pop. Like The Script, Twin Atlantic are a band who intimate a love of heavier music while sticking to big choruses and earnest lighter-waving sentiments. McTrusty is quite happy to trot out platitudes such as “in your arms, I’m home” (from recent single In Your Eyes), comfortable in such vague universality. Not unlike Lewis Capaldi, he can summon a lot of vein-popping vocal effort from the middle of the road on the likes of The Risk of Love is Always Loss, Unless It Hurts, his chest-beating address to his wife, and Supersweetness which finds him sick with love for his daughters.

Johnny Marr has just auctioned off around 80 of his axes. While their new owners try to wrangle some residual fairy dust, this most approachable of guitar heroes releases his latest amiable, appealing album. The Age of Everything is the sound of a man playing for enjoyment, not posterity, and if you can accept that Marr’s greatest riffs are behind him, you’ll enjoy that signature virtuosic trill when it pops up all the more.

Marr is in fine voice on Spin, though the pace is a little sluggish for a song about racing minds. He sounds almost seductive on Beyond the Rain (with bassline pinched from Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit), before submitting to an indie shrug of a chorus. Likewise, the terse guitar line and dubby bassline of That Feeling musters an intrigue not sustained by the song but the power chords and brooding, bouncy bassline give All In a Life a suitable lift.

Glasgow indie trio The Yummy Fur, key players in the 90s indie scene which birthed Mogwai and Bis, release their first new music in 25 years. Everybody Talks About the Weather is a tight, punchy, catchy and eloquent collection inspired by a veritable salon of artists and literary figures from Modigliani to Susan Sontag to Sam Peckinpah. The band takes a musical trip to downtown New York on the low-slung title track, while the singalong Headphones harks back to the mischief of the 90s.

WATCH: The Scotsman Sessions #444: The Yummy Fur

The second album by Hank Tree, aka Glasgow guitarist Fergus MacDonald and collaborators Clarissa Cheong and Peter Broderick, is a soft if understandably morose suite about reliance inspired by MacDonald’s work in the care sector. Stuck, for example, is a drone folk lullaby about patterns of behaviour, Please Write is a brief psych folk mantra and the encouraging You Can Thrive taps into the naivety and tenderness of Ivor Cutler.

CLASSICAL

Leipzig Club: François Salque & Vincent Peirani (Harmonia Mundi) ★★★

There is no Leipzig Club per se. It’s an imaginary sphere in which cello-accordion duo, François Salque and Vincent Peirani, invoke the spirit of the city’s most famous musical son, JS Bach, taking him as their starting point, but seasoning their offerings with a whiff of Weimar-era hedonism. That’s partly to do with their distinctive soundworld, the accordion’s sensuous snarl, even in Mendelssohn and Bach sonata movements, as enticing as an indulgent dessert, if leaving you a little bloated before the end. More appealing are the duo’s more modern arrangements and their bespoke repertoire. Samuel Strouk’s Bach Lines is a breathless motorised fantasy, Vincent Lê Quang’s Blue Inventions a mind-bending, smoochy delight. With Peirani’s toe-tapping title track Leipzig Club, a folksy-jazzy adrenalin rush, you just wanna get up and dance. Pēteris Vasks’ lengthy, Arvo Pärt-like Castillo Interior provides a surprisingly meditative finale. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Terje Gewelt: The Old Tree (Resonant Music) ★★★★

Respected Norwegian bassist Terje Gewelt renews an association with Scots saxophonist Tommy Smith that goes back to the Eighties, along with two other seasoned Norwegian players, pianist Erlend Slettevoll and drummer Erik Smith, in this richly toned arboreal celebration. There’s a distinct Nordic vibe here, with hints of Jan Garbarek’s work with Eberhard Weber in some of Smith’s often lyrical soundings over the spacy rumblings of Gewelt’s electric upright bass, as in the stately Sentinel. Smith’s tenor sax opens unhurriedly but develops keen edge in the opening title track, alongside Slettevoll’s empathetic piano, while, after a mellow bass intro, sax and piano range together through Woodland. Elsewhere, the singing sax, bass and glistering piano gradually develop tension over hissing cymbals in Oak Wisdom, and there are unexpected tin whistle interludes from Smith, folky sounding and avian amid the spacious stillness of Last Leaf Falling. Jim Gilchrist

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