Album reviews: U2 | Bruno Mars | Andrew Wasylyk

U2: Days of Ash EP (Island Records) ★★★★

Bruno Mars: The Romantic (Atlantic Records) ★★★★

Andrew Wasylyk: Irreparable Parables (Clay Pipe Music) ★★★★★

As young rock idealists, U2 were able to distil the world around them into rousing political anthems which have stood the test of time. In comparison with the fire of those early albums, their music and message has felt somewhat neutered over the years. But U2, and frontman Bono in particular, have never seemed entirely at ease with their status as an establishment rock band. While recording their new album, for release later this year, they spat out a handful of songs which didn’t fit the picture but demanded to be heard.

These urgent requiems for shooting victims now form Days of Ash, an Ash Wednesday lamentation gathering their most direct and potent protest music in decades. American Obituary is a quickfire response to the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent earlier this year which plays out like Pride (In the Name of Love) meets Patti Smith’s People Have the Power, with Bono half-rapping over the Edge’s lean but piercing guitar.

In contrast, The Tears of Things is poetic and intimate, with Bono right up at the microphone, crooning a “song of grief, of disbelief” for Palestinian land rights activist Awdah Hathaleen, while the band mine some salvation on Song of the Future, a rock strut inspired by Iranian teenager Sarina Esmailzadeh who was beaten to death by security forces in 2022.

Wildpeace is a complementary cut, providing atmospheric backing to a recitation of a work by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. One Life At a Time is the stronger of the remaining two songs, with Bono’s vocals transitioning from smooth challenge to keening supplication and back on a signature mix of rumination and rabble-rousing. Yours Eternally, with guest vocalist Ed Sheeran and Bono’s old pal Bob Geldof as part of the choir, occupies blander Coldplay territory, but is emblematic of their desire to channel anger into co-operative action and to foreground hope over hate.

Bruno Mars had such a blast with Anderson .Paak as Silk Sonic back in 2021 that he continues the slick soul pastiching on his first solo album in ten years. The Romantic is nine songs short and clocks in at barely over half an hour, all the better to state his amorous intentions succinctly and avoid filler.

With classic soul loverman bravado, Mars doesn’t hold back on the lyrical agony and ecstasy, while the contrasting music finessed with his band The Hooligans is smooth and effortless. He lays it on the line on old school ballad Risk It All before adding a Latin groove and disco strings to Cha Cha Cha. First single I Just Might comes on initially like Leo Sayer but its finger-clicking disco pop oozes natural groove.

READ MORE: Fatboy Slim, Glasgow review: 'an eclectic mash-up'

Mars presents as a one-man Stylistics on God Was Showing Off, milks the hurts-so-good petition of Why You Wanna Fight? and doffs a cap to Curtis and Marvin with the conscious soul natural high of On My Soul. Next in his sights is the Santana-style Latino pop of Something Serious before he leaves it all on the floor with the torrid beseeching of Nothing Left and Dance With Me.

Dundonian composer Andrew Wasylyk surpasses his fine catalogue of instrumental works with Irreparable Parables, an album of sublime vocal collaborations with stellar string embellishments from Pete Harvey. Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch mines the spirit of Robert Wyatt on seductive reverie Private Symphony #2, Gruff Rhys is mellow and devastating on The Cold Collar and Field Music are similarly intoxicating on In Portmanteau.

Varying the menu, First Moonbeams of Adulthood is a sultry nocturne, Hachi No Su is double bass-driven impressionistic spiritual jazz and the synth noir soundtrack of Spectators in the Absence of God is topped with Kathryn Joseph’s distinctive quaver, while Wasylyk pitchshifts his own voice to rumble like Ray Lennox on the title track.

CLASSICAL

The Sixteen: Lead, Kindly Light (CORO) ★★★★★

In years to come the steady output of CORO, created as the recording arm of Harry Christopher’s luminous a cappella choral group The Sixteen, will be looked upon as a golden catalogue of musical assimilation: a legacy combining imaginatively programmed recordings of Renaissance repertoire alongside newly-commissioned works. Lead, Kindly Light is The Sixteen’s latest album. While mostly centred on sacred gems from Spain’s 16th century Age of Gold - exclusively Cristóbal Morales and Sebastián de Vivanco - recent commissions by Kerensa Briggs and James MacMillan provide the contemporary twist. Briggs’ title track motet is exquisitely-voiced, its rich compound harmonies tempered by simplicity of melodic line. Also set to Cardinal Newman’s texts is MacMillan’s Nothing in Vain, monumental and devotional, its silken complexities woven into one gloriously expansive, compelling narrative. Both embrace a spiritual kinship with the textured perfection of Morales and the liberated nuance of the later-generation Vivanco. The performances are typically top-notch. Ken Walton

READ MORE: SCO & Nicola Benedetti, Edinburgh review: 'tough, rugged, visionary'

FOLK

RANT: Live in Glasgow (Make Believe Records) ★★★★★

As it says on the tin, RANT’S latest album was recorded in concert at Glasgow’s Cottiers Theatre and boasts a fine immediacy, with beguiling interplay between the four busy fiddles of Gillian Frame, Lauren MacColl, Bethany Reid and Anna Massie. The quartet’s constantly fluid dynamic ranges from the gentle drift of the air East Church to the Da Haa set with its cracking strathspeys fading and swelling before giving way to a brisk pair of Shetland reels. Similarly, their Happy Day set shifts from winsome delicacy to joyfully full-toned fiddle chorusing while a march written by Reid for her father’s 60th birthday is a jubilant melody taken at the double over snappy strings. There’s stealthy pizzicato work in MacColl’s tune Rosemarkie Man while, for closers, they follow the lingering solemnity of an Icelandic hymn tune with a short, sharp and splendidly zesty Hangman’s Reel. Jim Gilchrist

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