New music: Madeleine Roger, Nilüfer Yanya, George Strait and Christine Jensen

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This article was published 13/09/2024 (748 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FOLK

Madeleine Roger
Nerve (Birthday Cake)

Exploring the specific to uncover the universal is the essence of good storytelling; baring and examining uncomfortable truths always speaks louder than rephrasing trite homilies. The same applies to good songwriting.

On her second full-length solo record, Winnipeg singer-songwriter Madeleine Roger mines the specifics of her life to reveal and untangle complex emotional webs — and she does so with disarming grace and eloquence, creating a deceptively rich folk album that should be revisited again and again.

Some listeners will already be familiar with Nerve’s second track, You Don’t Think About Me, a ringing, acoustic-based song with a Joni-Mitchell-esque lyric and haunting chorus that made some noise this summer on the CBC Music Top 20. What they won’t realize is that Roger says it was written from the perspective of her ex-lover, and that she was the person in emotional distress in the song. Such an exercise in self-awareness couldn’t have been easy, but it’s a testament to Roger’s commitment, and most of the album’s 10 songs dig into similarly difficult territory — the bittersweet end of a long-term relationship (All My Love), caring for a dying grandparent (Terminal) and even falling for a married man (Am I Ever Gonna Love).

These recordings were laid down in a four-day session at the Isokon studio in Kingston, N.Y., by Roger and producer/multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman (a member of Bonny Light Horseman), and the arrangements are open and breezy. Roger’s acoustic guitar and unadorned alto carry most of the songs, with Kaufman’s influence coming in the form of additional musical touches — organ, mandolin, piano, bass, percussion and more — which always serve the tunes, rather than overwhelming them.

★★★★ out of five stars

Stream: You Don’t Think About Me; All My Love; Am I Ever Gonna Love.

— John Kendle

 

INDIE ROCK

Nilüfer Yanya
My Method Actor (Ninja Tune)

Nilüfer Yanya’s third album means having to do a little homework: carving out the time to listen. Not just half-listen.

Her 11-track My Method Actor is not the kind of music you blast from cars or bars or even put on while cooking. Yanya’s brand of spare, jewelbox-like songs demand your attention, each note and instrument used so deliberately.

The London-based singer-songwriter is like no one else out there, offering songs that appear at first like pleasing soft sketches until they reveal their depth and power, like tissue paper made of palladium.

My Method Actor sees Yanya reunite with Will Archer, who co-produces and adds lyrics as well as guitar, drums, piano, backing vocals and synthesizer.

The standout tracks — Call It Love, Made Out of Memory and Just a Western — are just three that show off Yanya’s allegorical lyrics on a bed of shifting, bright then shadowy riptides of rhythms and melodies that can include gorgeous smears of pedal steel guitar or cello. Her vision is sharper and even less cluttered than before.

There is always the air of unpredictability, with Yanya whipping out her falsetto or a wall of fuzzy guitars coming from nowhere. On Mutations, strings briefly pop up and it’s as pleasing as a glass of water in the desert.

This is music that is part of the world and yet not of it. So a suggestion: grab a pair of noise-canceling headphones, hit “play” and really focus on a remarkable collection of songs.

★★★★ out of five stars

Stream: Call it Love; Just a Western

— Mark Kennedy, The Associated Press

 

COUNTRY

George Strait
Cowboys and Dreamers (MCA Nashville)

George Strait’s 31st studio album, the feel-good Cowboys and Dreamers, marks five decades of record releases; a titanic career for a Texas troubadour whose greatest ambition seems to have always been the same: make pretty, plain-spoken songs about life’s true pains and pleasures, and listeners will find their own resonance within them.

There are standouts for every mood across Cowboys and Dreamers, best heard through an old truck’s speakers while driving down an empty back road: the joyful single Honky Tonk Hall of Fame, featuring Chris Stapleton; a cover of Waylon Jennings’ Waymore’s Blues; and the Jimmy Buffet-informed vacation stomper, MIA Down in MIA.

Privacy is required for the tear-jerking ballads with pedal steel: The Little Things, People Get Hurt Sometimes, The Journey Of Your Life or, most severely, Rent, written by Guy Clark and Keith Gattis, that begins with Strait offering a spoken-word tribute to the late Gattis.

Across 13 songs in 47 minutes — his first collection since 2019’s Honky Tonk Time Machine — Strait plays to his traditionalist country style without ever sounding derivative of his former records. That’s the beauty of his particular songwriting: the songs on Cowboys and Dreamers could exist at any point in time across his career, not in a lazy atavistic fashion, but utilizing nostalgia as an effective art medium.

If you love Strait, you love him — and that makes it classic.

★★★★ out of five stars

Stream: Rent; Honky Tonk Hall of Fame

— Maria Sherman

 

JAZZ

Christine Jensen
Harbour (Justin Time)

Christine Jensen has become much more than just a fine Canadian saxophonist. She has gone from strength to strength as a composer/arranger/leader of some wonderful albums. Harbour contains compositions from over a decade.

The band here includes Christine on soprano, her sister Ingrid as a dominant soloist on trumpet, with Rémi-Jean LeBlanc on bass, Erik Hove on alto and flute, Donny Kennedy on alto and soprano, Samuel Blais on baritone and bass clarinet, Gary Versace on piano, Dave Grott on lead trombone, Jocelyn Couture on lead trumpet, Chet Doxas on tenor, Steve Raegele on guitar and Jon Wikan on drums.

The music is solid large-ensemble jazz at the highest level. Jensen’s compositions are often complex, dense melodies with unexpected and perfectly placed riffs in every case.

The opening track, Passing Lion’s Gate, is a 12 minute mini-suite that is stunning. Without doubt the Jensen sisters have a chemistry that informs Ingrid’s participation as soloist on most of the tracks. Other soloists are excellent, too. Hove’s alto on Surge is a standout, as is Doxas’s tenor on Cascadian Fragments and Kennedy’s alto on Harbour.

Ingrid is inspired here. Her work on Fantasy On Blue, a reference to the 60th anniversary of Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue is terrific.

The development of large-ensemble jazz is fascinating to experience. It is now totally appropriate to mention Christine Jensen in the same breath as Maria Schneider, arguably the best current jazz orchestra leader. This is a very cool album with excellent music from top to bottom. Highly recommended.

★★★★1/2 out of five stars

Stream: Wink; Swirlaround

— Keith Black