New music

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This article was published 22/07/2021 (1855 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

POP / ROCK

Royal Canoe

Sidelining (Paper Bag/Birthday Cake)

Throughout its dozen or so years of making music, Royal Canoe has often taken an “everything plus the bathtubs” approach to building its experimental pop grooves. Riffs and rhythms are ridden to the nth degree, while vocals, vocal treatments, synth washes, triggered samples, guitar lines, keyboard swells, bass loops and various percussion ideas are layered and layered upon one another to create a dense aural pastiche that is uniquely RC’s own.

On Sidelining, Royal Canoe’s fifth full-length outing (if you go all the way back to Co-Op Mode), the quintet set itself the challenge of going into the studio with nothing prepared. The idea was to scattershoot ideas, see what stuck and try to write a song a day.

Band members have said the concept was mostly successful, even if recording was interrupted by the pandemic and the group had to reconvene for masked sessions last summer in order to finish. The resultant 10-song outing is thus an exercise in what RC can do when it sets limitations. The tunes here are rich with breezy melodies and rooted in easy grooves, the feel is laid-back and, even though this was largely a pre-lockdown record, its mood is intuitively reflective.

Opener and title track Sidelining sets the tone right off the bat, riding a funky bassline and a simple keyboard riff into a catchy sing-song Matt Peters lyric (replete with “hoo-hoo” gang vocals) about following one’s distractions, all in just under two minutes.

Second cut Butterfalls takes things up a notch, as Peters declares himself ready for “sh– to hit the fan” and is joined by a veritable choir singing that it’s “time to watch, time to watch it burn” in a chorus that brings the tune to several crescendos. Experimental Chicago popster Nnamdï joins the party in a funky synth, drum-and-bass workout called Scratching Static; HAL is an instrumental electro-jam presumably inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey; while sonic soulmate and fellow traveller Begonia helps bring proceedings to a close on the spacey soul/R&B vibel of Alexandria. ★★★★ out of five

STREAM THESE: Sidelining, Butterfalls, Alexandria

— John Kendle

ROOTS / COUNTRY

Layla Revisited (Live at Lockn’)

Tedeschi Trucks Band featuring Trey Anastasio (Fantasy Records)

From a rock ‘n’ roll perspective, pulling off a song-by-song performance of a legendary record is like an episode of Mission: Impossible. Any tiny error or moment of bad timing puts the project in jeopardy.

Fortunately, the Tedeschi Trucks Band is as adept at performing the 14 songs from Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, the 1970 album by Derek & the Dominos, as Mr. Phelps was at solving spy cases.

And the only smoke from Layla Revisited comes from a quartet of today’s top guitarists trying to recreate the magic of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman, not from your phone self-destructing in five seconds after the album is finished.

Married couple Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks front TTB — Trucks was named after the fictional Derek in Derek & the Dominos and played Allman’s slide-guitar parts from Layla during a Clapton tour — and their band has played songs from Layla at concerts since it formed in 2010.

For the 2019 edition of the Lockn’ Festival in Virginia, though, the 12-member band enlisted Doyle Bramhall II, another Clapton tour guitarist, and Trey Anastasio, the frontman for jam-band heavyweight Phish, for a special evening.

They shocked the crowd by playing the first 13 cuts from Layla, finishing with the title track, which Clapton, long before he became a cranky septuagenarian with a bad COVID-19 vaccine experience, wrote about his love for Patti Boyd, George Harrison’s wife.

It’s tempting to skip right to Layla, the album’s most famous song. Don’t do it. It’s the best song on the original record, but not on Layla Revisited.

It would be akin to guitar heresy to deviate too far from Allman and Clapton’s famous solos on Layla, and that fact prevents the band from taking the hit to a new level. And while Clapton has never been known for his vocals, after five decades of hearing him sing Layla on classic-rock radio, it’s odd to hear it sung by anyone else.

The record really rocks when the Tedeschi Trucks Band play Dominos’ songs they regularly perform on tour, such as Key to the Highway, Tell the Truth, Keep on Growing or Anyday.

That familiarity allows Tedeschi, Trucks, Anastasio and Bramhall, the four guitar aces, to soar, and they transform the latter two songs into 12-plus-minute jams that will make it difficult to stick to the speed limit when they roar on your car stereo. ★★★★ out of five

STREAM THESE: Anyday, Keep on Growing

— Alan Small

JAZZ

Charles Mingus

Mingus at Carnegie Hall, Deluxe Edition (Atlantic)

Re-releases of classic jazz performances are very common. While they might often appear more opportunistic than truly worthy, there are exceptions, and this album is one of them. The original release of the 1974 concert included several lengthy tracks but nowhere near the full scope of the event. This two-CD, three-LP release has two parts not heard on the original. The first is a 72-minute portion by the Mingus Jazz Workshop: Don Pullen on piano, Jon Faddis on trumpet, Hamiet Bluiett on baritone, Dannie Richmond on drums and of course Mingus on bass. The second part, the “jam session,” brings in guests: Charles MacPherson on alto, John Handy on tenor and alto and Roland Kirk on tenor. And yes, the result is a wild duelling sax battle.

There are moments of gentleness within tracks (such as Mingus’s solo on Fables of Faubus, a satiric reference to Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who called in the National Guard in 1957 to prevent integration of the Little Rock High School), but generally this is raw-edged music, loud, in your face and at times seemingly barely under control. This is not a criticism. If you can place yourself in the mood of the concert, the passion and the energy are exhilarating. The tracks are all long — some over 20 minutes — and the musicians leave it all on the stage, so to speak. While not subtle, Mingus’s compositions are always complex, and the covers here are arranged with that in mind. Pullen’s percussive piano, Faddis’ full-throated trumpet and Bluiett’s bari set off the Jazz Workshop portion of the album, while Mingus holds them all together. The jam sessions on Perdido and C Jam Blues are flat-out over the top. The collective saxes wail as if their lives depended on it.

Mingus was a troubled genius, whose anger and mental issues are legendary and worth checking out online. He remains the only jazz musician I know who dedicated an album to his psychotherapist. This classic concert is joyous, raucous and in the context of the musicians involved, very loud fun. The only response to it is to simply let go and hang on. You will enjoy the ride. ★★★★★ out of five

STREAM THESE: Fables of Faubus, Big Alice

— Keith Black

CLASSICAL

Strings attached

Anna-Liisa Eller, Kannel (Harmonia Mundi)

This release features Estonian kannel player Anna-Liisa Eller in her own arrangements of Couperin, Byrd, Dowland and Rameau, among others, in an eclectic, ear-catching program.

Akin to a harp but positioned horizontally, Estonia’s national instrument — with its sonority described as “the sound from heaven” — evokes the delicate plucked timbres of a harpsichord bathed in the timeless lyricism of a classical harp.

Highlights include Byrd’s Rowland, or Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home, which showcases Eller’s ability to execute delicate filigree ornamentation, Frescobaldi’s Fiori musicali — Toccata per le levatione, F 12.31, and Dowland’s famous, decidedly more sombre Lachrimae.

Also offered are the Prelude and Allemande movements from Rameau’s Premier livre de pièces pour Clavecin, highlighting the ability of this rarely heard instrument to easily handle baroque keyboard music, as well as an excerpt from the same composer’s L’Entretien des Muses from Suite in D Major. A lone contemporary work by Estonian composer Helena Tulve, Silmaja (Beholder) bristles with energy rooted in daring dissonances and extended instrumental techniques — more 21st-century works would have been welcomed.

However this writer’s personal preference is for Eller’s included series of interlaced, improvised preludes, interludes and postludes, performed on an electric kannel and further electronically processed, adding compelling counterpoint to the much older selections.

The four short pieces add their own ghostly presence to the overall mix, rife with harmonic overtones and plucked strings in the kannel’s lowest range, evoking gongs and not-so-distant sounds of tolling bells. ★★★★1/2 out of five

STREAM THIS: Improvised Interlude performed by Anna-Liisa Eller

— Holly Harris