Twice as nice for country star

ROOTS

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (Highway 20)

****

LUCINDA Williams’ recorded work since her 1988 self-titled classic has been remarkably consistent. However if you loved that record but have lost touch, right now is the time to tune back in. Despite this being a 100-minute-plus double album, nothing about it feels flabby or disposable.

It is a big commitment listening to something this long. Just think of it as two new Williams albums, one for now, one for later.

She’s working in her familiar surrounds where country-rock meets soul but doing it with new people, and a band that includes Pete Thomas and Dave Faragher of Elvis Costello’s Imposters and players including guitarist Bill Frisell and Ian McLagan of The Small Faces/Faces on keys.

Although it was recorded in Los Angeles, its heart seems to be in Memphis, or further south.

The gentle opening hymn, Compassion, is a tune by Williams as setting for a poem by her father Miller Williams, a one-time biology professor who switched disciplines to poetry thanks to the intervention of his friend Flannery O’Connor.

He once said: “I like to think that the best poetry involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual. It is partly in the tension between these two tendencies that a poem gets its energy and its life.”

That could be said of Lucinda’s music too. Here she keeps strictly to the accepted conventions and instrumentation of country-rock — there isn’t a song or even a note that fans of the genre might consider a real surprise — yet there is certainly tension there too, in the stories, in that slurred delivery, which makes it feel like those stories are being told to you by someone you just ran into in a bar.

Lucinda’s writing about what she always has, love, sex, death, people doing you wrong and standing up to people who do you wrong.

Darkness balances with light: West Memphis features Tony Joe White on guitar (it sounds rather like a TJW song, even if Lucinda wrote it).

It is almost happy in delivery, or as happy as you can get singing about three little boys found dead in the river and a man wrongly sentenced to life in prison. That’s the way we do things in West Memphis, Lucinda sings.

And you don’t need me to explain what songs like Cold Day In Hell and Foolishness might be about.

The second CD could be even stronger than the first, from the smoky late-night blues of Something Wicked This Way Comes and Big Mess (“As far as I can tell you are history/You can go straight to hell/That’s all right with me’’) to Byrds/Tom Petty folk-pop (When I Look at the World) and the sweet Memphis soul of Temporary Nature (Of Any Precious Thing).

The album closes with a nine-minute rendition of the late J.J. Cale’s Magnolia, originally released on his Naturally album. Another hymn.

It’s a line from the opening song that gives the album its title, and there is a nice sense of something being passed on, from father to daughter, from one poet to another, one great songwriter to another.

The circle is unbroken on Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

PRIMUS

Primus & The Chocolate Factory with the Fungi Ensemble (ATO/Mushroom)

***1/2

PRIMUS bassist and singer Les Claypool’s entire career has been left-of-centre and his band’s latest outing is no exception. This is the first full-length album to feature original drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander since 1995’s Tales From the Punchbowl and the trio — also comprising guitarist Larry LaLonde — are joined by percussionist Mike Dillon and cellist Sam Bass for this reworking of the soundtrack to 1971 Gene Wilder film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. For anyone familiar with both Primus and the film, this sounds exactly how you would imagine it. For anyone unfamiliar with the band, expect to hear your childhood favourites put through a blender with equal parts slap-heavy bass, half-spoken/half-sung lyrics, funky guitar, polyrhythmic drumming, cello and percussion. The band’s take on The Candy Man Can makes the song sound more like an ode to the protagonist from the horror film in Primus’s hands. Fans of the band will no doubt lap this up.

Daniel Johnson

COUNTRY

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Look Again to the Wind (Sony)

****

JOHNNY Cash was an angry man in 1964, frustrated that the US civil rights movement was ignoring the travails of Native Americans. Working with folk singer Peter La Farge, he crafted Bitter Tears, a scathing song cycle which revealed Cash as an equal to Woody Guthrie as an outsider folk poet. Fifty years on, the cream of America’s roots artists, including Steve Earle, Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris, have revisited the obscure yet iconic album and the project is a success on every level. It works as a companion piece rather than a conventional tribute album. There are instrumental reprises of Apache Tears and As Long As The Grass Shall Grow and the epic centrepiece of Bitter Tears
. Whereas Cash was full of righteous anger, the present-day treatments are reflective and pervaded by sadness that injustices have not been righted. What shines through is the raw poetic beauty of The Ballad of Ira Hayes and the Cash composition The Talking Leaves.

David Costello

CLASSICAL

NATHALIE STUTZMANN, ORFEO 55

Handel: Heroes From the Shadows (Erato)

****

FRENCH contralto Nathalie Stutzmann makes multi-tasking an art form as she directs instrumental ensemble Orfeo 55 and also sings 13 arias from Handel operas on this CD. As director and recitalist, Stutzmann has a busy concert schedule, with more than 50 recordings to her credit. Research led her to this Handel program of arias “from the shadows’’, that is, from secondary level operatic roles. Stutzmann’s meticulously detailed approach to music and text is on show in pieces such as tranquil reflection Par che mi nasca in seno, Irene’s aria from Tamerlano. Speed holds no fears in Cornelia’s aria L’aure che spira from Giulio Cesare where Stutzmann’s contralto flutters along with ease and flexibility. Five Sinfonia tracks give Orfeo 55 a chance to show its finesse, but more excerpts such as Son nata a lagrimar from Giulio Cesare where Stutzmann and countertenor Philippe Jaroussky create an elegant duo of mood and vocal textures, would have enhanced this program.

Patricia Kelly

BLUES

JOHNNY WINTER

Step Back (Megaforce)

***

ALBINO guitar virtuoso Johnny Winter, first introduced to a blinking, disbelieving live audience by fellow bluesman Mike Bloomfield in 1968, died in July at the age of 70 of still-unknown causes. Like 2011’s Roots, the Texan’s epitaphic album is a primer of the ’50s rock’n’roll, soul and blues that informed his early career. With guests including Ben Harper, Eric Clapton, Brian Setzer, Billy Gibbons, Joe Perry, Leslie West, Joe Bonamassa and Dr John trading licks and solos, Step Back is a co-op cavalcade of standards from such giants of the blues as Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bo Diddley. Most of these 13 tracks are mere slick, play-by-numbers cover versions, but there are standouts: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown’s Okie Dokie Stomp, on which former Stray Cat Setzer sprays rapid-fire notes, and Son House’s chilling Death Letter, with a solo Winter shredding acoustic slide as he eerily presages his own passing. Otherwise, Step Back serves as an introduction to the blues for anyone in need of an overview from some of the genre’s finest practitioners.

Phil Stafford

LISTEN TO FRANK YAMMA’S ‘UNCLE’ HERE

ROOTS

FRANK YAMMA

Uncle (Wantok Music)

****

A POWERFUL cry from the heart of indigenous Australia, an album that deserves consideration alongside the work of greats like Archie Roach and Kev Carmody. Yamma is a Pitjantjatjara man from Central Australia who returned to music with 2010’s excellent Countryman. Since then he has taken his music to the world with collaborator David Bridie, who again produces here and matches him with sympathetic players including double bassist Joe Creighton and cellist Helen Mountford. They all serve Yamma’s rich voice and songs, sometimes in orchestral settings like Memories, sometimes in strident folk-rock songs like A Blackman’s Crying. I’ll Be Back Soon, a soothing farewell song that shows the soul in Yamma’s voice.Sand Dunes is how Crazy Horse might sound if they came from central desert country. Several songs are in Yamma’s tribal language and this deeply satisfying album concludes with Sunday Morning, a tune you imagine being strummed beside a peaceful inland creek, kookaburra call and all. Yamma plays Mullum Music Festival, November 22 and 23.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

DAVEY LANE

Atonally Young (Field Recordings/MGM)

****

ANYONE who has followed Australian rock’n’roll these past 15 years knows Lane is one of the best musicians in the country, as a member of You Am I and studio guitar whiz of choice for songwriters like Charles Jenkins. He wore his ’60s Who/Kinks influences on his sleeve in his band The Pictures but this debut solo album finds him transcending those influences. Sure, there is a garage-psych seasoning to Atonally Young but it also feels contemporary, from the funk pop groove of Witch in My Mind to the woozy, lost-in-the-woods feel of The Undergrowth and the irresistibly catchy guitar pop of For No One and Not an Option Now. Proceedings open with the pulverising guitar psycherama of Komarov
. The Last of the Freakazoids patrols similar open skies, with a swirling mix and guitar stratospherics anchored by some thunderous drumming and a vocal performance that shows Lane really finding his feet out front. Songs as strong as In the Light of the Sun and A Lesson in Cause and Effect prove he has the songwriting prowess to match his guitar chops.

Noel Mengel

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