Album review: Vikki Thorn’s solo debut as ThornBird a five-star triumph
Thirty years after co-hatching The Waifs, Vikki Thorn has temporarily left the security of the familial nest to boldly spread her wings as a solo artist, and the results are spectacular.
Album reviews for week of March 18, 2022:
AMERICANA
ThornBird
ThornBird
MGM
Thirty years after co-hatching The Waifs, Vikki Thorn has temporarily left the security of the familial nest to boldly spread her wings as a solo artist. On her eponymous debut excursion as ThornBird, the West Australian soars to new heights as a singer, songwriter and arranger. Throwing caution to the wind, Thorn recorded no-holds-barred originals she had stashed away, relating to her dual existence as a musician and a mother in Utah and Albany, with pick-up players and a producer previously unknown to her. Her Perth recruits, combined with Waifs sideman Ben Franz, turned out to be a truly kick-arse backing band. Together, the collective has made an outstanding Americana album, one that an ace Austin or Nashville studio crew would be proud to claim. The fact that it was recorded mostly live over a week and after just one rehearsal makes it all the more meritorious.
While the set has its own swagger and style sprouting from Thorn’s energetic, expressive and wholeheartedly committed singing, it’s not entirely devoid of Waifs influences, which surface in several country/folk flavoured songs. Franz’s dynamic pedal steel licks excel in solos and exchanges with the equally accomplished electric guitarist Luke Dux, while his bass is in lock-step with Todd Pickett’s admirably diverse drumming. Thorn’s wailing harmonica adds thrills and fills on selective tracks, while piano, organ, trumpet and strings make complementary appearances, along with male vocal harmonies. On a self-composed singalong number and a co-authored Springsteen-esque roots rocker, Matt Thorn duets sweetly with his wife. In a coquettish self-harmonised cowgirl song, Thorn saucily releases her inner Dolly Parton while seeking “love in the dark” to allay her “fear and steady her heart”. Quirky rhythm, assertive guitar tremolo and a vocal refrain are effective bedfellows in the equally sassy Big Girl Pants. Snappy couplets like “bloodshot eyes & apple pies” and “swinging doors & chequered floors” are on the menu in a diner ditty. Kick-started by a gutsy blues that hints at early Elvis and ending unexpectedly with a long, dark ballad, ThornBird is an album that pulls no punches.
Tony Hillier
-
INDIE FOLK/ROCK
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Big Thief
4AD
You need to hear this album on a long drive with dazzled friends or fanning out like sunlight on a backyard afternoon. Masterpieces come like that, integrating themselves into your life. This ease ignites Big Thief’s fifth album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. Rootsy, but entirely modern, the folk rock four-piece has reopened the American songbook in the sprawling way Bob Dylan and The Band once managed on The Basement Tapes, drawing on the past to become timeless. Adrianne Lenker sings like equal parts Dolly Parton and Kate Bush, a magical feminist with slanted wisdoms, her lyrics indebted in weight and playfulness to prime Dylan. It’s no wonder Dylan himself stole her collaborator, guitarist Buck Meek, to work on his 2021 concert film Shadow Kingdom. Lenker herself is a protege of Susan Tedeschi. Her vision interweaves lost love and pandemic grief, carried lightly enough to let beauty in, be it a hoedown or haunting native wake. While worshipped by young Pitchfork readers, Big Thief transcends all generational divides.
Mark Mordue
-
PUNK/POST-PUNK
This Is Not an Island Anymore
Die! Die! Die!
Independent
Closing in on two decades as a band, New Zealand trio Die! Die! Die! still matches the bracing immediacy of that name. In fact, singer/guitarist Andrew Wilson, drummer Michael Prain and bassist Lachlan Anderson sound much more like pugilistic young rabble rousers than seasoned punk veterans. Even the slower songs here maintain the band’s signature interplay between burrowing bass, squalling guitar noise, battered drums and Wilson’s perennially tense, fraying vocals. That includes the opening title track, which very much sets the table for the onslaught to come. If certain individual ingredients are common enough in the punk and post-punk playbooks – odd guitar tunings, bludgeoning repetition and even some flaring saxophone – they pack considerable power and benefit from subtle variations across this record. In any other band, Wilson’s ardent mantras would be the focus, but every element of Die! Die! Die! is confrontational enough to make that just one more highly sharpened tool.
Doug Wallen
-
WORLD
Bamanan
Rokia Kone & Jacknife Lee
Real World Records
On paper it might seem an unlikely alliance, but Malian songstress Rokia Kone and California-based producer Jacknife Lee (U2, R.E.M., Taylor Swift) prove to be a perfect match. Kone’s debut album, which follows an acclaimed role in the pan-African supergroup Les Amazones d’Afrique, impressively spans the divide between centuries-old West African tradition and slick 21st century pop. Lee’s judicious arrangements allow the Rose of Bamako’s pure and passionate voice to soar and shine incandescently over contrasting tempos and beds of bass and synths, traditional percussion and infectious Mande guitar rhythms. Shades of internationally acclaimed compatriots such as Oumou Sangare, Kandia Kouyate and Rokia Traore surface throughout Bamanan, not just in the stellar quality of Kone’s nuanced and melismatic singing, but also in the subject matter of her songs, which address (in local language) the plight of women in Mali, as well as her pride in the enduring Bambara culture of her native southern region.
Tony Hillier
-
JAZZ
Oaatchapai
Sam Anning
Earshift Music
Bassist Sam Anning’s septet reads like a who’s who of Australian jazz, so we know this album will be good. His fourth album as bandleader, it follows his brilliant 2018 work Across a Field as Vast as One, which was much awarded. He is joined again by Mat Jodrell (trumpet), Carl Mackey (alto saxophone), Julien Wilson (tenor saxophone & bass clarinet), and Andrea Keller (piano & fender rhodes), plus new recruits Theo Carbo (guitar) and Rajiv Jayaweera (drums). The inspirations for this album, articulated by Anning in accompanying notes, are too complicated to be addressed here. The key composition Urkraft for instance, includes a rather poignant poem written by Anning, inspired by his thoughts on the primordial force that has originated everything in the universe. Listen for the innovative concepts, which are fascinating, in Anning’s writing, and simply luxuriate in beautiful improvisations played by some of Australia’s greatest jazz musicians. Anning has provided them with highly original music, filled with gravitas and nobility.
Eric Myers
-
-
Album reviews for week of March 11, 2022:
ROCK
Chariot of the Gods
Hoodoo Gurus
Big Time Records/Universal
Just before Hoodoo Gurus’ 10th studio album kicks in with World of Pain, a hard-rocking document of a habitual Friday night pub fight, an ambient track aptly titled Early Opener announces it with the clink of glasses, slurred conversation and what sounds like the band soundchecking in the background. Back in 1985, the Gurus’ second album Mars Needs Guitars (soon nicknamed “Bars Need Guitars”) heralded the new kings of Australian pub rock. It’s a descriptor that holds true 40 years after their formation. Despite its extraterrestrial title track, Chariot of the Gods is firmly grounded in what the Gurus were always about: agreeably trashy, guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll, anchored by Rick Grossman’s rumbling bass and the busy rhythms of relatively new drummer Nick Rieth (ex New Christs, Celibate Rifles), who replaced Mark Kingsmill in 2015. What set the band apart from its ’80s peers was singer/main songwriter and guitarist Dave Faulkner’s way with a one-liner, still much in evidence.
It was always going to be hard to top “you take the cake, I’ll keep the crumbs” (from 1985’s Like Wow – Wipeout), but 2022’s Answered Prayers goes close: “I’m feeling fickle, a little Travis Bickle / Hammer and sickle, it’s either slap or tickle”. Or this, from Settle Down, Faulkner’s bittersweet reflection on ageing: “One by one my friends have gone / They’ve found new lives on Amazon”. Moreover, he’s also keeping the band current with perspicacious social commentary: Hang With the Girls addresses gender dysphoria, while the Iggy Pop-inflected Don’t Try to Save My Soul parodies existential angst (“There is a place called happiness / They said, ‘Go seek it, boy’ / They didn’t tell me where to look”). Lead guitarist Brad Shepherd chimes in with two songs – the pure-pop Equinox and troglodyte rocker I Come From Your Future – but this is Faulkner’s record. It’s not all about him, however – he engineers a chance meeting of Lou Reed and the Beatles on Got to Get You Out of My Life, saddles up with the Johnnys for Get Out of Dodge, and even allows a faint whiff of Cheap Trick to anoint Carry On, the album’s finest moment. That song sums up what Faulkner, and by extension the Gurus, do best: just when you think you’ve heard it before, a twist in the melody brings you back to earth.
Phil Stafford
–
CLASSICAL
The Berlin Concert
John Williams + Berlin Philharmonic
Deutsche Grammophon
Hearing the big, sweeping scores of John Williams performed by a truly top orchestra puts them in a rather new light. With the composer himself at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic, they sound magnificently plush and almost symphonic in dimension. Excerpts from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Indiana Jones and Star Wars make up the larger part of this live concert, given last year when Williams was invited to conduct the prestigious German orchestra for the first time. Given that his music is deeply rooted in late Romanticism, there is much logic to hearing it with the ripe, gleaming tone that the Berlin Phil bring. In 2020, the Vienna Phil issued a similar album on the same label, John Williams in Vienna; and the only regret is that five pieces are repeated here. But the Berliners’ smooth power is just too intoxicating to miss. Olympic Fanfare and Jurassic Park’s main theme stand out for sheer heroic gusto, but the more textured Harry Potter excerpts are wonderful too.
Graham Strahle
–
INDIE ROCK
Lucifer on the Sofa
Spoon
Matador
Spoon reconvened in its native Austin, Texas, for this 10th album, a back-to-basics affair compared to 2017’s more ruminative, electronics-shaded Hot Thoughts. The veteran indie band has settled comfortably back into barroom rock ‘n’ roll, taking inspiration from ZZ Top on bluesy lead single The Hardest Cut and flexing garage-hewn muscle during On the Radio. Those two tracks wouldn’t have been out of place on the band’s similarly streamlined 2002 album Kill the Moonlight, and frontman Britt Daniel’s urgent rasp and broken falsetto are by now just as familiar as the band’s gnarled lurching. But not many of these songs feel downright essential, with the title track and fellow ballad Astral Jacket proving especially thin. Moreover, it’s a rather odd choice to open the album with a perfunctory cover of the 1999 track Held by Bill Callahan’s erstwhile project Smog. There remains a rewarding sense of intuition between these players, but moments of true satisfaction are more scattered this time around.
Doug Wallen
–
ROCK
4
Slash featuring Myles Kennedy + the Conspirators
Gibson/Sony
Here’s a challenge: Name a Slash song. Not Guns N‘ Roses, or even Velvet Revolver – a Slash song. Unless you’re a devotee, there’s a strong chance you can’t – yet, there’s now five albums to draw from. Part of it stems from his mainstay cohorts, Alter Bridge’s Myles Kennedy and makeshift session band The Conspirators. As a live prospect, they’re perfectly entertaining – Kennedy can easily execute a passable Axl Rose or Scott Weiland where needed. When penning originals, however, there’s a notable lack of chemistry. Slash himself, then, must also shoulder some of the blame. 4 sees him once again mining Guns N‘ Roses’ heyday for most of his ideas, giving his Conspirators little to work with. Even when powerhouse Kennedy is trying his absolute best to elevate proceedings, like on The River is Rising or Actions Speak Louder than Words, it ultimately feels a little too uninspired. Slash remains an iconic figure of rock history, but only as a right-hand man rather than the centre of attention.
David James Young
–
ELECTRONIC
Prey//IV
Alice Glass
Eating Glass Records
Since leaving Crystal Castles in 2014, a decision later attributed to alleged abuse by her bandmate Ethan Kath, Canadian Alice Glass’s solo career has been stop-start; her long-awaited debut album is likely to change that. Prey//IV is a seemingly cathartic statement on her traumatic past, as well as a reminder of the pain that lingers. With its themes of abuse, power, violence, revenge, self-harm and horror, it’s dark, unapologetic, sometimes aggressive, and generally uncomfortable listening — exactly what one suspects Glass is aiming for. Its thumping bass and frenetic electronic effects aren’t always cohesive, but Glass’s strong, disarming vocals do well to cut through the tension and create some powerful, danceable moments. Everybody Else taunts with its creepy toy piano sounds, while first single Baby Teeth straddles the pop realm with its steady beat, its embrace of despair making it, in Glass’s own words, “probably the darkest and most hopeless track”. Glass likes to make songs to dance to when you’re sad, and they’re here in spades.
Tim McNamara