Willie Nelson does Sinatra his way on That’s Life, his 71st solo album
At 87, Nelson is a master interpreter who drinks in Sinatra’s staples with the same world-weariness, regret and melancholy.
Album reviews for week of March 20, 2021:
AMERICAN SONGBOOK
That’s Life
Willie Nelson
Legacy/Sony
At 87, Willie Nelson is busier than ever. This is his second album in less than a year, and his second collection of Frank Sinatra covers after 2018’s My Way. Nelson’s obsession with the American Songbook dates to 1978’s Stardust, still the biggest-selling album of his career, though his affinity with Sinatra goes back way further. A 10-year-old Willie first heard Frank on Texas radio in 1943 and was struck by the elder singer’s mastery of phrasing. Forty years later, Sinatra and Nelson were booked on the same bill at a casino gig. “That cat can sing,” Sinatra told the promoter. “He can sing my stuff but I don’t know if I can sing his.” Though Sinatra failed to fulfil his stated intention to record an album of Nelson covers, Willie has returned the favour in more ways than two. That’s Life was mostly recorded in Hollywood’s Capitol Studios, as were several classic Sinatra albums between 1954 and 1962.
Though they developed from opposing idioms (jazz and country), both are essentially bar-room singers: Frank favoured the saloon, Willie the honky tonk. Their audiences were similar: a lone bartender, an absent lover, the lonesome listener at home nursing a scotch. And Nelson, as much the master interpreter, drinks in Sinatra’s staples of the genre – In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Learnin’ The Blues, Lonesome Road – with the same world-weariness, regret and melancholy. He can also match Sinatra’s peacock strut on the standards: Nice Work If You Can Get it, Just In Time, You Make Me Feel So Young, and a resigned, laconic That’s Life. The band, featuring guitarist Dean Parks and producer/arranger Matt Rollings on piano, comes to the fore on the Latin-flavoured Luck Be A Lady and I’ve Got You Under My Skin, horns and strings trading blows with the best of Sinatra’s ’50s work alongside the legendary Nelson Riddle Orchestra.
But it’s the other Nelson, Willie, who takes full ownership of perhaps Sinatra’s most poignant song, Cottage For Sale, milking the tears from lines such as: “The key’s in the mailbox / The same as before / But no one is waiting / For me anymore.” As much country lament as torch song, it’s the perfect example of how Nelson bridges genre gaps. He did it with 2016’s Gershwin tribute, and now he’s done it twice with Sinatra. Hats off…
Phil Stafford
JAZZ
Eldorado
Pat Jaffe
Independent
Recorded in Reykjavik, Iceland, this is an impressive debut album from a thoughtful and sensitive musician. Melbourne pianist Pat Jaffe, 22, has nine compositions here, two of them accompanied by a string quartet. To describe the album, terms such as refinement and understatement come to mind. The music is peaceful and ruminative but, under a seamless surface, there are nuances which are subtle and exquisite. In the two pieces which include the Siggi String Quartet, the strings are skilfully employed to amplify the pianist’s most expressive moments. Jaffe is an accomplished jazz pianist, but there are few signs of conventional jazz references, such as the blues, which some consider to be essential to jazz. Instead the flavour of the music suggests the twilight zone between jazz and contemporary classical.
Eric Myers
ROCK
When You See Yourself
Kings of Leon
RCA/Sony
Nearly 15 years removed from its initial deviation from southern-fried garage rock, no one is expecting an about-face from arena-fillers Kings of Leon so late in the piece. Its ensuing records, however, have always had flickers of greatness among the more forgettable moments – if only to remind us, deep down, the Followills are still the same old pastor’s sons. Album No 8 is fundamentally no different, although its opening one-two serves as their most promising in years. The atmospheric title track and the driving urgency of single The Bandit are must-hears for fans, as is the bustling shuffle of Echoing. Elsewhere, however, the album bogs itself down with an over-reliance on wafting synthesiser across its 50-minute runtime. As the years go on, it’s getting harder to ascertain exactly what the band is trying to achieve.
David James Young
CLASSICAL
Gardener of Time: Barry Conyngham at 75
Barry Conyngham
Move
A collection of orchestral works by Barry Conyngham recorded to mark his 75th birthday allows us to understand and explore this well-established Australian composer in unprecedented detail. His Japanese-infused aesthetic has stayed consistent over the decades and exerts a tantalising pull with its abstractly beautiful if sometimes uneasy sounds. The title work creates a gentle kaleidoscope of texture that is interrupted by fierce outbursts. The Edge, Petrichor and Bushfire Dreaming similarly depict a natural landscape characterised by continual, occasionally destructive change brought about by both natural and human forces. Live performances by The Ormond Ensemble and Melbourne Conservatorium String Ensemble under conductor Richard Davis are riveting.
Graham Strahle
INDIE POP
Today We’re the Greatest
Middle Kids
EMI Music
When Middle Kids debuted with 2018’s Lost Friends, the Sydney trio casually lined its gnashing indie rock with outsized, pop-worthy choruses. This second album is more subdued, with new-found emphasis on earnest ballads and acoustic guitar. That may be due to guitarist/keyboardist (and primary songwriter) Hannah Joy welcoming her first child with bassist Tim Fitz; Run With You even closes with the baby’s sonogram-sourced heartbeat. The building blocks are still in place: Joy’s singing remains malleable and dewy with emotion, and the anthems lean toward a playlist-friendly gloss and gallop. But these songs don’t distinguish themselves as well as those from the first album, feeling more familiar than indelible, although there are welcome signs of growth.
Doug Wallen
PSYCHEDELIC ROCK
L.W.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
Flightless Records
Context is king on the 17th studio album from this genre-defiant sextet. Listening to L.W. as a stand-alone piece feels like watching Return of the Jedi – thoroughly entertaining, but you’re missing a lot of backstory going in blind. The album concludes a trilogy from the prolific King Gizzard, which saw it eschew conventions once again by playing microtonal guitars; essentially, instruments that can hit the off-sounding notes in-between usual fretboards. Such a premise has the potential to spread quite thin – especially by the third album – but to the band’s credit, they see it out with flair, notably in Static Electricity, which swells and spirals with walls of guitar drone. The band may have an exhaustive discography, but listening to its frequent additions is never exhausting.
David James Young
Album reviews for week of March 13, 2021:
ALTERNATIVE
Carnage
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Goliath/AWAL
Conceived quickly during lockdown, Carnage marks the first credited duo release for Nick Cave and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis (The Bad Seeds, Grinderman, Dirty Three) outside of their extensive soundtrack work. Yet it plays more like an extension of the themes explored across the Bad Seeds’ 2019 double album Ghosteen, which saw the enduring Australian singer-songwriter openly grieving for his late son Arthur. This record continues the reeling, often amorphous approach to arrangements, again forged by improvisation. That stream-of-consciousness flow carries over into lyrics that can feel suddenly jarring. “I’ll shoot you in the f..king face / If you think of coming around here,” Cave growls on White Elephant, a track that shifts from spoken-word bravado to a hymnlike singalong across six minutes. He references Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Fred Astaire in passing elsewhere, stoking delicate romance on the closing Balcony Man before comparing himself to “a 200-pound octopus under a sheet”.
Not many artists could comfortably accommodate those tonal twists, but the lived-in gravity of Cave’s voice means that we usually stay right there with him. And the sheer degree of spontaneity here means that we get real-time thrills such as the Greek-chorus repetition of the title phrase on opener Hand of God and the piano-flecked electronic simmer and shudder of Old Time. While it’s tempting to scan the lyrics for clear meaning – see the title track’s opening jewel: “I always seem to be saying goodbye” – it’s the unreadable aspect that makes us turn them over anew in our heads. That’s especially true of Lavender Fields, a New Age-shaded meditation on life and afterlife that’s all the more powerful for how open-ended it is. Blurring the pair’s constituent parts, Carnage roams far beyond the squalling violin with which Ellis first made his name. Working together in a shared state of intuition, the two have never sounded quite so unfettered by expectation – either theirs or ours.
Doug Wallen
JAZZ
Bossa Nova Sunset Club
The View From Madeleine’s Couch
Independent
Courtesy of the bossa nova, a ubiquitous time-feel found everywhere in jazz, Brazilian music enjoys a mythical status. This Brisbane group has spent 24 years developing a rare empathy with Brazil’s sensuous music. This unusual album features Anje West singing virtually the whole repertoire in Portuguese. As most local listeners will hear her vocals as an instrument, it’s fortunate that her voice is understated, well recorded, not too lush and has a lovely vibrato, ideal for Brazilian-flavoured music. Solos by Kym Ambrose (vibraphone) and Bruce Woodward (guitar) are unfailingly appealing, and the inner rhythmic structures of 12 tracks are well thought through, underpinned by the great Brazilian drummer Marcio Bahia.
Eric Myers
FOLK/ROCK
Skellig
David Gray
Laugh A Minute Records/AWAL
The 12th album by this British singer-songwriter is beautifully simple in its folk harmonies, lulled guitar and understated piano. There is an unearthly aspect to Skellig, magical and atmospheric, perhaps the apparition of Skellig Michael, a twin-pinnacled crag in Ireland. Recorded in the Scottish highlands, Gray’s inspiration was a monastery founded in 600AD, which raised his interest in how one communes with God in the harshest terrain. Irish musicians David Kitt, cellist Caroline Dale and Sligo singer Niamh Farrell feature in these luscious, tactile, devotional songs. Heart and Soul epitomises the sense of a musical call directly to the soul, bypassing body and intellect. The slide of fingers over guitar strings, a sigh, the pressure of a foot on a bass pedal: every moment feels sacred in such spaciousness.
Cat Woods
INDIE ROCK
Little Oblivions
Julien Baker
Matador/Remote Control
The mid-2010s saw Julien Baker emerge as a bare-bones, heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter. With little more than her guitar and voice, she saw out the decade as one of her generation’s most celebrated indie wunderkinds. A new decade sees the Tennessee native restructuring her approach, widening her palette to incorporate full-band arrangements in earnest for the first time. Doing so means that Little Oblivions, her third LP, is experimental by design. Tracks such as Heatwave translate well in this new environment; others, such as Crying Wolf and closer Ziptie, struggle to justify their relative maximalism when contrasted with the stark simplicity of her early work. It’s understandable for Baker to aspire beyond her solo framework, but there’s a danger in throwing perfume on the proverbial violet.
David James Young
POP PUNK/METALCORE
You’re Welcome
A Day To Remember
Warner
This Florida post-hardcore quintet takes no prisoners on album No 7. In the wake of Deftones’ trailblazing style that combines punk, metal and a cappella harmonies, vocalist Jeremy McKinnon veers from menacing, metal growl to a melodic, boyish pop-punk within seconds. Is it metal? Is it emo? Is it punk? It’s often all three genres contained in the same song. Bloodsucker and Resentment channel pure fury into melodious vocals, guttural snarls and violent, frantic guitar riffage. Looks Like Hell, Last Chance to Dance and Permanent merge the purest elements of metal into the catchiest, hook-laden pop songs. Each song offers a concise punch to the solar plexus at roughly three minutes apiece. It’s almost militant in the fervent, climactic build of drums that blow out into a furious sonic assault.
Cat Woods
INDIE ROCK
As Days Get Dark
Arab Strap
Rock Action
“What would you call the opposite of a comedian? Whatever it is, that’s what I wanted to be,” confides Aidan Moffat in bone-dry spoken word on Arab Strap’s first album in 16 years. Tears on Tour is a deadpan ballad about weeping over children’s movies yet being unable to on stage, even after selling collectable handkerchiefs. As cheekily self-aware as that job description may be, it nails his role in the introverted Scottish duo, which first emerged in 1995. Against low-lit drum machine, Malcolm Middleton’s spindly guitar threads and the occasional flourish of strings, Moffat dwells at length on the passage of time and the bleak toll of displacement. His wordplay remains elegant and atmospheric, citing “the puckish promise of a bended knee” while viewing old photos in Another Clockwork Day.
Doug Wallen
Album reviews for week of March 6, 2021:
SOUL/POP/ROOTS
Terra Firma
Tash Sultana
Lonely Lands/Sony
Tash Sultana has found solid ground. Terra Firma, the Maltese-Australian musician’s second album, recorded across 200 days last year during a COVID-enforced break from touring, is about home, hearth and heart, making up for lost time with a partner and rediscovering simple pleasures: surfing, the kitchen, the motorbike, the dog. Most of its 14 songs celebrate this new-found contentment. Notable exceptions are the anti-materialist funk-rap Greed, and two tracks — Crop Circles and Coma — that revisit a disastrous teenage drug experience. The musical template is struck on the instrumental overture, Musk, all silky guitars, dreamy keys, spinal bass line and hooky harmonica. Elsewhere are stabs of brass, programmed percussion, judicious use of echo and reverb, double-tracked vocals displaying Sultana’s multi-octave range, and found sounds including wildlife, rain, closing car doors and footsteps.
Where the 2018 debut Flow State was an exploration of music’s possibilities, Terra Firma is a delivery on its promise. Sultana demonstrates a firmer grasp of soulful form, though some of the content remains elusive. The lyrics, not the artist’s strong suit, are akin to another in a long list of instruments (a dozen and counting) Sultana has tackled since first picking up a guitar at the age of three. Selected as much for their sound as their meaning, the words are like a final layer in the seemingly elaborate and deceptively simple soundscapes Sultana constructs. The gender-fluid artist (who prefers the nominative pronoun they) is indeed a person of many parts: singer, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, chameleon. Sultana’s non-binary gender choice is spelled out in the song Sweet and Dandy: “I don’t have to define by the sexes / and I don’t have to get down with none of that bullshit XYs and Xs.” It’s clear the lockdown enabled more time for Sultana to spend on the arrangements. Rather than relying on the established methodology of pedal-switched loops, effects and sequencers, they’re shifting gears in search of higher ground.
Phil Stafford
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JAZZ
Son of Nyx
Tamil Rogeon
Soul Bank Music
Melbourne violist Tamil Rogeon has assembled an impressive group to illustrate a compelling musical vision. I hear his attractive compositions, arranged innovatively and organically connected, as a six-movement suite of modal jazz works. Rhythmic foundations, brilliantly articulated by bassist Sam Anning and drummer Danny Fischer, underpin the music. Keyboard duties are shared by two excellent players in Sam Keevers and Daniel Mougerman. Warm background vocals & additional percussion on some tracks spice up the music. Mysteriously Rogeon himself is somewhat unobtrusive. While all other instruments are splendidly recorded his viola solos sometimes lack presence in the sound mix. Still, this is a powerful album and there are great moments when the music really soars.
Eric Myers
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POP
Kaleidoscope Eyes
Sheppard
Empire of Song
Bubbly, sinuous dance-pop is served fresh on the third album from Brisbane siblings George, Amy and Emma Sheppard. Relentless in its sparkly superficiality, this is music ideal for running along the beach, sunset beers at the bar and long summer road trips. Heartbreak is made infectious in Somebody Like You, which shows the big harmonic choruses this band is expert in. Every song sounds like it could be a theme song for an American teen drama series, which is an art in itself. The lyrics are simplistic schmaltz, but fans of Sheppard show up for the high-energy, airbrushed production that recalls slick 1990s groups like NSYNC or Steps, as shown on harmony-stacked anthems like Brand New. This is textbook-perfect pop that’s bound to soundtrack ads for jeans and lip gloss.
Cat Woods
-
INDIE ROCK
The Shadow I Remember
Cloud Nothings
Carpark Records
Dylan Baldi’s songwriting has always operated on a knife-edge: the frontman of US band Cloud Nothings can shift his project on a dime from rousing indie pop to a snarling noise-rock thrash, sometimes within the same song. Within this framework, one could consider The Shadow I Remember business as usual. It’s album No. 7, after all, reuniting the band with producer Steve Albini from its 2012 breakthrough Attack on Memory. But Baldi is constantly tweaking his own format: Nothing Without You marks its pop-friendliest effort in at least half a decade, care of guest vocalist Macie Stewart’s endearing titular refrain. The wheel isn’t reinvented on these 11 tracks, but Baldi’s tyres are never less than roadworthy, so it’s always worth taking these trips again and again.
David James Young
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AMERICANA
These 13
Jimbo Mathus & Andrew Bird
Cooking Vinyl Australia
Guitarist Jimbo Mathus and fiddler/mandolinist Andrew Bird, collaborators of yore in cult Carolina swing band Squirrel Nut Zippers, embrace the maxim less is best with relish on their debut duo album. Recording live to analog tape around a single microphone lends an intimate and compelling vibe to 13 soulful and sincere co-compositions that straddle the spectrum of acoustic Americana styling, from folk and country to blues and gospel. Mathus & Bird’s songs refer to hard times and suffering without resorting to cliche. While the contrast between their voices and the sound of their instruments is marked, both exude musicality and individuality, which makes for arresting, imaginative harmonies and exchanges. Pithy lines pepper these songs, and their rapport is palpable.
Tony Hillier
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HIP-HOP/ELECTRONIC
Smiling With No Teeth
Genesis Owusu
Ourness/House Anxiety
Born in Ghana and based in Canberra, 22-year-old singer/rapper Genesis Owusu brings a jaw-dropping degree of ambition to his debut album. It’s a thrilling showcase of his outsized personality while adding welcome depth to hip-hop’s signature bravado. Targeting a symbolic pair of black dogs that stand for depression and racism, Owusu unpacks mental health at length on Gold Chains and the title track, turning relatable anxieties into gymnastic shows of wordplay set to club-pitched electronics and undulating R&B to slippery jazz and abstract future-pop. The sprawling track list resembles a heightened form of channel surfing, recalling the genre-blurring greatness of OutKast and Prince. For all its ferocious verve, though, there’s a sensitivity and articulation here that’s rare indeed for such a young star in the making.
Doug Wallen
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