list.co.uk/music RECORDS | MUSIC
SOUNDTRACK BELLE & SEBASTIAN Days of the Bagnold Summer (Matador) ●●●●● EXPERIMENTAL ANNA MEREDITH FIBS (Moshi Moshi) ●●●●●
The IMDB entry for the forthcoming Days of the Bagnold Summer – the debut film by director Simon Bird, aka The Inbetweeners Will McKenzie – tells us precisely why Belle & Sebastian have composed the original soundtrack for it, which is released here as a full album recording. ‘A teenager spends his summer listening to heavy metal music and trying to get along with his librarian mom,’ it declares, and only the Americanisation of that last word detracts from what could essentially be a monochrome Belle & Sebastian album cover come to life. Technically the group’s tenth album, and their first since 2015’s Girls in Peacetime
Want to Dance, there remains a sense – as there was with Storytelling, 2002’s soundtrack to the Todd Solondz film of the same name – that the Belle’s creative direction might have been usurped somewhat by the demands of the film. Of thirteen tracks, two are re-recordings of previous Belle & Sebastian songs; ‘Get Me Away from Here I’m Dying’ (1996) and ‘I Know Where the Summer Goes’ (1998), the former one of only two genuinely upbeat songs here (the other is the La’s-like jangle of lead single ‘Sister Buddha’).
There are also a number of instrumental and incidental tracks, and while ‘Jill Pole’ and ‘The Colour’s Gonna Run’ are pleasant folk-rock grooves, the absence of Stuart Murdoch’s voice is missed (although ‘Another Day, Another Night’, ninety seconds of Sarah Martin repeating a looping lyric over gossamer-thin acoustic guitar, is superb). ‘I Know Where the Summer Goes’ is a gorgeous, folksy affair;
For all that she’s a compositional expert of breathtaking ability, Anna Meredith remains trapped in the hinterland between her two natural constituencies at the moment. The North Queensferry-raised musician is beloved of classical audiences, although there’s a certain perception from stuffier quarters that her popularity is a confected sop to the youngsters, while in the field of genuinely experimental pop music – which is what she makes – she’s too approved of by the BBC Proms and laden with an MBE to be truly fashionable. Whichever form her legacy takes – and she’s a musician of such originality that a proper legacy would be deserved, rather than just fond remembrance of a couple of songs which people once liked – it will be her recordings which grant it to her. In which case FIBS, the follow-up to her 2016 Scottish Album of the Year Award- winning debut Varmints, indicates that playful experimenter may be the mantle which suits her best.
Throughout, Meredith appears to be having fun with new and often intriguing
combinations of keys, instruments and genres. The addition of electric guitar is an element which her fans may not be used to, although ‘Limpet’, the song which relies on it most, is also the most conventional, with the air of an instrumental Manic Street Preachers B-side. It's also used on ‘Paramour’, whose swirling electronic beats and deep blasts of tuba are at least far closer to Meredith’s ballpark. With electronica, she appears truly at home; on ‘Sawbones’, orchestral and
‘Did the Day Go Just Like You Wanted?’ bears some classic bittersweet lyricism from Murdoch; and ‘This Letter’ is a sparse bossa nova fantasia.
Perhaps the most pleasingly unusual track on here, however, is ‘We Were Never Glorious’, the instrumental which closes the record with elegiac piano, violin and vocal clips from the film. It’s not a classic Belle & Sebastian album in its entirety, but there are many moments of wonder to be found here. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 13 Sep.
synthesised elements fusing so as to be indistinguishable; on ‘Inhale Exhale’, which takes the elegiac acid riff and converts it into a soaring piece of pop; and on ‘moonmoons’, ‘Divining’ and ‘Unfurls’, all different flavours of delicate ambient exploration. It’s an album which blends the conventional and the unconventional, and while Meredith’s talent glows on the latter, the former is unfriendly ground to one of her ability. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 25 Oct.
ART POP JENNY HVAL The Practice of Love (Sacred Bones) ●●●●● FOLKTRONICA BON IVER i,i (Jagjaguwar) ●●●●●
Love isn’t exactly the most original of subjects to tackle for a recording artist. Everyone’s had a crack at it from the certified crooners to the bland brand of Radio 2 romance. But Norwegian multi-disciplinary artist Jenny Hval’s The Practice of Love hangs less on tenderness and more on the intuitive connections between four women: Hval herself, Sydney-born songwriter Laura Jean (who Hval met when living out in Australia), Singaporean multi-instrumentalist Vivian Wang (who Hval admits she’s only really met in passing) and French artist, Félicia Atkinson. The connection between the latter is marked only by a shared passion for New Mexico and a mutual admiration for each other’s work. With such a breadth of influences and global inputs, it’s not surprising that The
Practice of Love is a Rolodex of stored sounds, fragments of documentary scripts and the kind of ethereal electronica you might hear from fellow Nordic DJ, Maria Minerva. Opening track ‘Lions’ finds Hval poaching from Vivian Wang’s voiceover stores as she recounts the tale of an imagined space up in northern Norway that was never christened while ‘Accident’ (with Jean on lead) feels more like a nod to the EDM euphoria of the nineties. But it’s the title track where Hval’s playful mind and self-expression excels as Wang delivers a rousing knockdown of the very notion of love (‘I hate love in my own language/It contains the entire word honesty inside it’) and admits: ‘Maybe “Sorry” is the closest I’ve ever got to saying love’.
Bon Iver mainman Justin Vernon has made the most of the opportunities which arose from the unexpected global success of his no-fi debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. Initiatives include running his own festival and launching a non-commercial streaming service on to which he regularly dripfeeds new material – including, at one point, a song entitled ‘The Shittiest Day In American History’ (whatever could he be talking about?)
Vernon has also become progressively more sociable as a musician, and some of his recent collaborators crop up on this fourth Bon Iver album. Guests include piano man Bruce Hornsby, the Dessner brothers from the National and James Blake, whose propensity for manicured angst makes its presence felt in the periodic use of distorted keening vocals. There is a thin line between this self-regarding pretension and the soulful gospel chorale of ‘iMi’, and Vernon seems intent on criss-crossing it throughout this downbeat electronic suite which sticks roughly to the same lane as 2016’s 22, A Million in eschewing the songwriting rigour of earlier albums in favour of experimenting with the sonic palette.
Vernon has suggested that the weeks spent utilising multiple rooms in the studio were more crucial to the record than the years he spent songwriting – you can judge for yourself whether or not that is a boon. While individual tracks don’t outstay their welcome, many are frustratingly sketchy.
With her six-strong discography to date, Hval has picked up international Highlights are invariably the more soulful interludes – the bare vocal invocation
acclaim for her markedly non-traditional arrangements incorporating poetry, prose writing and performance. The Practice of Love is no exception. If anything, she’s spread those tendrils even wider, out through internet cables and across oceans to connect these artists together and find a common voice. Because while Hval might not like the idea of love, she’s found the spark of something tender here. (Cheri Amour) ■ Out Fri 13 Sep.
at the start of ‘Hey, Ma’ would not be out of place on a Young Fathers album. Hornsby guests on the piano–led, gospel-tinged ‘U (Man Like)’, which culminates with some sweet call-and- response between the sexes. But, elsewhere, the testifying quality of Vernon’s raw vocal over a calming wash of finessed piano and synths on ‘Naeem’ or his pained pronouncements against a backdrop of soothing, shifting brass on ‘Sh’Diah’ sounds contrived. (Fiona Shepherd) ■ Out now. 1 Sep–31 Oct 2019 THE LIST 81