London,

CDs of the week

18.04.08

Arctic Monkey Alex Turner's side project, The Last Shadow Puppets, is a debut of extraordinary promise, The Accidental could improve with time and Anita Wardell has an impressive go at scat-singing.

THE ACCIDENTAL
There Were Wolves (Full Time Hobby)
**
Loudly touted as the future of quiet music, The Accidental are three refugees from British indie bands and singer-songwriter Liam Bailey. Their debut album is a hushed, bedsit affair which sidles from the hypnotic Wolves to the relatively jaunty I Can Hear Your Voice in gentle reverie. The results are certainly warm and there’s sporadic evidence of genuine craft, but the whole business is so unassuming, so unmemorable, so cheaply produced and so mealy-mouthed it sounds like a very early template for something which might be quite good at some distant point in the future.
JOHN AIZLEWOOD

POP

THE LAST SHADOW PUPPETS
The Age of the Understatement (Domino)

****
Both the group’s name and the album’s title are artful and knowing, which is surprising given that the creators — Arctic Monkey Alex Turner and Miles Kane of The Rascals — are only 22 years old. They were inspired by a love of Scott Walker and vintage Bowie, which is immediately apparent in the title track. What could have been mannered and moribund is transformed by infectious enthusiasm and no little songwriting skill into a joyful recreation of pop’s golden age. Standing Next to Me could have been a hit any time over the past 40 years and surely will be when released as a single. This is a debut of extraordinary promise.
PETE CLARK

FOUR TET
Ringer (Domino)
***
Much like Portishead and trip hop, Kieren Hebden pioneered a beautiful new sound as Four Tet and then spent years distancing himself from it. His albums Pause and Rounds are two of the finest examples of folktronica — the cutting up of warm acoustic sounds and electronics on a laptop — but he has since spent more time making experimental jazz with drummer Steve Reid. For this 32-minute mini-album, he turns his talents to a subtle, minimal, hypnotic form of techno. Of the four tracks, the bubbling chimes of Ribbons stand out but they sound like stopgap sketches rather than the fresh invention someone of his stature could be producing.
DAVID SMYTH

JAZZ

ANITA WARDELL
Kinda Blue (Specific Jazz)
****
As a scat-singer who thinks like an instrumentalist, Anita Wardell stands alone in the UK. She’s in prime form on an artfully chosen set of songs with blues titles (Born to be Blue, Little Girl Blue) but non-Blues chord sequences. Guesting with Robin Aspland’s expert piano trio are Adam Glasser (on harmonica for I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues) and guitarist Phil Robson. He enhances Teenie’s Blues and Race Against Time (originally Loose Bloose) where Anita’s lyric follows a classic guitar solo by Jim Hall. Wardell and her labelmate, saxophonist Tony Kofi, launch their new albums in a Purcell Room double bill on Monday.
JACK MASSARIK

WORLD

YAEL NAIM & DAVID DONATIEN
Yael Naim (Atlantic)
***
Born in Paris, brought up in Israel where her Tunisian parents migrated when she was four yours old, Yael Naim has a strikingly pure and flexible voice. On Paris, the opening track on this album, it sounds like she’s singing on air as she slips naturally between French and Hebrew. Other songs, like the single New Soul, are sung in English. Having returned to France in 2000, she recorded this album of personal chansons with the accompaniments of multi-instrumentalist David Donatien. The album has a confessional intimacy with soft, whispered vocals on many of the tracks, including a cover of Britney Spears’s Toxic.
SIMON BROUGHTON

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