Album reviews

Wyatt/Atzmon -
Winter of Mixed Drinks
Music Label: Domino Records
Reviewer: Irfan Shah

At once mainstream, jazz and outsider art, he continues to plough a happy furrow through the music scene and has added to one of the loveliest and most underrated back catalogues in music with his latest release. ‘For the Ghosts Within’ is a collaboration between Wyatt, saxophonist Gilad Atzman and violinst Ros Stephen which puts original compositions alongside standards such as ‘Round Midnight’ and ‘In a Sentimental Mood’.

So much hangs on his voice – personally I think it’s a lovely thing, that soft south England accent wandering through string quartets and aching sax, hanging notes and a vague sense that Wyatt is wandering around his house in nightgown and slippers singing to himself and unaware that he has an audience entranced by his performance. And it is an uneven album, in the best sense – the title track is a sumptuous, twisting ballad with guest vocalist Tali Atzman’s haunting voice floating amidst eastern scales, an embroidery of sound that carries lightly the darker thematic resonances and is followed by ‘Where Are They Now?’ which sounds like a trad jazz take on Mozart’s Divertimenti , plunging in and out of sampled beats and Arabic rap.

This is what self-indulgence should sound like. And a thought strikes me – that maybe, to act with total self-indulgence is to behave with complete integrity. But I digress – ‘For the Ghosts Within’ is your favourite batty uncle, your letter to Santa delivered, a guiltless-guilty pleasure and a tender and understated treat.

Ólöf Arnalds - Innundir skinni
Music Label: One Little Indian
Reviewer: A. Sargeant

Gonks. You remember them don’t you? Small, furry soft toys your sister used to collect. Like me, you probably never really got them, but at one time they were a ‘must have’ playground accessory. But unlike Rubiks Cubes, they couldn’t be used as a tool to dazzle your mates with how brainy you were and unlike conkers, they proved inadequate when trying to deal someone a really cruel blow on a wet-play in January. In fact it was impossible to say with any certainty if these unaccountably ghoulish freaks with their simple expressions and big hair served any credible purpose at all, outside of making kids nervous. And it’s a similar proposition with much of the music coming out of Iceland. As otherworldly as a six-mile traffic diversion in Mid Wales, as tricksy as a hobbit and as likely to confound as Stephen Hawking’s diaries, artists like Bjork, Mum and Sigur Ros might offer tunes to rival aurora borealis in terms of beauty, but rarely do we understand them. And it’s a stereotype that Ólöf Arnalds seems unlikely to disrupt, not least because all these artists either appear on or are in some way connected to the album in one way or another - Bjork appearing on the creepily exquisite torch song, ‘Surrender’ and Sigur Ros keys-chap, Kjartan Sveinsson have produced the album. Sparse, minimal and as tremulous as a voice creeping down the quietest of library aisles, tunes like ‘Jonathon’ and ‘Svif Birki’ bring to mind the weeping, ethereal beauty of more accessible folk triumphs like James Yorkston, whilst the rousing vocal revelry of ‘Vinur Minn’ packs more energy and more sudden movements than Zorba the Greek.

Arnalds may seem two strings short of a full charango on occasions (‘Crazy Car’ is frankly baffling) but its no less charming because of it. And whilst the lute might not be the traditional weapon of choice it works in the rather alien, and tirelessly kooky context of ‘Innundir skinni’.