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Album reviews with Ian Sinclair: November 9, 2020

New releases from Strawberry Guy, Aimee Mann and Eberhard Weber

Strawberry Guy
Sun Outside My Window
(Melodic)
★★★★

STRAWBERRY Guy’s Twitter bio reads “Impressionist music.” Which makes sense when you realise the album cover is a reproduction of Claude Monet’s 1888 painting Meadow at Giverny.

Alex Stephens — the Welsh-born singer-songwriter behind the odd moniker — also cites French composers such as Ravel and Debussy as inspirations.

All of which is to say the orchestral indie music on his debut album is deeply romantic and sounds absolutely wonderful.

There is a warm, ’70s feel to songs like Stay In This Moment that brings to mind the summer melancholy of English artists like Nick Drake and The Clientele.

Elsewhere there are two beautiful instrumental tracks, breezy Burt Bacharach-sounding pop tunes and closer A White Lie, a lonesome dead of night piano ballad.

A sumptuous, hugely accomplished first record, this is very much a suite to get lost in.

 

Aimee Mann
Queens of The Summer Hotel
(Super Ego Records)
★★★★

WRITTEN for a stage adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s memoir about her time in a US psychiatric hospital in the 1960s, Aimee Mann’s tenth album is an accomplished song cycle.

Sensitive and wise, the US singer-songwriter has one of the most recognisable voices out there, perfectly suited to the mid-tempo orchestral indie folk found here.

Indeed, her 2017 Grammy award-winning album Mental Illness suggests more than a passing familiarity with the topic at hand.

The Rufus Wainwright sounding At The Frick Museum concerns the Johannes Vermeer painting with the same name as Kaysen’s book, while the song Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath is presumably named after the two poets who spent time in the same institution.

Like much of the set, the single Suicide is Murder, a piano ballad, sounds really lovely, belying the song’s dark lyrical content.

 

Eberhard Weber
Once Upon A Time — Live in Avignon
(ECM)
★★★★

HAVING made his ECM solo debut in 1973, the now 81-year-old German bassist and composer Eberhand Weber has worked with jazz heavyweights like Jan Gabarek and Ralph Towner, along with Kate Bush on her 1985 Hounds of Love album.

This recording is from a recital before an appreciative audience in Avignon, France, in August 1994, with Weber on his signature five-string upright bass hybrid.

Played through an electronic delay controlled by foot pedals, he is able to create an impressive and atmospheric sound on tracks like the epic Trio For Bassoon and Bass and his fluid cover of the show tune My Favourite Things.

He sounds like he is playing the oud on Silent For A While, while the pulsating Delirium brings to mind Vangelis’s soundtrack work.

An exquisite set from a master of his craft.

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