FILTER ALBUMS
Ed Harcourt ★★★
Orphic
DEATHLESS. DL/LP
Singer-songwriter goes seasonal. Nothing to do with Christmas though.
As he hurtles towards his 20th album and his fiftieth year, it’s reasonably clear that for Ed Harcourt not everything has turned out as well as it deserved to. He was always too ruminative and complex to cross the commercial bridge, but Orphic ticks all the right boxes without sounding like a box-ticking enterprise. It’s influenced by January sadness (AKA seasonal affective disorder) and he’s more contemplative than ever as A Ghost Walked Through Me is dedicated to the late Afghan Whigs guitarist Dave Rosser and the woozy Baby’s Gone To Seed is his subtle take on contemporary America. He hits his lugubrious stride on the Coldplay-esque The Low Spirits, title notwithstanding the most up-tempo, optimistic moment: “you’ve got to beat the low, low spirits, won’t you take a walk with me in the sunshine”. Everything else be damned: he’s doing fine.
John Aizlewood
Various ★★★
Spring Revisited
ACID JAZZ. CD/DL/LP
Club DJs re-imagine New York soul label archive.
The Spring label began life in New York in 1967 and majored in soul, disco and funk. Its flagship artists Millie Jackson, Fatback Band and Joe Simon have been much sampled over the years. Here the archive is given over, along the lines of the Blue Note Re:Imagined series, to DJs/ mixers from New York, Paris and all across the UK, who go a step further, giving tracks a clubland makeover. Some work well like Dimitri From Paris’s revved up four-to-the-floor Liberated Women’s Mix of Millie Jackson’s We Got To Hit It Off, or DJ Spinna’s piano house take on Joe Simon’s Love Vibration and Kenny Dope’s reworking of Fatback Band’s Night Fever as percussive spectacle. Others less so, such as Dope and Magnus Frykberg’s oversaturated remake of Jackson’s Don’t Send Nobody Else which loses the original’s primal force.