Jill Barber
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Music
New CD releases: Louise Burns, Timber Timbre and more
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
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POP
Mellow Drama
Louise Burns (Light Organ Records)
3 stars
Louise Burns plays bass and was a founding member of Lillix, a Vancouver teen-rock outfit that was signed to Madonna’s Maverick label when Burns was 15. Now 25, she has put together a solo debut disc of mostly original songs that play like a big valentine to the big-booted pop and rock sounds of the sixties and seventies. Burns’s full-throated alto recalls that period too, as she sings about doubt, heartbreak, gypsy wives (via a more than respectable Leonard Cohen cover), and the power of the sea to wash it all away. The sound of the record is broad and reverberant, as if you’d walked into a big half-empty club and heard someone with talent who hasn’t been discovered by many people yet. That’s exactly the case with Burns – though maybe not for long. Robert Everett-Green
Louise Burns plays the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on April 28
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FOLK/BLUES
Creep on Creepin’ On
Timber Timbre (Arts & Crafts)
3 stars
“All I need is some sunshine,” Taylor Kirk softly moan-sings on his weird Toronto trio’s latest (and perfectly titled) album. But the sunshine doesn’t come, and the night crawlers have never been happier. Though similar to 2010’s bluesy, eerie self-titled release, Creep on Creepin’ On skulks toward a more cinematic soundscape. So while Bad Ritual has the poltergeist-played piano and a zombie-crooning choir we expect, the tuneful, plinking title track adds striking strings and Colin Stetson’s daunting saxophone, and the closing instrumental Souvenirs hints at widescreen possibilities. A little sunlight after all then, into the tomb of Timber Timbre. Brad Wheeler
Timber Timbre plays Ottawa’s First Baptist Church, Saturday; Montreal’s Théâtre Corona, April 16.
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POP
Mischievous Moon
Jill Barber (Outside Music)
2.5 stars
For all her sweet disappearances into other eras – swank Bacharach-stirred cocktails and lush dinner-party jazz – the style-chasing chanteuse Jill Barber is only mischievous on Tell Me, her fourth album’s most contemporary and alluring track. It’s a lowly lit ballad, with steely seventies strings and an elegantly sexy chill. “Did I do something wrong,” she croons, her doll-like contralto coolly contrite, “or is it what I didn’t do?” It’s a little of both. In her search to create a niche for herself, the lovestruck Barber seems a little too lost in her own daydreams. B.W.
The bilingual Barber tours Quebec this month, with dates to follow in Hamilton, April 29; Toronto, April 30: Victoria, May 13; Nanaimo, B.C.; and Vancouver, May 18.
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CLASSICAL
Ann Southam: Glass Houses Revisited
Christina Petrowska Quilico, piano (Centrediscs)
4 STARS
Revisiting the late Ann Southam’s Glass Houses is like running into old friends. I hadn’t heard these minimalist piano pieces for years, but those I knew were instantly familiar. It might seem that all this pattern music would start to sound the same, but Southam – who saw it as a metaphor for the repetitive nature of “women’s work” – made each of her (generally consonant) harmonic landscapes absolutely distinctive. Most are affably, gently intriguing; some are ebullient; one is grimly reminiscent of a passage in Steve Reich’s Holocaust work, Different Trains. Pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico, who revised and edited Glass Houses with Southam’s endorsement, performs them with virtuoso precision, taking advantage of all the piano’s resources – warmth, resonance, pedalling, dynamics. Quilico’s interpretation is less brittle, less abstract than we might expect; it’s also more sensuous, as if those metaphorical women were getting more pleasure from their work. Elissa Poole
