Molly Sweeney handout for Brad Wheeler story
New releases: Molly Sweeney and more
J.D. Considine, Elissa Poole AND Brad Wheeler
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Also: Matthew Barber, Madeleine Peyroux and Paul Lewis
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FOLK
Gold Rings and Fur Pelts
Molly Sweeney (Independent)
3 1/2 stars
A mesmerizing new voice from Montreal comes to the scene, dramatically offering emotions and stories that are deeply cast and artfully arranged. You can’t take your ears off Molly Sweeney, who worries elegantly and shrouds herself in a sort of sixties folk-siren shawl. Her voice is darkish normally, so when on the waltzing Full Moon she soars to high range – “I’m screaming this song, and I hope you will hear / Well I must owe you something, since I hold you dear” – the effect is that of a bold ray of silver through shadows. I hear Joni Mitchell, I hear Leonard Cohen – I hear mostly the sublime dance of Sweeney.
– Brad Wheeler
Molly Sweeney and band play Toronto’s Tranzac, June 21; Ottawa’s Elmdale Tavern, June 22.
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POP
Matthew Barber
Matthew Barber (Outside)
3 stars
Self-titled and self-made, Matthew Barber’s latest is a simple, honest pleasure, recorded on an analog 8-track machine. On the sparse Let Me Go Home, Barber’s plea is delivered with such a heavy heart that any listener with an ounce of empathy would offer to take the man home or any place else he wished to go. There are unashamed nods to Dylan, the Beatles – guitar riffs on Blue Forever recall Abbey Road’s Oh! Darling, and the rocking Dust on My Collar borrows slide licks from George Harrison – and especially Loudon Wainwright III. Barber on this generally acoustic album often misses homes and people, but he doesn’t miss on much else.
– Brad Wheeler
Matthew Barber (with Oh Susanna) plays Halifax’s The Carleton, June 20 and 21; Toronto’s Great Hall, June 24.
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JAZZ
Standin’ on the Rooftop
Madeleine Peyroux (Decca)
3 1/2 stars
Some singers assert their right to sing the blues through overstatement, establishing their bona fides with shouts, growls and exaggerated drawls. Peyroux, by contrast, makes her point through understatement, letting back-of-the-beat phrasing and throaty murmurs do the work. And work it does, as her singing encourages attention to the subtleties — the minimalist thrum of the title tune, or the Auden-derived lyrics of Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love. As with her last album, the emphasis is on originals, but the covers are stunners, from the ghostly invocation of loss in Robert Johnson’s Love in Vain to the Memphis blues percolating beneath Bob Dylan’s I Threw it All Away.
– J.D. Considine
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CLASSICAL
Ludwig van Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, Op. 120
Paul Lewis, piano (harmonia mundi)
4 stars
Like Beethoven, who wrote his Diabelli Variations only after completing his last three piano sonatas, British pianist Paul Lewis comes to the Diabelli Variations at the end of recording an imposing Beethoven cycle for harmonia mundi. And just as Beethoven – roused by the challenge of making something profound out of a form so suited to triviality – bent Diabelli’s conventional little waltz to his will, so Lewis forces even the most contrasting material into sides of a single character: Each variation is part of a whole, rather than a discrete vignette. Neither whimsy nor humour has much presence here, but the interpretations are gripping, and everything – including the variation that parodies Leporello’s first aria from Don Giovanni – belies its mundane roots.
– Elissa Poole
