Albums of the week: three new releases
Seven Psalms is a short (25 minute) album made up of seven “intimate prayers”, written by Nick Cave during the 2020 lockdown, and delivered by him against a backing of reverberant synths and piano played by Warren Ellis, his chief collaborator. For any other major rock artist, this would rank as a “dramatically left-field turn”, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. But Cave’s changing relationship to God and his faith is a “kind of connective tissue that runs throughout his body of work”. This isn’t a major Cave release; it feels more like an addendum to last year’s Carnage. But it’s an “extremely powerful album”, displaying the talent of two “superb writers, at the top of their game”.
Seven Psalms is less an album and more – in Cave’s words – a “veiled, contemplative offering” of “small, sacred songs”, said James Hall in The Daily Telegraph. But these are “powerful nuggets” – and Ellis’s music “is elegiac throughout. It throbs and swells with subtle majesty” – and is illuminated by some “beguiling” riffs and “gorgeous” details.
Songs sung in the Cornish language conjure thoughts of fiddles, “clanking tankards of ale and invective directed at whatever the Cornish word is for secondhome owners”, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the Financial Times. Tresor, a beguilingly beautiful album from the Welsh-Cornish singer-songwriter Gwenno Saunders, “tramples dreamily over that illusion”. Gwenno sings in “sweetly hazy tones”, while her “mesmerising” music has the “other-worldly feel of vintage psychedelic pop, a portal into a world of pulsing rhythms and brightly chiming colours”.
Most people will experience these songs without knowing what they are about, said Kate Solomon in The i Paper. But read a translation of her lyrics, and you’ll find that Gwenno is singing about womanhood and motherhood, landscapes and seascapes, and the passing seasons. A solitary number in Welsh has a more political spin. It is a “beautifully crafted” collection full of “magical” music to get lost in. “Tresor is Cornish for ‘treasure’ and this album really is.”
When Paolo Nutini broke through with his debut These Streets in 2006, the handsome Scot was greeted as a “pin-up purveyor of contemporary blue-eyed soul”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. But his pigeonholing as a “more soulful James Blunt”, or a Caledonian James Morrison, was always wildly misleading. And since then, Nutini’s career has seen him embrace jazz, Americana, epic rock and funk. This, his fourth album, is thrillingly “eccentric” and a triumph. Its influences include “Krautrock, prog rock, folk rock and a taut vein of post-punk pop-rock, all gilded with the most fluid, raw and emotional soul voice Britain has produced since Rod Stewart first squeezed into a pair of tight trousers”.
Nutini, who is now 35, has spent the eight years since the release of his last album wandering the world – New York, Mexico, Spain – making music under the radar, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. All that experience has “sunk into” this 70-minute epic that “goes down unexpected routes” and establishes him as a “serious musical talent”.
Stars reflect the overall quality of reviews and our own independent assessment (5 stars=don’t miss; 1 star=don’t bother)