Honeyblood
Honeyblood
FatCat
In love, at least, Stina Tweeddale can’t catch a break. On the new album by the Glasgow duo Honeyblood, she is aggrieved and exasperated, falling hard only to be let down harder.
Honeyblood is a bracing two-piece — Tweeddale sings lead and plays guitar, and Shona McVicar plays drums — that specializes in a refreshing contrast of jangle and derision. They pair the melancholy guitars of early ‘90s shoegaze with surf-rock tempo — the result is energetic, peppy hostility.
Sometimes Tweeddale is the wounder here, like on No Spare Key, about letting a lover down and paying the price. But she’s far better when she’s been stung, as on Super Rat, on which she declaims, “You are the smartest rat in the sewer,” and sounds unclear whether that’s the least attractive thing possible, or maybe just a little bit intriguing.
Honeyblood is a skeletal outfit, which makes the background vocals — a combination of Tweeddale and McVicar — more important, like a shouted Greek chorus of disappointment and petulance.
Honeyblood has a core idea, but it sustains slight expansions of the musical palette, as on the lyrically dim Fortune Cookie, which pulses with a rootsy undercurrent. But mostly it keeps to its slash-and-burn mission, as on the zippy Killer Bangs and (I’d Rather Be) Anywhere but Here, both about the fallout from collapsed relationships.
And Tweeddale is happiest when she’s at her snottiest, as on the angsty, gnashing and exuberant All Dragged Up, which captures her at the point of just giving up, and trying to enjoy the rupture:
Teething pains are meant to fade
When incisors pierce through
When Mother Nature planned for age
She must have forgot about you
— Jon Caramanica
Terms of My Surrender
John Hiatt
New West
There’s just one really steadfast relationship on Terms of My Surrender, the new album by John Hiatt, and it’s the one between him and the blues. Everything else, it seems, is provisional: desire and devotion, good choices and decent luck. Singing in character, Hiatt offers all manner of hangdog sweet talk and yearning entreaty, and even a couple of sworn assurances. But it’s a blues sensibility that guides these songs, in feeling if not always in form.
Hiatt, 61, has had no problem acclimating to the elder-statesman phase of his esteemed troubadour career, in which the blues always cohabited with country, folk and rock ‘n’ roll. His wry, knowing voice as a singer-songwriter rang of experience even when he was a younger man. But these autumnal reflections — “Leaves are fallin’, winter’s on my mind,” goes the opening line in Here to Stay, a blues dirge — point toward a familiar species of morbid resilience. As if to help place the reference, Hiatt name-checks John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf in Baby’s Gonna Kick, a grudging prowl featuring his own train-whistle harmonica.
Produced by Doug Lancio, the lead guitarist in the Combo, Hiatt’s fine backing band, Terms of My Surrender has a relaxed and rawboned sound, credibly rooted in live performance. (A deluxe version, available through Amazon, includes a DVD of a sure-footed concert film currently in rotation on the Palladia channel.) Hiatt and the Combo can prioritize deep groove without laying it on too thick, never overcrowding the lyrics in the songs.
Those lyrics can be philosophically reflective, as in Long Time Comin’, or brokenhearted, as in Come Back Home. On Nothin’ I Love, Hiatt tries on the guise of a man racked with vices, trying to press them into the service of flattery: “Nothin’ I love is good for me but you,” goes his line. Old People recalls Randy Newman’s Short People, but with lyrics that lean more poignant than puckish, peeling away to the bitter heart of the joke.
Similarly, Face of God is back porch blues built around a high-minded rhetorical question: “Tell me how much more suffering/Before you see the eyes of God?” And on the title track, shrouded in the same misty country-Western nostalgia that has preoccupied Bob Dylan of late, Hiatt flickers between his gruff natural register and a faint, shuddery falsetto. When he sings of surrender, he could be alluding to love or death, or maybe both: “Where’s the glory in ashes and dust?/At the end of the story, there’s just us.”
— Nate Chinen
Floating
Fred Hersch Trio
Palmetto
The implication of weightlessness in Floating, the title track of an extravagantly beautiful new album by Fred Hersch, derives from a handful of effects: its slow, steady pulse; the subtle sweep of the chord progression; the diaphanous shimmer of Hersch’s pianism. But what really pulls the feeling together is the quietly shifting rapport Hersch has with the bassist John Hebert and the drummer Eric McPherson, who bring an alert intensity to even the airiest nocturne.
All is not ethereal on Floating, despite that memorable impression — and a cover image depicting a ghostly house, illuminated from within, resting atop a body of water. (It’s from A Speech to the Sea, a recent project by the Finnish artist Maaria Wirkkala.) What the album presents is an impeccably balanced program, carried at all times by sensitive and focused execution. Hersch has been making acclaimed trio releases since his debut album as a leader, 30 years ago. He hasn’t made one better than this.
His trio with Hebert and McPherson has been working more or less steadily for the past five years, developing an imposing level of collective empathy. That much was already apparent on the group’s previous album, Alive at the Vanguard, recorded at the Village Vanguard.
Typically for Hersch, Floating features some deft entanglements with jazz standards, beginning with the opener, a version of You and the Night and the Music arranged in contrapuntal 12/8 meter. But the greater share of the album belongs to the originals, most of them with personal dedications.
West Virginia Rose, a reverie for Hersch’s mother and grandmother, leads easily into Home Fries, a New Orleans strut dedicated to Hebert. The brisk hum of Arcata was inspired by the bassist Esperanza Spalding. Autumn Haze, cool and shadowy, is a nod to the pianist Kevin Hays. Far Away, a ruminative ballad for another jazz pianist (Shimrit Shoshan, a promising talent who died in 2012) strikes the album’s purest emotional chord, with rustling texture and elegiac melody.
The diversity of mood and color in these songs — and they do pass muster as songs, with strong melody and sensible design — is a boon to Hersch and his partners, who keep finding new routes of expression within the music. Hersch, with his fluent exposition, his rapturous clarity and his elegant assurance of touch, leads the way.
— Nate Chinen
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