Album reviews: Dylan John Thomas | The Smile | Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes

The Smile: Wall of Eyes (XL Recordings) ****

Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes: Dark Rainbow (International Death Cult/AWAL) ***

Like his mentor Gerry Cinnamon before him, Glasgow singer-songwriter Dylan John Thomas has built a formidable local fan following largely on word of mouth, selling out the beloved Barrowland ballroom on six occasions, all on the back of two EP releases. And now Thomas gathers these tunes, along with other favourites from his live set, to create the dynamic snapshot that is his self-titled debut album.

These songs are already known, loved and embraced as standards by the fans. There are also dividends for the more casual listener, given Thomas’s gift for an earworm hook. This care-experienced former busker is a songwriting purist, no composition by committee here. The album begins with the lonesome clang of guitar but quickly settles into a diet of breezy, chiming indie pop, with deft guitar playing, troubadour vocals and well-crafted tunes typified by opening track Fever.

The bare acoustic opening of Feel the Fire brightens up to a singalong chorus, mimicking the ups and downs of shifting moods suggested by the lyric “took my medication but I think it’s wearing off”. Up In the Air has a split musical personality with the querulous woodwind and ska rhythm of the intro bearing little relation to the slower, softer, melancholic portion of the song. Thomas is not the first writer to make a virtue of sandwiching together two song ideas. If it’s good enough for The Beatles…

On that note, What I Need is a Beatley amalgam of piano, strings and steady drums, soulful top notes and elegant melodic transitions. His guitar skills are to the fore on Rich Boy, as he channels his inner Lindsay Buckingham, before applying some dreamy Christine McVie-style synths to Yesterday. Elsewhere, there are shades of Leonard Cohen’s undulating finger-style playing on Champs-Élysées, percussive chimes on Jenna, which sounds like a Scottish indie pop version of Hot Butter’s Popcorn, and some spirited whistling to perk up Melancholy’s Cure.

The album closes with a version of Wake Up Ma recorded live at Barrowland – although not one of his most raucous numbers, it offers a glimpse into the communal celebration of a Thomas gig.

With the most recent Radiohead album some way back in the rearview mirror, The Smile remains your best bet for some Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood artistic action. Wall of Eyes, their second album in the loose-limbed company of Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, has been promoted with listening parties in surround sound and videos by Hollywood director Paul Thomas Anderson, so it’s an all-round luxe project.

The bewitching title track features clipped acoustic guitar, flamenco inflections, Yorke’s ghostly voice and creepy strings from the London Contemporary Orchestra, while the sense of space and mellow catharsis continues on Teleharmonic.

Yorke shifts to a more declamatory register on rock odyssey Read the Room, garnished with Greenwood’s Tuareg desert rock-influenced guitar tunings, while Under Our Pillows is an outright proggy melange of angular arpeggios, free-flowing vocals and pulsing Krautrock rhythms.

Friend of a Friend is a dance of light and dark, which exposes its Covid roots with its reference to balcony socials. I Quit is lyrically spartan and unusually direct for the impressionistic York – “this is my stop, this is the end of the trip,” he insists, while he gets his Thelma and Louise blaze-of-glory moment “skidding round a hairpin” on the eight-minute Bend Hectic before the music goes over the edge, cacophonous and soaring in the final two minutes.

Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes continue to plot a route between the vulnerable yet persuasive rock crooning of Queen of Hearts and the muscular rock of American Spirit on their latest album Self Love, adding epic synths to the mix alongside the crunchy guitars of the title track.

CLASSICAL

Le Temps retrouvé: Fauré | Bonis | Hahn | Boulanger (Chandos) ****

As the married violin-piano duo Elena Urioste and Tom Poster so often remind us, there’s still plenty undiscovered music of worth out there. In this gorgeous French album, alongside such known names as Fauré, Hahn and Lili Boulanger there is a truly inspired Violin Sonata by Mel Bonis, whose personal life (1958-1937) reads like a Jilly Cooper novel, involving a marriage of convenience with a rich old gent to wrest her away from an unsuitable lover, then having a daughter by the latter who discovers just in time she is in love with her half-brother. Bonis’ music is just as juicy: an endlessly teasing opening melody that defies structure yet embraces conviction; a confidence of style that echoes Franck yet evokes distant Brahms. In its wake, Fauré’s late Sonata No 2 is thoroughbred, Hahn’s Sonata blissfully sentimental, Boulanger’s brief Nocturne, with roots in Debussy, a radiantly original “adieu”. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Rob Cope: Gemini (Ubuntu Music) ****

Soprano saxophonist and bass clarinettist Rob Cope composed these 12 sometimes short but always characterful pieces specifically for the musicians who collaborate with him here – tenor sax player Andy Scott, pianist Liam Noble and drummer Paul Clarvis, the twin associations of the title referring the two pre-existing duos – himself And Scott, Clarvis and Noble – coming together for the album. It opens auspiciously with Voices, a winsome melody introduced by Cope’s luscious bass clarinet and taken up by tenor sax then piano over a rattling backchat of drums. Often instruments engage in spirited conversation – shrewish soprano and tenor sax spatting, for instance, in Together, or the animated central section of the otherwise languid Water, two saxophones playing without rhythm section. There’s a pulsing woodwind flow to Across, melancholy reed deliberations over murmuring percussion in Little Glass Box and much cheerful instrumental tail-wagging in Laika, ”a blues for dogs everywhere”. Jim Gilchrist