Album reviews: Kasabian | Hot Chip | Lisa Gerard & Marcello De Francisci

Following the departure of original frontman Tom Meighan, Kasabian’s guitarist and songwriter Serge Pizzorno has stepped up to take on vocal duties on their new album, with some unexpected results. Reviews by Fiona Shepherd

Kasabian: The Alchemist’s Euphoria (Columbia Records) ***

Hot Chip: Freakout/Release (Domino) ****

Lisa Gerard & Marcello De Francisci: Exaudia (Atlantic Curve) ****

Earlier this summer, Kasabian supported Liam Gallagher at his return-to-Knebworth megagigs – one swaggering turbo-charged indie rock band opening for another. However, Kasabian’s original chief swaggerer, frontman Tom Meighan, was long gone, dispatched in 2020 “by mutual consent” following his conviction for assaulting his partner.

Rather than audition a new singer, guitarist and songwriter Serge Pizzorno has stepped up to frontman duties without much disturbance in the band’s style and popularity. Handily, Pizzorno has a natural charisma which is lacking in his bandmates, bassist Chris Edwards, drummer Ian Matthews and guitarist Tim Carter.

He’s also the Pete Townsend of the outfit, beavering away in his studio – called the Sergery – shaping the eclectic sound, setting the lyrical agenda – no songs about lockdown, nor the band’s travails – and quite possibly choosing the rubbish album title.

Pizzorno is a maximalist, layering swirling strings and a pseudo-rap on to opening track Scriptvre to distract from its similiarity to U2’s One. Rocket Fuel apes the aggressive bounce of The Prodigy, with hectic vocals and urgent synthesized strings, while Strictly Old School treats its psychedelic indie leanings with modern R&B pop production.

The brash indie rocker Alygatyr, released as a single last year to test the waters, is a bridge between old and new. “I am space,” sings Pizzorno. It transpires that when Kasabian were in the gutter, they were looking at the stars. The album features a second half suite of space songs intended to capture the out-of-body experience the band have been through in the last couple of years, the best of which is dreamy prog odyssey TUVE (standing for astronomy jargon The Ultra View Effect). Back down on terra firma, Kasabian have made a tricky transition sound relatively painless.

National treasure party band Hot Chip always make it sound effortless. The creation of their eighth album, Freakout/Release, was the ideal excuse to rock out together after the privations of lockdown in guitarist Al Doyle’s Relax & Enjoy studio – how could they not produce something life-affirming in such a space?

The middle-aged clubbers are on the dancefloor from the get-go with the funky groove of open track Down, built round a sampled vocal loop from More Than Enough by cult Chicago outfit Universal Togetherness Band. Again with the good vibes.

Yet there is almost always an element of melancholy providing some dynamic tension in the music – it’s there naturally in Alexis Taylor’s reed,y plaintive voice but also in his lyrics about lives out of control.

The titles tell their own story – Guilty, Broken, Out of My Depth, the latter a beautiful ballad on a bed of pulsing synth drones. The upbeat electro funk and piano house of Eleanor is shot through with compassion, Hard To Be Funky is a thoughtful serving of cosmic disco while The Evil That Men Do is a meditative house track with guest rap from Cadence Weapon. Songs for the head, the heart and the feet.

Dead Can Dance frontwoman Lisa Gerrard first met LA-based Argentinian producer/composer Marcello De Francisci through mutual connections in film music and they worked together on the 2010 album Departum. Follow-up Exaudia is a panoramic pandemic project, recorded remotely with some of her DCD bandmates, including Shetland’s Astrid Williamson, to produce a majestic suite which lives up to its Latin title, a term pertaining to a king granting an audience.

Gerrard, queen of the goths herself, was inspired to write about the Sephardic Jewish diaspora in Europe and the Middle East. The title track sounds like an epic Arabian adventure, while her stately contralto is entwined with the slightly rawer tones of Persian singer Bahar Shah on Stories of Love, Triumph & Misfortunes.

CLASSICAL

Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn: Chamber Works (Chandos) ****

For whatever reason, there’s a lot of Mendelssohn chamber music circulating at the moment: Fanny, that is, not her more famous brother Felix, though both are featured on this polished new release by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective. By a neat coincidence two of the three works featured here – Felix’s posthumously published Piano Sextet and Fanny’s distinguished Piano Trio Op11 – were coincidentally performed at the current Edinburgh International Festival. There’s justified curiosity in Fanny’s music, its supreme craftsmanship and bounding confidence. Take the fulminating opening the Piano Trio, a thrusting launchpad to the richly inspired unfolding of the ensuing movements. The same exquisite lyricism and structural robustness informs the Piano Quartet in A flat, especially in a performance that affectionately respects these complementary parameters. The Sextet could almost come from the same pen, but this is noticeably from Felix, a work of high drama with a lustrous nod to Weber. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Dameronia’s Legacy All Stars: Live at Audi Forum Ingolstadt (Ubuntu Music) ****

This purposefully swinging US-European band revivifies the music of pianist, composer and arranger Tadd Dameron, arguably, during a tragically brief career, the most influential jazz composer of the bebop era. The brainchild of drummer Bernd Reiter, the octet combines big-band-style arrangements, plenty of space for soloing, with unbridled energy and regard for Dameron’s compositions. There is, for instance, fine horn chorusing and mellifluous baritone sax by Rick van den Bergh and a thoughtful double bass excursion from Aldo Zunino in If You Could See Me Now (a signature ballad for Sarah Vaughan), while Reiter literally drums up the excitement in the high-energy Philly J J, soloists playing with infectious gusto. Reiter, Zunino and pianist Andrea Pozza deftly propel the fast-forward swing of On a Misty Night, while two covers include a full-bodied yet sensitive treatment of Victor Young’s My Foolish Heart. Jim Gilchrist