Album reviews: Blood Orange - Freetown Sound; Metronomy - Summer 08 + more

Also C. W. Stoneking - Gon’ Boogaloo, Jacob Collier - In My Room, and Frank Zappa - The Lumpy Money Project/Object

Metronomy, Summer 08, 3/5

Download this: Miami Logic; Old Skool; Night Owl

Having indulged his musical dreams through the acclaimed The English Riviera and Love Letters albums, with Summer 08 Metronomy’s Joe Mount winds the clock back to the earlier point at which the Nights Out album first hoisted him into a life of tour buses, taxicabs and promo duties. Entirely self-played save for a vocal by Robyn and some scratching by Mixmaster Mike, it carries on where Nights Out left off, with bounding synth bangers anchored with striding funk bass, marching to the “sweet 16 beat” of an early drum-machine that “makes my dreams sing”. Except that this time, Mount sounds chastened and wary, a yearning, lovelorn soul adrift in late-night disco delirium in “Night Owl”, and worried in “Back Together” about old friends left behind. It’s a weird one, mysterious and mildly menacing, but eerily engaging nonetheless.

CW Stoneking, Gon’ Boogaloo, 4/5

Download this: The Zombie; The Thing I Done; The Jungle Swing; On A Desert Isle

Australian blues throwback CW Stoneking puts his faith in primitivism on this latest album, which finds him tackling electric guitar for the first time, albeit using the kind of charity-shop set-up even Seasick Steve might find lacking in sophistication. Recorded in one take, with drums, bass, guitar and backing vocalists huddled around two microphones, the results have a rustic charm akin to a more grizzled Leon Redbone, with rolling rumba-rock and reggae grooves driving the likes of “The Thing I Done” and the aptly orang-utan gait of “The Jungle Swing”. Best of all is “The Zombie”, a slinky, sensuous dance number in “drag-step time”, to which the girls’ backing vocals lend the swampy mood of Dr John’s Gris-Gris.

Beyond The Wizards Sleeve, The Soft Bounce, 3/5

Download this: Delicious Light; Iron Age; Door To Tomorrow; Black Crow

The production/remix duo of Richard Norris and Erol Alkan here offer a retro-psychedelic throwback to a more imaginative time, one where the Krautrock grooves of Neu! and Can collide with spacey Ibizan house synth washes and the whimsical acid fairytales of classic Sixties Brit psychedelia. The latter aspect is aided on “Door To Tomorrow” by the naive charm of Euros Childs’s vocal about a girl called Emily, that most evocative of psych-rock names, whilst sawing strings swirl miasmically about him. Elsewhere, “Black Crow” offers dream-pop with Gothic overtones, “Iron Age” grafts together passages of heavily riffing guitar and sylvan vocal harmonies, and “Tomorrow, Forever” and “Finally First” soar into space on exultantly whooshing synthesiser lines. An utterly cosmic concoction.

Jacob Collier, In My Room, 3/5

Download this: In My Room; Down The Line; You And I

Garlanded with praise from the likes of Quincy Jones (“I have never in my life seen a talent like this”), jazz prodigy Jacob Collier is a hugely talented multi-instrumentalist whose solo debut, while impressive, suffers in places from the absence of an outside tempering influence. “Woke Up Today”, for instance, features so many overdubbed twists and turns it becomes a polyrhythmic digital soup, as Collier strives to demonstrate the extent of his abilities on every instrument devised by mankind. And save for where he’s restrained by another’s melody, as on Brian Wilson’s “In My Room” and Stevie Wonder’s “You And I”, his multi-tracked vocal harmonies, too, can be indulgently over-ornamented. But such influences hint at the genius level Collier’s measuring himself against, not without merit.

Frank Zappa, The Lumpy Money Project/Object, 5/5

Download this: Lumpy Gravy 1 & 2; Who Needs The Peace Corps?; Mom & Dad; What’s The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?; Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance

In 1967, flush with the underground success of the first two Mothers Of Invention albums, Frank Zappa did what any sane artist would and made Lumpy Gravy, a carefully scored classical work performed by an orchestra of more than 50 session musicians, painstakingly edited by him into a heavily percussive musique concrete collage. At the same time, he recorded with the Mothers the extraordinary We’re Only In It For The Money, a savage satirical blast at American society and flower-power mores whose eclectic musical modes ranged from pop and R&B to parodic rock and avant-garde, yet somehow coalesced into a brilliant whole. This 3CD set includes several mixes of both landmark albums, along with a host of outtakes: taken en masse, the sheer ambition and diversity shames most musicians’ meagre aims.

Blood Orange, Freetown Sound, 3/5

Download this: Augustine; EVP; But You; Hands Up

Devonté Hynes’s latest outing as Blood Orange takes the soft-soul stylings of 2013’s Cupid Deluxe and mashes them together with African voices and percussion, saxophones and vox populi samples to create a sonic collage that seeks to marry the vision of Marvin Gaye with the methods of Frank Zappa. That’s a considerable ambition, and unsurprisingly it falls well short much of the time. Opening with the street noise, saxophone and angry feminist rap of “By Ourselves”, it proceeds via abrupt edits into the more soothingly soulful territory of tracks like “Augustine”, “But You” and “Hands Up”, where the cajoling sensuality of Hynes’s tremulous voice wields an urgent intimacy akin to Michael Jackson. Elsewhere, chattering balofon and glistening electric piano illuminate “Best To You”, while the choogling clavinet funk of “EVP” approximates Daft Punk doing Stevie Wonder.