Album reviews: Lou Rhodes -Theyesandeye, Look Park - Look Park, Faun Fables - Born Of The Sun, and more

Lou Rhodes, Theyesandeye

★★★★☆

Download this: All The Birds; All I Need; Sea Organ; Them; Sun & Moon

It’s hard not to read the cover shot of Lou Rhodes toting a ram’s head as a signal of how far she’s grown since her days as half of electro trip-hop duo Lamb. Certainly, Theyesandeye bears scant relation to that earlier work, and represents a firm step forward from the basic folk style of her three previous solo albums. This is surely due in large part to co-producer Simon Byrt, an analogue fetishist whose antique reverb units lend Theyesandeye a spacious, ghostly ambience which shifts Rhodes’s songs into the psychedelically tinged “wyrd-folk” territory explored by Natasha Khan on the early Bat For Lashes albums – another irresistible connotation of that ram’s-head sleeve photo.

“All The Birds” opens the album with Rhodes “waiting for this song to come and fall into my heart”, her acoustic guitar and sparse percussion haunted by wordless backing-vocal moans. It establishes the “true adoration of sweet Mother Nature” subsequently hymned in “All I Need”, with guitar, piano and more of those effusive, oceanic backing vocals marshalled in celebration of the simplicity and wonder of the natural world “that brought me you”. This alliance of love and nature recurs later in “Sun & Moon”, a brief exercise in romantic bucolicism where tiny guitar and piano notes are woven into a delicate web of sound carrying the planetary allegory of loving partners.

Elsewhere, Rhodes’ throwback hippie tendencies are evident in songs like “Them”, a critique of simplistic finger-pointing attitudes (“One finger points away, the others point right back”) with spooky strings and piano borne along by military snare tattoo; and “Sea Organ”, where her pulsing guitar is joined by gentle harp glissandi for a rallying-cry to her “brothers and sisters of the sun” to repair the ecological damage of an era when life was judged by “what we had, rather than what we gave to it”. It’s an attractive, still beguiling attitude that courses through the album like ambrosia, offering a welcome, if unworldly, alternative to pop’s prevailing discourse of acquisitive antagonism and automated emotions.

Look Park, Look Park

★★★☆☆

Download this: Shout Pt 1; Stars Of New York; I’m Gonna Haunt This Place

Look Park is the solo project of Fountains Of Wayne songwriter Chris Collingwood, eschewing that band’s power-pop guitars in favour of keyboard textures of piano and mellotron, sculpted into rolling, cyclical grooves by co-producer Mitchell Froom. Alongside whimsical but barbed ruminations on matters such as travel and celebrity, Collingwood can’t help employing musical analogies in songs such as “Crash That Piano” and “Minor Is The Lonely Key”. The deceptive geniality of his delivery, meanwhile, recalls Gilbert O’Sullivan, enabling him to bring darker undertones to apparently pleasant pieces like the lilting waltz “I’m Gonna Haunt This Place”, an aim pursued, he claims, “like ghosts of old friends I have murdered in song”.

Various Artists, Heartworn Highways

★★★★★

Download this: Desperados Waiting For A Train; Pancho And Lefty; LA Freeway; Ohoopee River Bottomland; Waiting ‘Round To Die

Successful music documentaries are largely a matter of capturing an artist, or a scene, with their guard down. In the case of Jim Szalapski’s Heartworn Highways, the scene was the mid-Seventies “outlaw country” movement centred around songwriter Guy Clark and his friends Townes Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle, which sowed the seeds for the genre’s reclamation. Punctuated by snippets of revealing chatter, the simple, stripped-down performances on this reissued soundtrack emphasise the sheer songwriting talent involved, as the participants pass the guitar around the kitchen table, singing songs of dissipation, ignominy and dashed dreams such as Clark’s “Desperados Waiting For A Train” and Van Zandt’s “Pancho And Lefty”, wryly introduced as being “about two Mexican bandits that I saw on the TV two weeks after I wrote the song”.

Sam Outlaw, Angeleno

★★★☆☆

Download this: Who Do You Think You Are?; Jesus Take The Wheel (And Drive Me To A Bar); I’m Not Jealous

Despite his surname, Sam Outlaw owes less to the “outlaw country” progenitors encountered in Heartworn Highways than California cowboys such as Poco and The Eagles, artistic origins admitted in his debut album’s title. He’s helped by the sleek production of Ry and Joachim Cooder, the former lacing delicious guitar lines through Outlaw’s songs while his son adds subtly illustrative percussive flourishes. The gently jogging “Love Her For A While” and “Country Love Song” could be Eagles outtakes, so peaceful and easy are their feelings, while echoes of Gram Parsons ooze through “Jesus Take The Wheel (And Drive Me To A Bar)”, an all-purpose country song uniting barstool self-pity, cars and Christianity. Best of all, though, is “Who Do You Think You Are?”, with Outlaw’s genial drawl lent a refined mariachi backdrop by trumpets and strings.

Various Artists, I’m A Freak, Baby

★★★☆☆

Download this: Cherry Red; Brontosaurus; Skullcrusher; Race With The Devil; The Green Manalishi

Redolent with the whiff of damp greatcoat and denim, this enjoyable 3CD box tracks the late-Sixties moment when mod and psychedelia shifted into heavy rock. At its most successful, it saw Fleetwood Mac herald the terrifying “Green Manalishi”, Deep Purple chase a “Fireball” and The Move celebrate the dubious dance moves of the “Brontosaurus”, while blues bands like The Yardbirds, Groundhogs and Taste took on extra wattage and piledriver riffs. There’s unintended comedy and a few overlooked gems amongst the lesser lights unearthed here, but meanwhile, burrowing beneath the surface, underground bands like the Ladbroke Grove contingent – The Deviants, Pink Fairies, Edgar Broughton Band and Hawkwind Zoo – brought a hairier, politicised aspect into British prole-rock which would prepare the ground for punk.

Faun Fables, Born Of The Sun, 2/5

★★☆☆☆

Download this: YDUN; Goodbye

Faun Fables indulge the wyrd-folk thing to the max, and then some, but compared to Lou Rhodes, theirs is a strident, hectoring take on the back-to-nature lifestyle which as a result acquires an uncomfortably cultish feel at times. And more to the point, they seem to have abandoned appealing melodies as perhaps too much of a compromise with pop, so Dawn McCarthy’s effusive wailings on tracks like “Invitation” and the title-track quickly become teeth-grindingly unbearable. With songs about mountain men and sentient country houses, it’s like a more pompous (and crucially) humourless version of The Incredible String Band built around flutes, celesta and caterwauling: okay in very small doses, but unbearable at album length.

Bitori, Legend Of Funana

★★★☆☆

Download this: Bitori Nha Bibinha; Cruz Di Pico; Natalia

Funana is a rhythmic accordion music native to Cape Verde, where during colonial times it was driven underground by the Portuguese authorities, who considered it the music of uneducated peasants. Performance was punishable by imprisonment until independence in 1975, whereupon its driving rhythms and lyrical innuendos were modernised by new proponents. But this 1997 recording by one of the music’s Sixties pioneers, Victor “Bitori” Tavares, strips Funana back to its essentials: with its fast, scuttling staccato groove and riffing accordion, “Bitori Nha Bibinha” is like a cross between cumbia, cajun and Balkan strains, while the eager, pulsing accordion vamp of “Cruz Di Pico” has the disconcerting effect of imposing itself on one’s breathing. Throughout, singer Chando Graciosa brings urgent commitment to the songs, whether seductively appealing or reflective of the hardships of the Cape Verdean underclass.