Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth
Utopian Ashes
(Sony)
★★★★

HAVING led Scottish indie rockers Primal Scream for nearly 40 years, Bobby Gillespie still has the ability to surprise.

Utopian Ashes is a duets album with Jehnny Beth from the Savages, inspired by legendary musical partnerships like Gram Parson and Emmylou Harris and George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

As these touchstones suggest, the record explores the disintegration of a relationship, with Beth’s and Gillespie’s mingling voices push the desolation up to 11.

The set is arguably the most emotionally mature and profound work Gillespie has ever done.

Underpinning the drama is a rich country soul sound, with traces of the slower numbers from 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up.

“I wanted to put pain back into music,” Gillespie says about the songs. He and Beth have achieved this in spades on this beautiful and inconsolable album.

The Go! Team
Get Up Sequences Part One
(Memphis Industries)
★★★★

SADLY Ian Parton, founder of the Brighton collective The Go! Team, lost hearing in his right ear while making their sixth record. Not because of the music, it turns out, but a rare condition called Menieries.

This trauma transformed the album into “a life raft,” he notes. Indeed, the hooktastic indie hip-hop he has co-created here — chock-full of positivity and sunny vibes —  is also a life raft in these bleak Covid years, the perfect soundtrack to 2021’s special summer.

With its flutes and playful street percussion, Cookie Scene sounds like an out-take from Jurassic 5’s self-titled debut, while Ninja’s spoken word vocals about a past lover on I Loved You Better are something else.

Imagine if The Avalanches had way more energy and were desperate for a chart hit — that’s how good Get Up Sequences Part One is.

Enjoy.

Various Artists
Journeys in Modern Jazz: Britain
(Decca)
★★

COMPILED by jazz historian Tony Higgins from the Universal Music archives, this two-CD set presents key artists who shaped British jazz from 1965-72.

He has a specific aim in connecting that period with Britain’s  burgeoning jazz scene today, as exemplified by the likes of Sons of Kemet, Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd, as its musical descendants.

Yet while contemporary British jazz stars like Shabaka Hutchings have fashioned a genuinely exciting new British jazz sound by taking huge inspiration from black Caribbean and African styles, much of the music on this compilation seems in thrall to the dominant US jazz of the 1950s and ’60s.

So tracks by Ken Wheeler, Don Rendell and Alan Skidmore all sound nice enough but feel like pale imitations of giants like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.

I’m sure jazz aficionados will get a lot from this. For everyone else, tread carefully.

IAN SINCLAIR