CD reviews: Has-Lo, Kate Ceberano, Posies, Lauren Pomentz and Robert Clancy

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This was published 7 years ago

CD reviews: Has-Lo, Kate Ceberano, Posies, Lauren Pomentz and Robert Clancy

HIP HOP

Has-Lo

A long and winding road: Kate Ceberano's career anthologised

A long and winding road: Kate Ceberano's career anthologised

HARD WRITER

(Independent)

★★★½

Has-Lo spent much of his recent career trying to escape his highly personal, critically praised 2011 debut album In Case I Don't Make It. But exactly half a decade later, a new EP finds the Philadelphia rapper more or less back where he started. The intervening years haven't been easy: there were aborted moves in the US and, despite some laser sharp collaborations at home and abroad (including Melbourne's own Flu), Has-Lo's solo output had been largely sidelined by self-doubt. Hard Writer is the sound of the gears slowly turning again, of despair dappled with the beginnings of hope. Few can be more effectively introspective than Has-Lo. His songs about lonely suburban pool halls and lost relatives are delivered with unerring honesty and bittersweet humour. His lyricism feels entirely natural, the words quietly tumbling from his mouth in perfect order. Matched to the rapper's own curation of dusty soul samples, cuts like the therapeutic title track or mystical Millie make perfect little slices of introspective autumnal music.

Matt Shea

ROCK

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The Posies

SOLID STATES

(Planet)

★★★★

For a Seattle rock band capable of some serious power drives, the Posies can make the sweetest of pop. It's true their breakthrough album, the stupendously great Frosting On The Beater, came out mid-grunge years and later songs such as Everybody Is A F---ing Liar could thrash a good head of hair. Then this album opens with an organ-and-guitar burst of garage rock in We R Power. But it's worth remembering that one of the group's finest covers was of The Hollies' King Midas In Reverse, and it is Manchester's Hollies, among the best vocal groups of the 1960s, who come up time and time again here. It's there in the right-on vocal arrangements of Scattered and Radiance and the post-beat group shape of March Climes, as much as in the gentleness of Titanic and Squirrel Vs Snake. Even when the sound turns to '80s synth pop in M Doll and The Definition, the lead vocals owe a debt to The Hollies' Alan Clarke and Graham Nash, respectively. Buy this for a friend who also likes Fountains Of Wayne or Nada Surf.

Bernard Zuel

EARLY MUSIC

Lauren Pomerantz and Robert Clancy

RENAISSANCE MUSIC FROM SPAIN AND ENGLAND

(Songbird Music)

★★★★

At its best, early music is not just an artistic time-machine but an insight into the psyche of humanity in another era. While reverence is commendable, even more important is a willingness to buy into the present tense of the music; to make it fizz in the moment of performance. To this end, soprano Lauren Pomerantz and lutenist Robert Clancy stood up when they performed, memorised all the repertoire to avoid being captive to the page, and connected the songs with short improvisations from Clancy. Only just released, this album was recorded live in 1980 in Ibiza when the pair toured the Balearic Islands in the wake of studying early music together in Switzerland. Although slightly brittle, Pomerantz's voice has wonderful immediacy, so you sense her living the lyrics rather than aiming for an arid exercise in perfection. She is fully alive to Clancy's rhythmic buoyancy in her phrasing. His improvisations are a delight, adding to the evocation of the era's formal elegance as a living, breathing reality.

John Shand

POP

Kate Ceberano

ANTHOLOGY

(ABC/Universal)

★★½

What are we to make of Kate Ceberano? Her long, varied, mixed career is all here in a gargantuan triple-disc set. It begins with a Pash, ends with a hymn and covers theatre, jazz, pop, dance(ish), duets and Christmas fare. It's impressive in its sweep and longevity, but the inadvertently telling absence of a central essay or even chronological written history in the packaging sums up the problem: it has been a career with no discernible pattern or solid beating heart that is purely her. Does her version of Falling Slowly (from Once) with David Campbell, A Natural Woman or a Farnham-light Help add anything to familiar songs or tell us anything of her? While Love Don't Live Here Anymore is one of her best moments, there is little to be gained from her Jesus Christ Superstar double of I Don't Know How To Love Him and Everything's Alright.

Bernard Zuel

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