Spectrum music reviews: Roisin Murphy, Julie Ruin and Hans Hotter

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This was published 7 years ago

Spectrum music reviews: Roisin Murphy, Julie Ruin and Hans Hotter

By Craig Mathieson, Barry Divola and Barney Zwartz

PUNK

The Julie Ruin

The Julie Ruin: unflagging energy and post-punk cool.

The Julie Ruin: unflagging energy and post-punk cool.

HIT RESET

(Hardly Art/Inertia)

★★★½

"I can play electric guitar while shaving my legs in a moving car," declares Kathleen Hanna in Hello Trust No One. It's a boast that's funny and righteous. With The Julie Ruin, her five-piece New York-based band, she finds middle ground between the riot grrrl ruckus of her '90s group Bikini Kill and her later electro-pop outfit Le Tigre. Two things that have remained constant are her unflagging energy and strong attitude. Indeed, the song titles read like a personal manifesto – I Decide, I'm Done, Rather Not, Be Nice. On the title track she addresses past abuse over a clattering punky buzz, while the wiry, jumped-up Mr. So And So skewers sexist jerks who purport to be into girl bands. Hanna's voice is a chanting, yelping, quivering thing – equal parts John Lydon and Siouxsie Sioux. It can falter in the wrong setting, such as the piano-based ballad Calverton, but it pins your ears back in the best possible way on Planet You, which retools '60s girl group pop with garage rock drive and post-punk cool.

BARRY DIVOLA

ELECTRONIC POP

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Roisin Murphy

Take Her Up to Monto (Play It Again Sam)

★★★★☆

Stemming from the same recording sessions as 2015's exemplary Hairless Toys, which was her first studio album in eight years, Roisin Murphy's latest release confirms the Irish vocalist and songwriter's mastery of electronic pop. The former Moloko frontwoman takes the genre to contrasting extremes, teasing out coolly charged emotion while stamping her authority on the gorgeous synthesised textures. The songs deconstruct dance music, so that no one element is ascendant. The beats, whether discreet on Mastermind or Eno-intricate on the wistful Thoughts Wasted, peak and then fall away like movements in a decorous Bowie-Moroder symphony. The gilded R&B of Romantic Comedy emphasises that on this album the rhythm is her slave. Murphy plays the torch ballad diva on the shadowy epic Nervous Epic, and throughout the album she's vocally assertive and lyrically assured. The weighing up of options on Hairless Toys is here supplanted by elegantly phrased verdicts. In this exotic disco Roisin Murphy doesn't just survive, she thrives.

Craig Mathieson

CLASSICAL

Hans Hotter

THE ART OF HANS HOTTER

(Decca Eloquence)

★★★★☆

Many fine judges consider Hans Hotter the outstanding Wagnerian bass of the 20th century – surely its finest Wotan. Yet he was prouder of his accomplishments in lieder, scaling back his magnificent voice to the intimacy of songs with piano, without loss of beauty or character. This double-CD collection of Schubert, Brahms, Wolf, Richard Strauss and Carl Loewe – accompanied by Geoffrey Parsons – provides all the evidence one could wish. Hotter was 64 when these recordings were made in 1973, but the voice is still rich, powerful, and flexible, and this set is something of a treasure. The CD notes aptly call him "at once majestic and profoundly human". Contrast the humour, gently realised, of three Loewe songs, with the noble melancholy and contemplation of the three mature Brahms songs that follow. Hotter was close to Strauss, which makes his interpretations even more interesting. Given that he was strongly anti-Nazi yet had to remain in Germany throughout the war, we can be grateful that Hotter was able to leave such a post-war recording legacy.

Barney Zwartz

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