Jennifer Castle
Camelot
★★★★

RELEASED in 2020, Jennifer Castle’s glacially paced Monarch Season, recorded alone in her kitchen looking out over Lake Erie, was the perfect soundtrack to the isolating Covid lockdowns.

Four years later and the Canadian singer-songwriter’s new record broadens her sonic palette beyond the restrained contemporary folk she is known for, with several tracks like Lucky #8 getting close — whisper it — to rocking out. With the set supposedly a commentary on middle age, she’s helped out by a cast of talented musicians, including Cass McCombs on various guitars and Owen Pallett writing the string arrangements. 

Though she inhabits the indie music space, Castle’s vocals have a lovely country warble to them. Full Moon In Leo rambles along, while the title track seems to paraphrase Neil Young’s ’70s masterpiece Ambulance Blues with its question: “Am I just pissing in the wind?”

Primal Scream
Come Ahead
(BMG)
★★★★

SINCE Primal Scream’s last record in 2016, frontman Bobby Gillespie has released the inconsolable Utopian Ashes duet album with Jehnny Beth and written his memoir Tenement Kid.

Come Ahead feels something of a rebirth for the veteran Glasgow-born band. Yes, it’s very much in their soul-funk wheelhouse, and I’m not entirely sure it works, but it feels a daring and exciting set for a bunch of men in their fifties and early sixties.

The expansive, orchestral soul bangers sound great. And some of the tracks seem quite personal — Gillespie’s Dad is on the front cover, and False Flags considers the experience of those who join the army for economic reasons, like his old man. There’s quite a bit of leftist politics too, from the timely anti-colonial Settlers Blues to the class struggle of album centrepiece Innocent Money.

Keith Jarrett
The Old Country
(ECM)
★★★

IN 1961 the jazz club at the Deer Head Inn in Pennsylvania gave Keith Jarrett his first gig as leader of a piano trio, aged just 16 years old.

In 1992 he returned to the venue a US jazz legend, accompanied by Gary Peacock on double bass and Paul Motion on drums. Their set of American standards became a fan favourite when it was released by ECM Records two years later as At The Deer Head Inn.

With Jarrett’s musical career tragically at an end following two strokes in 2018, The Old Country comprises eight previously unreleased pieces from the concert.

From I Fall In Love Too Easily to Cole Porter’s All Of You, and the lingering closer How Long Has It Been Going On, it’s an intimate set from the trio, the playing light, fleeting and soulful.