The reviews

Love Sublime
Brad Mehldau, Renée Fleming
Nonesuch

Seven years after drawing inspiration from Rainer Maria Rilke on his Elegiac Cycle, a classical-style work for solo piano, young jazz star Brad Mehldau hooks up with the great American soprano Renee Fleming to delve further into the German poet’s output in a setting of his earlier Book of Hours: Love Poems to God.
Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the seven-song cycle is at times a bit sketchy in outlining rather than sinking into the aching emotion, but there is no denying the exquisite pain of Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you or the ease with which Mehldau tailors his restless, varied rhythmic attack to the words and Fleming’s dynamic delivery of them. Love Sublime also features serviceable settings of three lyrically gripping poems by Louise Bogan. The title track is a reworking of a song Mehldau previously recorded as an instrumental.

Snake Farm
Ray Wylie Hubbard
Sustain Records

To listen to Ray Wylie Hubbard’s Snake Farm is to enter an eerie netherworld populated by dark and fascinating characters, some of whom are creepy enough to give you the shivers.
The sandpaper-voiced Hubbard, a Texas songwriting legend, works a primal, greasy groove with these bluesy portraits, starting with Ramona, the dancing, tattooed reptile-house worker of the unforgettable title track. Snake Farm hypnotically mixes slithering images of sex, fear, revulsion, and humour, especially when Hubbard lets out a shimmering and menacing shudder of disgust.
Guitar gunslinger Seth James sharpens the fine point on the stiletto that helps make these songs so lethal, but throughout, Hubbard strives for a tone of decadent elegance. Fans of lowlife chic should lap this up.

The Garden
Zero 7
Atlantic/Wea

“Upbeat” seems like an odd description of a recording that includes song titles like Throw It All Away and Waiting to Die. Yet fans of Zero 7 (the English sound-design duo of Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker) will indeed discover that the group’s third release exhibits a slightly more animated pace – more multitempo than downtempo – than its predecessors, the seductively trippy Simple Things and the like-minded When It Falls.
The Garden is an intriguing listen, showcasing the sophistication that makes Zero 7 the Steely Dan of chillout – wry, intelligent lyrical observations, inventive musicianship, a detached sense of cool forged by the duo’s heady blend of folk, jazz, ’70s soul, and electronica. Different, yes, but worthwhile.