ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Cat Stevens/Yusuf The Laughing Apple
Cat-O-Log Records Out Friday
It has taken a decade for Cat Stevens to fully reconcile himself to being Cat Stevens. When he returned to music in 2006, having abandoned his career after converting to Islam in 1977, he traded as Yusuf. The Cat was firmly back in the bag.
Since then he’s paddled around in the rockpools of his discarded creative identity, but The Laughing Apple signals a full immersion. Reuniting with producer Paul Samwell-Smith and guitarist Alun Davies, both veterans of Stevens’s early Seventies classics, Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat, it’s the first release since Back To Earth in 1978 to be billed as Cat Stevens.
Sound commercial logic? Certainly. But the sense of reclamation extends into the heart of the album, which revisits several of Stevens’s earliest compositions. Four tracks (Blackness Of The Night, The Laughing Apple, Northern Wind, I’m So Sleepy) are reinterpretations of songs from his 1967 album New Masters. Stripped of the over-elaborate production of the originals, they’re presented here in the kind of earthy yet elegant acoustic setting that can’t help but recall Stevens in his prime.
It has taken a decade for Cat Stevens to fully reconcile himself to being Cat Stevens. When he returned to music in 2006, having abandoned his career after converting to Islam in 1977, he traded as Yusuf
The same mood is evident on Mary And The Little Lamb and You Can Do (Whatever), which date from the same era but were never fully realised, and three new songs. See What Love Did To Me has the direct and devotional beauty of Stevens’s best work, topped off with swooping Arabesque strings. The outstanding Don’t Blame Them finds him once again directing traffic on the bridge across the generational divide, much as he did almost 50 years ago on Father And Son.
Aged 69, his voice still has a guileless quality, a gift for innocence that only occasionally curdles into tweeness. With its gentle lullabies, skipping parables, stern warnings and quiet joy, The Laughing Apple feels like the real deal. A short, sweet return for the most effectual top Cat.
With its gentle lullabies, skipping parables, stern warnings and quiet joy, The Laughing Apple feels like the real deal. A short, sweet return for the most effectual top Cat
CD OF THE WEEK
Foo Fighters Concrete and Gold Out Friday
Rating: 
Dave Grohl has described Foo Fighters’ ninth album as ‘Motörhead’s version of Sgt Pepper’. It’s a good line describing what would in reality have been a very bad idea, but you get the picture. Bulldozer riffs, heavy artillery, ornate melody and a tincture of psychedelia.
The surprise is that they pull it off so convincingly. Lead single Run is characteristic, with its shifting time signature, massive guitar hooks and sweetly insistent chorus. But the feel elsewhere is more post-Beatles than Pepper.
Dave Grohl has described Foo Fighters’ ninth album as ‘Motörhead’s version of Sgt Pepper’. It’s a good line describing what would in reality have been a very bad idea
T-Shirt – the wonderfully grandiose 80-second opener – and the punchy The Sky Is A Neighbourhood recall Wings at their most baroque; Sunday Rain resembles John Lennon’s I’m Losing You sung by Dennis Wilson.
Produced by Greg Kurstin, more accustomed to crafting hits for Adele and Pink than hirsute stadium rockers, Concrete And Gold sounds fabulous, but it helps that Grohl & Co drum up more ideas on one album than most bands have in a career, from acoustic psychedelia (Happy Ever After) to chilly Pink Floyd pastiche on the title track. Even when it misses, Concrete And Gold is rarely boring, and when it hits – as it does often, and hard – Foo Fighters fulfill their billing as the best rock band on the planet.
Concrete And Gold sounds fabulous, but it helps that Grohl & Co drum up more ideas on one album than most bands have in a career