Music review: An album

Duet
Kristina Olsen and Peter Grayling (KOPGCD01)

Singer/guitarist and cello duets are not the expected ingredients of a folk CD, but this combination of American singer Olsen and West Australian cellist Grayling proves to be a delightful combination. Olsen's voice and the cello swap lines, matching tonalities, with the cello weaving a lower line, sometimes a harmony, sometimes a rhythmic counterpoint.

Olsen's choice of songs seems a little more reflective than on previous releases, perhaps as a response to working with the sonorities of the cello. Her great strength as a songwriter is the ability to convey the sense of a broken heart, usually her own, in a direct yet humorous manner.

The outstanding track on this CD is a song called "Heart Hill", a very English-sounding song about a place glimpsed off an English motorway, but the whole CD is a fine addition to her catalogue along with the notable collaboration with Grayling.

Flight Paths – The Paradise Motel (Mushroom)

British music magazine New Musical Express may have been a bit harsh when it said that The Paradise Motel's Merida Sussex's voice made Julie Cruise sound like Tina Turner. But it is a fairly accurate description of her haunting vocal style. While other bands use the voice to merely add on top of the noise, Sussex's vocals are arguably the most important component in the Motel's impressive musical machinery.
          The haunting legacy, which began with Still Life (1996), continues on Flight Paths. The dark musical tapestry, created by Charles Bickford and enhanced by Victor van Vugt's rich production, has progressed with almost a hint of salvation ("Derwent River Star", "Daniel", "Caravans", "Hollywood Landmines") expressed in Sussex's uplifting vocals.
          So while The Paradise Motel will never be the latest teen fad, with more style than to bother with crowd-diving and noisy guitars, this dark, yet cathartic, musical masterpiece will have a more lasting influence on Australian musical history than we may yet acknowledge.

Peter Sculthorpe: String Quartets
Played by the Goldner String Quartet (Tall Poppies TPO90)

The Goldner Quartet was formed by Musica Viva in 1995, and consists of four of this country's finest younger string players.
                    This disc is the second volume of Sculthorpe's complete works for string quartets, recorded in the presence of the composer. Included is the String Quartet No 10, written in 1983 for the US-based Kronos Quartet and displaying musical influences "from both sides of the Pacific". It is balanced by the String Quartet No 11 of 1990 which is distinctively Australian in feeling and, with the sub-title "Jabiru Dreaming", is one of the composer's "Kakadu" works.
                    Both are very approachable, and receive committed and finely shaped performances which capture effectively the essential elements of the music. With the composer's supervision the performances can be regarded as definitive.
                    The disc also offers ten small pieces for string quartet, two of them miniatures called Hill-Songs, and the remainder drawn from unpublished or discarded works. With equally fine and carefully crafted performances, they provide, with the full-scale quartets, a constantly interesting survey of Sculthorpe's music for string quartet from 1945 to 1994.