From Alt-J to The Amazons: the best albums of the year 2017
Alt-J – Relaxer
★★★★☆
“There was a wayward lad crept out one morning/ The ground to be his bed, the sky his awning”. And so, as if reciting an old English madrigal, begins Alt J’s third adventure in sound, another kaleidoscopic cross-genre box of surprises.
The trio, who formed at Leeds University in 2007, are one of British music’s most intriguing success stories, a multi-million selling, US conquering arena band whose complex, introverted, playfully convoluted music is wilfully defiant in its avoidance of categorisation.
Relaxer is a misnomer. The album switches twitchily between folk and edgy rock grooves. On the opening track, 3WW (the title representing “three worn words”, presumably “I love you”), our wayward lad loses his virginity with a couple of sirens in a country field (given voice by Elie Roswell of Wolf Alice), amid a cornucopia of sweeping strings, spiky digital sound effects and incongruous lyrical references to flashing neon.
Later, on the gorgeous Last Year, another rising British female singer, Marika Hackman, offers delicate balance during this oppressively sad ballad, which calls Simon & Garfunkel to mind. In between, by striking contrast, a group of Harry Potter fans engage in acts of sexual perversity in a Japanese club during the comically thrillingly Hit Me Like That Snare, a track that bangs fiercely along on a cowbell and a dirty guitar riff like the B-52s at a punk orgy.
This is internet era pop, its barrier-free absorption of so many different musical styles a product of the computer recording technology it is created with. Yet the actual flavour of the voices and acoustic instrumentation is heavily analogue, and seems to owe something to the kind of academic self-absorption of early progressive rock (albeit without dwelling on virtuosic self-indulgence).
If you took Jethro Tull, Genesis and King Crimson, added a dash of the art attack of Talking Heads, Prince and Beck and the post-rock experimentalism of Radiohead and Hot Chip, then tossed them into a digital tumbler with some fridge magnet poetry you might go some way towards approximating Relaxer’s post-rock art-folk-hybrid. It is deeply gorgeous and utterly baffling.
The inscrutability of lyricists is nothing new in rock culture, though it can be especially frustrating when songs offer tantalising glimpses of meaning obscured by references so abstract they could only resonate with the author. It is this aspect of wilful obscurity that still makes Alt J an intriguing band rather than an essential one. Relaxer dazzles and delights the ears yet still feels like the work of a band who might have something to say, if they weren’t too precious to actually come out and say it.
The Amazons – The Amazons
★★★★☆
The Amazons are not a troupe of warrior women, nor do they hail from South American equatorial jungle. Nor, for that matter, are they the house band of a well-known internet shopping site. They are, in fact, four young men from the English commuter town of Reading with a silly name and a resolutely old-fashioned line-up of two electric guitars, bass and drums.
They don't lack for ambition, though. According to their press release, they are on a mission to "reinvigorate rock and roll", a sentiment not all that far removed from Kasabian's recently declared intent to "save guitar music fromthe abyss".
There is certainly a widespread feeling in the music business that the kind of swaggering guitar rock that lorded it over pop culture for decades is fading into commercial and artistic insignificance in a new age of digitally manipulated cross-genre electronic pop. But while the Amazons' debut represents nothing remotely new, it serves as a timely reminder that there are still things rock does better than any other musical genre.
This album is a belter, a shout-it-to-the-rooftops, punch-the-sky, yell-along-at-the-top-of-your-voice storm. It is crammed top to bottom with monster riffs, anthemic choruses and the sheer exuberant thrill of being young, in love, and armed with a fuzzbox. On the ridiculously titled Junk Food Forever, frontman and guitarist Matt Thompson sings: "Late nights together/ Jackets in leather/ I can't forget ya!"
Thompson has an angsty, raw voice that can rise to a sweet falsetto in more tender moments, while the rest of his band swathe his declarations of love and loneliness in harmonious backing vocals. Their subject matter is essentially just girls: can't live with them, can't live without them, apparently.
What the Amazons do particularly well is play together, locking tightly syncopated instrumental sections to catchy, impassioned songs. They like to get stuck into a headbanging groove, grungy riffs counterpointed with thrilling, effects-laden lead guitar, all fused together by a powerhouse drummer with a purpose and cohesion that seems almost unstoppable. There are no keyboards (apart from piano on striking closing ballad Palace), no hip hop inflections or modern pop touches. The whole thing might as well have been smashed together from Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Oasis and Queens of the Stone Age, with a pungently youthful flavour of sexual yearning.
The Amazons share ground with Catfish and the Bottlemen, another young guitar band who have succeeded in filling arenas with singalong love songs. Perhaps romance is what it takes to make rock that sounds like pop music again. One thing is for sure: played with this kind of gusto, it is hard to imagine guitars ever going out of fashion.
The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Deluxe)
★★★★★
It is now 70 years since Seargent Pepper taught the band to play - and 50 since The Beatles invented this mysterious, moustachioed character. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band brought the rock'n'roll era to a whole new level of musical maturity and creative possibility. It was a dazzling, mindbending work of genius in 1967 and it remains a thoroughly engrossing, weird and original record all these decades later.
To mark the anniversary, Giles Martin, son of the late producer George, was invited to remix this masterpiece - a daunting task for anyone. But Martin and co-engineer Sam Okell have done a loving job, getting away from some of the oddities of the familiar stereo mix done by Abbey Road engineers. The drums in particular benefit from extra space, guitars cut through with freshened attack and the way the final piano chord now smashes through the orchestra on A Day in the Life actually made me jump. It is like seeing a favourite movie again in high definition. It doesn't replace the original, it enhances it.
A second CD features early takes of The Beatles playing live in the studio before orchestras, brass sections and psychedelic frills had been added. You also hear the chatter between takes: Paul McCartney advising John Lennon how to sing Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, Lennon returning the favour on Getting Better, with none of the ego clashing that eventually poisoned their relationship. Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite! has a peculiar emptiness, eventually to be filled by sounds as yet unimagined. It is a fascinating window on a lost world, five bright musical minds (including George Martin) operating in sublime unison to create a work of collective genius.
If there is a bittersweet aspect to the anniversary of the first true band masterpiece of the rock era, it is the question of whether we will ever see its like again? Digital recording techniques are effectively limitless yet favour solitary obsessions, with the consequence that the most interesting contemporary pop tends to be driven by maverick individuals - Kanye West, Frank Ocean and Damon Albarn to name a few.
When was the last time a band created a truly great, world-beating album that pushed boundaries and reverberated throughout pop culture? For me, it would have to be Radiohead's OK Computer, from 1997. That was 20 years ago. Who is going to teach the band to play today?
Kasabian – For Crying Out Loud
★★★★☆
Kasabian’s leader Serge Pizzorno has declared their sixth album is all “about saving guitar music from the abyss”.
As the bullish Leicester quartet’s sole songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and co-vocalist, Pizzorno has a genuinely impressive vision of music that combines the attack and swagger of classic rock with the electro dazzle of modern digital pop. Kasabian records have always sounded great but For Crying Out Loud might just be their greatest.
From the headlong punk-meets-acid-house charge of Ill Ray (The King) to the stadium campfire singalong of Put Your Life on It, Kasabian deliver hooks, headshots and upper cuts in a barrage of punchy sounds and aggressive attitude. You’re In Love With a Psycho bashes together chunky glam rock and Eighties synth pop with Spaghetti Western splendour in the service of a nursery-rhyme lyric revelling in political incorrectness (“The doctors say I’m crazy, I’m eight miles thick/ I’m like the taste of macaroni on a seafood stick”).
And this is where the rot sets in. In Pizzorno’s dreams, Kasabian aspire to be a missing link between the Sex Pistols and Daft Punk. It would be fairer to say they bridge the considerably less distant gap between Oasis and the Prodigy: belligerent rock meets belligerent techno.
It is all sound and fury, signifying… well, nothing much. It is hard to imagine anyone bothering to interrogate the meaning of “Sasquatch in a bin bag/ It’s no surprise/ Nosebleed in a pound shop/ Spitting flies”. Pizzorno’s verses are errant nonsense, while his choruses tend to proclaim greatness, celebrate hedonistic excess or mooch after unsuitable lovers in ways that seem more sinister than romantic.
In this, he is possibly not helped by having a frontman with only two modes of delivery: sneering or chanting. Tom Meighan could sing a ballad like he wanted to start a fight, which, indeed, he does on The Party Never Ends, lusting after an aloof woman under “shark-infested skies”.
Pizzorno is hardly the first songwriter to try and get away with whatever rubbish he can fit with his metre and melody. The problem is that lyrical sloppiness undermines his avowed mission.
For all their sonic splendour, Kasabian have only achieved parochial success. Although they have headlined Glastonbury and had four number one albums in Britain, their football-chanting lairiness has proved about as welcome in the rest of the world as English hooligans on holiday. Their albums are no longer even released in America.
If this band is really going to save guitar music from the abyss, they are going to have to do better than singing about sasquatches in bin bags.
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds – Lovely Creatures – The Best of (1984-2014)
★★★★★
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ most recent album, the grief stricken Skeleton Tree, has been nominated this year for an Ivor Novello award.
Given that the 59-year-old Cave is an Australian, I am not sure how he qualifies for a British songwriting prize but we should certainly be happy to claim him. To my mind, Cave is the greatest, deepest, boldest and most original lyrical singer-songwriter of the post-punk generation.
What this superbly designed and curated career Best Of demonstrates is that – pretty much against all pop precedent – Cave has been improving with time, so that his later work is even richer and more original than his early forays.
Ably abetted by the bravura sonic adventurism of his band, the Bad Seeds, Cave has continually stretched himself as a writer, singer, performer and arranger. Cave’s milieu is a bubbling cauldron of love, hate, fear, obsession, religious mania and scientific curiosity, a world of sex and murder permeated with extreme violence, surrealism and jokes, striking a perilous balance between the savage and sentimental, the darkness of his vision ameliorated by a deep sensitivity.
What is particularly stunning about this audacious lyricist, however, is his equally audacious approach to music. An instinct to push his art to the limits was apparent in his punk/goth origins with The Birthday Party (mercifully not included here). Personally, I find much of Cave’s early recordings almost unlistenable, too provocatively flat, rough, a-rhythmical, fierce and messy.
With thoughtful essays and interesting photographs, the first of three CDs (1983-1993) on Lovely Creatures offers an intriguing portrait of the artist as a young man. But it is the second (1994-2003) on which Cave really comes into his own, developing (with multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey) the musical skills to match visionary lyrics with beguiling melodies and soundscapes. Cave dives into Americana, blues, country, soul and gospel, even venturing into the piano ballad on a gorgeous vein of rich, sad songs such as Into My Arms, People Ain’t No Good and Brompton Oratory.
By the third CD (2004-2013), however, Cave is exploring strange new ways to balance his instincts for rock abstraction with classic singer-songwriting skills. With avant garde experimenter Warren Ellis as right hand man, it is almost as if Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan had run away to join Radiohead. “People often talk about being scared of change/ But for me I’m more afraid of things staying the same,” Cave sings amid the alien drift of 2008’s Jesus of the Moon.
If you were enchanted by Skeleton Tree’s other-worldly sadness, Lovely Creatures offers an extraordinary illustration of Cave’s restless creativity. It leaves you relishing the possibility that the best is still to come.
Gorillaz – Humanz
★★★★☆
When he embarked on a fifth studio album for cartoon band Gorillaz in 2015, Damon Albarn asked guest artists to imagine a future in which Donald Trump had won the 2016 US presidential election. If that now seems prescient, the wildly imaginative, comically surreal, fizzily upbeat results suggest few contributors really took the possibility seriously.
Only a handful of tracks on Humanz are explicitly political, notably Benjamin Clementine’s wonky satire Hallelujah Money, closing anthem We Got the Power (featuring Albarn’s old Britpop rival Noel Gallagher on backing vocals) and the taut, intense Let Me Out, on which punchy New York rapper Pusha T is paired with gospel legend Mavis Staples.
But I’m not sure what Grace Jones declaring “No antenna!” over the bluntly repetitive electro-riff of Charger has to do with Trump’s rise to power, or anything else for that matter. As a protest album, you could certainly accuse Humanz of lacking focus.
The key theme is effectively summed up by the opening track, Ascension, on which rapper Vince Staples proclaims: “The sky’s falling baby/ Drop that ass ’fore it crash” while Albarn intones about drunkenly awaiting an “attack on Iraq”.
Rappers, rockers, Rastafarians and R ’n’ B singers all feature here, their diverse sounds underpinned by Albarn’s penchant for melancholic chords and pensive melodies. Perhaps improbably, out of this cornucopia of colliding sensibilities, something moving and coherent manages to emerge. Gorillaz raise interesting questions about how visual iconography impacts on the listener’s experience.
The potency of cartoonist Jamie Hewlett’s artwork defines the mad spirit of the band as much as the music itself. Purpose-built apps and audacious cartoons provide a youth-friendly interface for a project at the artier edges of the pop spectrum. It gives Albarn freedom and licence, not that the 49-year-old musical polymath has ever been noticeably lacking in such qualities.
Throughout his work with Blur and an ever-expanding list of side projects (from operas and film scores to collaborations with African musicians), he has employed his facility for melody to link disparate genres. But there is something about the exuberance of Gorillaz that really lets him run riot.
His only solo album, 2014’s Everyday Robots, was an oddly dour affair by contrast. Behind his cartoon mask, Albarn is unafraid to be ridiculous, unapologetic about his love of a banging pop tune. He can play with modern genres and contemporary guest stars that might otherwise seem ill-suited to a veteran artist.
Humanz is a giddy celebration of unity in difference, the sound of eccentrics, weirdos, outsiders and freaks partying together in defiance of convention. It is music where anything goes, as long as it’s got a groove and a heart.
Kendrick Lamar – DAMN
★★★★★
Kendrick Lamar is the star hip hop has been waiting for, the most urgent, dextrous and purposeful rap lyricist of his generation and perhaps any.
This is his second masterpiece in a row. To Pimp A Butterfly was widely hailed as the album of 2015, boasting a widescreen musicality encompassing jazz, soul and psychedelia as backdrop to a fierce, funny, emotionally committed state-of-the-(divided)-nation address. In scope, purpose and flamboyance, it connected hip hop back to the socially and politically aware soul of the Seventies, drawing comparison to Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.
DAMN is a leaner, more minimalistic work but so intensely focused, lyrically audacious, conceptually inventive and swaggeringly delivered that it more than matches its acclaimed predecessor.
The cover (a scowling close up), bold all caps typography and single word titles (BLOOD, PRIDE, LUST, LOVE, FEAR, GOD) declare Lamar’s stripped-back intent. The feel of the album is a world away from the dazzling, sprawling cornucopia of Pimp.
Yet, crucially, there has been no sacrifice of the musicality that helps make Lamar so accessible. Grooves remain fluid, funky and jazzy, melodies glide with a limber sweetness facilitated by Lamar’s masterful flow and sweet singing voice, and delicate touches throughout create a subtly layered sound that peels back with every listen, revealing new sonic dimensions to match the depths of meaning to be uncovered in the lyrics.
From DNA’s punchy electro mantra about identity to LOVE’s tender sing-song reggae pop meditation on fickle emotions, DAMN is an album of surface sheen and hidden depths, where words and music operate in beautiful synchronicity, a constantly unfolding dance that lends each new approach a sense of investigation and revelation. It is dazzling.
XXX features U2, a combination that would no doubt fill some music fans (from both sides of the rock and hip hop divide) with dread, but the resulting track has a sinuous and surprisingly soulful flow that makes them a perfect match, showcasing Lamar’s superstar guests at their most understated.
While Bono whispers “Pray for me” and gently sings an idealistic mantra of the American dream, Lamar delivers a time-shifting poetic epic about the innate violence in the very fabric of America’s sense of itself. “Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph/ The great American flag is wrapped and dragged with explosives/ Compulsive disorders, sons and daughters/ Barricaded blocks and borders/ Look what you taught us/ It’s murder on my street, your street, back streets, Wall Street/ Corporate offices, bank’s employees and bosses/ with homicidal thoughts, Donald Trump’s in office …”
Ah, there he is. For a rapper who has never shied from addressing the big issues of his day, it is no surprise that the unpopular 45th president should make several appearances on DAMN. But he is not really the focus of Lamar’s attention. On XXX, Lamar implicates himself in the violence of his nation, addressing America as “a mirror”. The emphasis is on the personal, even if the context remains socio-political.
Time and again, Lamar addresses emotional and philosophical issues through an examination of his own contradictions, using himself as a template for human fickleness. On PRIDE he examines the sins of his own pride over a thick, old soul beat (“Hell-raising, wheel-chasing, new worldly possessions/ Flesh-making, spirit-breaking, which one would you lessen?/ The better part, the human heart, you love ‘em or dissect ‘em/ Happiness or flashiness? How do you serve the question?”) then follows it with the crashing braggadocio of HUMBLE in which he crows about his superior rap skills and pounds his rivals over a dynamic piano beat. It’s a juxtaposition that complicates and enriches both songs.
Such high minded artistic purposefulness is, for me, what really sets Lamar apart. Well, that and the fantastic rap skills. He can switch up tempo and flow, play with the tone of his vocal delivery, dip in and out of melody, all the time delivering line after line in which every syllable counts.
He can create mesmerising narratives (the closing autobiographical DUCKWORTH has a powerful sting in its tail), hypnotic mantras (FEEL offers a dazzling list of complex and contradictory emotional responses), solipsistic pop songs to match DRAKE (Rihanna works her magic with Lamar on the light groove of LOYALTY) and pepper it all with the kind of philosophical and playful non-sequiturs that make rap so eminently quotable (“I can’t fake humble just cause your ass is insecure”).
As a genre, rap can be very demanding to listen to, partly because of the incessant lyrical punctuation but also because of the blizzard of cultural references and slang that need to be decoded. Yet when you peel back the superficially dazzling wordplay of most rappers, you are not left with much more than incessant proclamations of empty obsessions. DAMN is a refreshingly Bling free zone, uninterested in designer labels, expensive cars and assorted luxury brands.
There are no women being thoughtlessly demeaned. This is an album in which a sensitive, complex wordsmith is asking serious questions of himself and, by implication, his listeners, about how much responsibility we all hold for the imperfect world we live in. “See, in the perfect world, I would be perfect, world” he insists. DAMN revels in its own imperfections in ways that affirm Lamar’s place not just at the top of the hip hop heap right now but at the top of popular music. This is the work of a future all-time great in full command of his powers. Damn, indeed.
Tinie Tempah – Youth
★★★☆☆
On the title track of his third album, Tinie Tempah declares: “Everything to me is blasé/ I told the architect to make the whole thing parquet.” It is an amusing rhyming couplet made all the more distinctive for being such a peculiar thing for a streetwise rapper to boast about.
The 28-year-old Patrick Okogwu marks his return to the pop front line by proclaiming that he has “started doing yoga”, which he rhymes with “chauffeur” and “toaster”, further affirming both the quintessentially comic Englishness of his vocabulary and his unapologetically middle-class aspirations.
In a genre that tends to pride itself on its abrasive edginess, Tempah is arguably Britain’s most popular rapper. Since crashing onto the scene with his debut smash hit Pass Out in 2010, he has scored more number one singles than any of his peers (three in his own right and four as featured artist).
He may not have the cool cultural cachet of original Grime star Dizzee Rascal and is almost entirely lacking the aggressive attack and sonic adventurousness of the new generation really putting British rap on the map (including Skepta, Stormzy and Kano). What he does have in abundance, though, are essential skills of flow and wit allied to an almost shameless ambition to court the mainstream. Tempah makes slick, bright state-of-the-digital-art pop music where hooks and grooves are every bit as important (if not more so) than the content.
Youth could serve as a one-stop guide to contemporary chart trends. There is sexy r&b (Text from Your Ex), summery Latin beats (Mamacita), EDM bangers (Girls Like), a vein of distinctly Drake-ish downtempo sing-song (If You Know) and a bit of acoustic strumming with Jake Bugg standing in as a poor man’s Ed Sheeran (Find Me).
Breaking up the parade of potential singles is a more intriguing strain of moody, stripped-back electro focused on Tempah’s delivery. On bare-knuckles tracks such as Holy Moly, Something Special and Shadows, he challenges the new generation to match his success, although I don’t know how intimidated his rivals will actually be by all this talk of yoga and parquet flooring.
The hookline for the bullish Not for the Radio promises “the realest s--- I ever wrote” but despite Tempah’s refined language, his preoccupations remain disappointingly generic, exposing the shallowness of his ambition. Beneath his witticisms lurk the usual hip-hop obsessions with clothes, money, girls and status, peppered with references to fast cars and luxury labels, with moments of introspection when he questions whether it was all worth it (before concluding that it was).
Easier to admire than to care deeply about, Youth should confirm his status as the go-to rapper for people who don’t really like rap music.
The Big Moon – Love in the 4th Dimension
★★★★☆
The Big Moon are a girl band, a phrase that, as women seize their rightful share of pop’s front line, is becoming redundant. It’s rare enough to hear an exciting, cohesive, fresh, charismatic young rock band at all these days; the fact that it involves four young women playing electric guitars, bass and drums should be incidental.
Yet, if you are a regular gig-goer, you will know that all-female line-ups are still an exception. Three decades on from the Riot Grrrl feminist fenimist punk movement, guitar music remains a bit of a boys’ club.
Perhaps that works in the favour of tThe Big Moon, a young London quartet based around the exuberant songwriting of guitarist-vocalist Juliette Jackson. They are not reinventing the wheel. The constituent ingredients of their sound stem from garage and indie rock with grunge undercurrents in service of smart, melodic, sharply constructed songwriting, with notes of classic Sixties pop brightness, peppered with playful harmonies.
It is not particularly modern. There are no glitchy beats or digital contortions; nothing that sounds like it has been processed through a computer. The Big Moon belong in dingy sonic spaces where fuzzed-up overloaded electric guitar is really all you need to get pulses racing.
Yet it feels contemporary in character, which perhaps has something to do with the female tone; the way the band almost exult in playing together, a sense that these are women commandeering this space for themselves. They don’t have the angry energy of Savages, or the experimental impulse of Warpaint, two other all-female bands at the top of their game right now. What they have in abundance, though, is camaraderie, joy and swagger, the real sense of a band playing together, a reminder that, in rock music, operating as a unit is more important than being individually virtuoso.
Besides, quality songwriting will always sound contemporary. You can trace a line from the Kinks through the Smiths and the Arctic Monkeys to the Big Moon’s elegantly constructed pop vignettes of friendship (Silent Movie Susie), romance (Formidable, The End), unreliable boys (Cupid) and small-town escapism (Bonfire).
Jackson delivers her lyrics with a relaxed, easy-going brio, like she’s communicating among friends rather than trying to passionately shove a message down the listener’s throat. On Happy New Year, she awakens to the knowledge that “I’m never going to be this young/ and everything I do one day will just be done”.
This whole album sounds like an attempt to seize and memorialise the giddy freedoms of youth. Like the best indie bands, the Big Moon sound like a gang you would want to belong to – whatever your gender.
Goldfrapp – Silver Eye
★★★☆☆
The seventh album in 17 years from electronic duo Goldfrapp is awash with smooth waves of thick synthetic sound, fizzing, burbling and crashing over the pulsing thud of mathematically quantized drum beats. Alison Goldfrapp’s layered vocals drift and shimmer with ethereal languor over musical partner Will Gregory’s robotically throbbing bass lines. Tracks glide by with the relentless hypnotic power of a perfect machine in motion. It is pretty much what I once imagined the future of music would sound like: gleaming zero gravity pop. So why does it seem so old fashioned?
Goldfrapp are in their fifties now, more often than not a retro phase of a musician’s career. Their last album, 2013’s Tales Of US, experimented with an organic analogue sound, featuring guitar, piano and strings. It was an elegant, downbeat affair but lost them some commercial headway, particularly in America where they are viewed as EDM (electronic dance music) pioneers.
Silver Eye returns to the swagger of their early years with a vengeance. The galloping electroglam blast of opening tracks Anymore and Systemagic could have sprung directly from 2005’s Supernature sessions.
It is stirring stuff, a reminder that at their peak Goldfrapp conjured a state-of-the-art fusion of disparate electronic strands, drawing together the Teutonic android pulse of Kraftwerk, the space age disco of Jean Michel Jarre and Giorgo Moroder, the anthemic synth pop of Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and OMD and the hypnotic drive of Techno, all exquisitely personalised with the sensual vocals of Goldfrapp herself. But what sounded like science fiction in 1975 and cutting edge in 2005 is starting to sound like nostalgia for a future that never came.
The duo seem to acknowledge as much on Everything Is Never Enough, when Goldfrapp sings “This is not tomorrow/ We are here in the future past.” It may be the only point on the album where form and content meet. For the most part, lyrics are cascades of words that sound impressive but never quite cohere into meaning on tracks with titles like Faux Suede Drifter, Zodiac Black and Tigerman. It is all shiny surfaces, superficially dazzling but hard to care about. I could listen to it all day and come away none the wiser about what the artist thinks or feels.
It is becoming incongruous to even talk about electronic music as a specific genre in a digital world where every sound is a waveform to be manipulated inside a computer programme. Everything is electronica now. What the most interesting artists of digital pop (from cutting edge pioneers like Frank Ocean, James Blake and Sampha to marquee stars like Kanye West, the Weeknd and the xx) have introduced is a kind of wonky soulfulness that allows a genuine sense of humanity to bleed through the synthetic surfaces.
By contrast, Goldfrapp hark back to the bombast of a time when electronica was all about man (or woman) versus machine. On Silver Eye, the machines are ascendant.
Bob Dylan – Triplicate
★★★☆☆
Bob Dylan's 38th official studio album is his first triple-set of an extraordinary career that has stretched the possibilities of language and music so wide he was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Before we get too excited, however, let it be known that Triplicate comprises three discs, 30 songs and 95 minutes of a 75-year-old man croaking his way through cover versions of vintage swing and jazz era show tunes, presumably leftovers from two previous albums of Sinatra-influenced sessions. It is not for the fainthearted.
The first of these collections, 2015's Shadows In The Night, arrived with a near mystical power, Dylan's cracked, ancient voice summoning a wistful air of melancholy from songs of memory and regret. The follow-up, Fallen Angels (2016), however, was playful and exuberant. His swinging rendition of Young At Heart rather dented the impression of old Bob dwelling on mortality.
When I met Dylan's manager at an event, I quizzed him about why his illustrious client was making these records. "Who knows?" admitted a man who works with Dylan closer than most. "Bob's a mystery. But he has earned the right to do whatever he wants."
Unfortunately what Dylan wants is not the same as what his fans want from him. In recent years, we've seen exhibitions of his elaborate wrought-iron gates and impressionistic oil paintings. What we are still waiting for is new music from arguably the greatest songwriter of our times.
I think it is fair to say that Triplicate is an act of self-indulgence only of interest to Dylan completists. If you were to stray into a room where it was playing you might wonder how anyone could have allowed such a ropy old singer to gurgle his way through such beautiful melodies. But should you linger a while, something wonderful might happen.
Seduced by the sensitive playing of Dylan's stripped-back Americana group, in arrangements peeling away big band clichés, you mght find yourself drawn into Dylan's peculiar rhythm, surrendering to the delicate mood, and really hearing these gorgeous old songs anew.
Occasional lines jerk out of the mix as Dylan struggles for control of his vocal cords. But his unique phrasing and delivery is usually right on the nose of the song's meaning. On many tracks a low, resonant cello saws beneath Dylan's gritty tone, their oaky timbre blending into one. The frailty of his stretched, long notes carries a weight of experience, like a tree stripped bare in winter.Over 90 minutes, this is a set that casts a hypnotic musical spell.
But enough already. We might be intrigued to read Picasso's poetry or hear Pinter's songbook but no one needs five volumes of it. Now it is surely time to find out what all of this is bringing to Dylan's own original art.
After all, he didn't win the Nobel Prize for crooning.
Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales – Room 29
★★★★☆
This is a beguiling curiosity, combining delicate piano pieces with the fragile vocals and erudite lyrics of Britpop's greatest wit. The ambience is mellow and melancholy, mock classical, leavened with stately old-world charm and a dash of Music Hall panache. But as you get drawn into a world of dusty dreams and thwarted longings in a song cycle inspired by Chateau Marmont – a rather rococo Los Angeles hotel that looms large in Hollywood legend - the emotional and intellectual content cuts through the gentle mood like a killer with a carving knife.
Jarvis Cocker's beloved band Pulp have been on hiatus since 2001, reuniting only for brief live reunions. The Sheffield singer-songwriter has released two solo albums in that period, the last in 2009, while maintaining a dilettantish presence as a cultural gadfly in journalism and broadcasting. This audacious album, though, suggests that his gift for songwriting remains as sharp as ever.
Chilly Gonzales is the pop alter ego of classically trained Canadian pianist and composer Jason Beck, who has a prolific solo career and is much in demand as a collaborator in dance, electronic and hip-hop music (notably with Drake, Peaches and Daft Punk). Cocker and he are long-time friends, both having lived for decades in Paris, and they evidently share an intellectual refinement and a fanatical passion for the trashy aesthetic of pop.
While Gonzales's elaborate piano and string pieces verge on pastiche in their mimicry of classical styles, his melodies and harmonies are gorgeous, their instrumental passages trembling with emotion. Cocker's fragile singing would get him kicked off X Factor in a hail of mockery but he knows how to deliver, shifting from spoken phrases to whispery melody and high, shaky grandstanding with conviction. His lyrics twist the nostalgic mood with a series of vignettes, character studies and philosophical musings set at Chateau Marmont.
The Room 29 of the title is the actual hotel room, containing a piano, where Clara Clemens (daughter of Mark Twain) lived out a lonely widowhood. At other times in the same room, Jean Harlow's doomed second husband, Paul Bern, allegedly failed to consummate their marriage and Howard Hughes slowly lost his mind to dreams of sex and movies. These subjects are explored, respectively, on Clara, Bombshell, Salomé and the title track.
Linking all the songs is an exploration of the gulf between glamorous illusion and mundane reality that contemporary Hollywood has come to epitomise. On bravura show-stopper The Other Side, Cocker peers behind the veil of celebrity to discover "Everything is scripted/ Access is restricted/ I've seen all the cables and the wires... there is nothing on the other side."
A chamber piece that spills blood all over the hotel carpet, Room 29 is an understated triumph.
Laura Marling – Semper Femina
★★★★☆
This is Laura Marling's sixth album in nine years. The 27-year-old daughter of English aristocracy (her father is the fifth Baronet Marling) is arguably the outstanding singer-songwriter of her generation, although she operates far below the pop radar.
Her work is finely wrought, cerebral and philosophical, fearless but with a certain emotional distance, even when she is examining the workings of her own heart. She is sometimes compared to Joni Mitchell (high praise for any songwriter) and they certainly share an edge of indifference to outside influences as they pursue their own artistic vision. Titling your latest release in Latin after a quote from Roman poet Virgil certainly does not suggest any desperation to conquer the pop market.
"Semper femina" can be loosely translated as "always a woman". In Virgil's Aeneid, a god unkindly describes women as "varium et mutabile", or "fickle and changeable". Marling regards feminine mutability in a more generous light throughout this sparkling, thoughtful album.
On Nouel, she twists Virgil's words into a dedication to the female muse, variously incarnated as a singer, a cat, an artist's model and a goddess, but also quite possibly referring to the songwriter herself.
If this all makes it sound like an album that requires footnotes, that would be unfortunate. Marling writes with colloquial clarity (she rarely uses words just for their own sake) and concocts melodies through which lyrics flow with natural ease. After the grittier edges of 2015's self-produced Short Movie, Marling here shifts back towards a mixture of English pastoral and subtle Americana, but with an added layer of adult sensuousness.
With any singer-songwriter, it is too easy to focus on words and melodies and overlook production. American guitarist Blake Mills has done a superb job teasing out textures and details in intimate, understated arrangements, where luscious strings, spooky backing vocals and light-touch drums rise and fall without overwhelming Marling's precise, smooth singing. Each song has its own character, examining women through the eyes of others (and sometimes subtly critiquing the men who objectify them).
Despite the distance Marling seems determined to maintain, a sense of her own fear of isolation bleeds through an album in which longing and rejection hold centre ground. The closing track, Nothing, Not Nearly, finds Marling at her most revealing, reminiscing about a failed affair and concluding with the sad realisation that "love waits for no one". It is another gem in an already glittering canon.
Ed Sheeran – Divide (÷)
★★★★☆
Ed Sheeran’s third album will almost certainly be the biggest selling British album of the year. There are 12 tracks, and each is perfectly formed.
This is a set of direct, punchy, melodic, catchy, meaningful songs, with verses and choruses in all the right places. They are beautifully sung and delivered with a compelling and endearing mixture of charismatic swagger and emotional honesty. The quality doesn’t let up from beginning to end. It is very good. And if you can feel a “but” coming on, it is a very small one. Like Adele’s third blockbuster album, 25, it does not push into new places or extend the range of the artist, rather it offers a perfect synthesis of everything that has made them so universally popular.
It is named after the mathematical division symbol but not, I suspect, for any reason more compelling than branding. His 2011 debut was named + (“plus”) and the 2014 blockbuster follow up was x (“multiply”).
That one did indeed multiply Sheeran’s appeal, establishing the acoustic singer-songwriter as one of the biggest stars in contemporary pop. But this is not an album of division so much as consolidation, and I don’t think they have a mathematical symbol for that. Maybe he should have called it Ed2 (“squared”). For better or worse, it’s an Ed Sheeran album that sounds pretty much exactly like what people think an Ed Sheeran album should sound like.
Evidently he is not ready for subtraction yet, although he did take a year off in 2016. He opens his new album with Eraser, a snappy folk rap in which he looks back on his musical career and attempts to explain the dizzying and sometimes overwhelming effects of fame (“I’m well aware of certain things that can destroy a man like me”) without recourse to lonely-at-the-top clichés.
Exuding typical positivity, Sheeran makes a mantra out of turning adversity into opportunity: “I’ll find comfort in my pain.” The track builds with thrilling urgency, which is something Sheeran has proved adept at, adding elements bit by bit until a bouncy rhythm section is rattling along beneath him like he’s strapped to a runaway train. It’s a good trick and he pulls it off on every one of the up-tempo songs.
The way Sheeran brought hip hop inflections into acoustic singer-songwriting was the driving force in his rise to fame but it no longer has a quality of surprise. His rap style is fluent but incredibly distinctive, almost always in the same rhythm and flow. He is very honest and direct, with a sharp turn of phrase, and you really get the sense of a man getting things off his chest, but it is becoming over-familiar, forsaking some of the ragged peculiarity that brought so much oddball energy to his first two albums. Division is by far Sheeran’s smoothest collection.
Indeed, at times it essays a lush romantic polish that might verge on cheesy easy-listening if there wasn’t something quite so grittily substantial about the force of Sheeran’s personality. Even at his most sentimental there is a quality of earthiness shoving intently from the inside of his songs. He has the gift of sincerity, for saying potentially corny things and making them sound real.
Previous albums have demonstrated that he really knows how to write a beautiful, elegant and heartfelt ballad and ÷ is stuffed with them, apparently celebrating Sheeran being reunited with his childhood sweetheart. Chord progressions often adhere to standard blues soul patterns but he still manages to squeeze something fresh out of them. Dive is a raspy gem exploring longing and frustration, Happier a tender, self-punishing rumination on lost love, but Perfect may be a bit too perfect for its own good.
Imagine a cross between Eric Clapton’s Wonderful Tonight and Chris De Burgh’s Lady In Red and you can decide for yourself whether to reach for a handkerchief or pass the sick bag. Personally, I can’t fault it. Those songs are considered classics for a reason. But with the sweet romantic dedication continuing on Hearts Don’t Break Around Here and How Would You Feel (Paean), the mood of mushy amorousness has the cumulative effect of rubbing off some of the edges that have made Sheeran such an endearingly awkward pop star.
For me, the album springs to life on the more sharply observational Shape of You (already a huge hit single) and especially New Man, the latter riven with caustic jealousy (“Wears both shoes with no socks on his feet/ I hear he’s on a new diet and watches what he eats/ He’s got his eyebrows plucked and asshole bleached/ …still I hear he makes you happy and that’s OK by me”).
Sheeran is such an upbeat character, maybe (as the opening Erasure suggests) it takes adversity to really get him going. The toughest ballad by some distance is the album’s closer, Supermarket Flowers, tackles the death of his grandmother (although framed as a mother figure) and if you can get through that one with dry eyes you’re a stronger man than I.
Temples – Volcano
★★★★☆
Temples look like they popped from a time warp: all mop tops and fuzzy curls, minimally accessorised with bangles and beads. It is a mod-meets-hippie look established circa 1967 in the first let-your-hair-down wave of psychedelic rock. It has served bands well over ensuing decades, from winsome indie to Britpop, but you wonder what it signals among young men from Kettering in the second decade of the 21st century.
Their 2014 debut album, Sun Structures, exhibited the same kind of retro precision. Jangly mysticism and swirling solos indicated total allegiance to vintage psychedelia. Alongside Tame Impala, the Horrors and Toy, Temples were hailed for taking guitar music back to the future. The irony, of course, was that there was nothing remotely progressive about such a slavishly old-fashioned brand of progressive rock.
While haircuts remain the same, Temples' second album represents a genuinely bold leap forward. You can hear it from the opening bars of Certainty, with big, brash, wonky hooks triumphantly blasting over thunderous drums and squalling electronic bass. With keyboards replacing guitars as the dominant instrument, the quartet have embraced the synthetic sound-warping possibilities of digital pop and it pays huge dividends.
The quality that really elevated their debut was the songwriting and it remains their strong suit, crafting rich melodies from interesting chord patterns driven by a muscular rhythm section. Every track on Volcano flows beautifully, almost overloaded with hooks and harmonies, and charged with rhythmic intent. But the soundscapes are infinitely brighter and weirder and more thrillingly modern. Their belated embrace of technological possibility encompasses the hypnotic and hallucinatory qualities of dance music, which has arguably been the true psychedelia of recent decades.
To be fair, Kevin Parker's Tame Impala bridged this gap on 2015's Currents, and plenty of others are exploiting similar terrain, from the more flagrantly weird Flaming Lips in the United States to the aggressively laddish Kasabian in the UK. Temples have a charm of their own though, in the dashing peppiness of their song construction, which can bring to mind influences as unexpected as ABBA, Yes, Wizzard and the Kinks. But their debt to the kookiness of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd remains problematic, failing to align with the new purposefulness of the sound.
The high, dreamy voice of guitarist and lead singer James Bagshaw is sweetly appealing, although it is often hard to discern what he is singing and harder still to care. In a recent interview he extolled the virtues of "the N+7 algorithm", which involves replacing nouns with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. This might help explain songs such as Oh! The Saviour with such inscrutable couplets as "Take a sip from the detox dandy/ have a taste of the open pantry".
It is to be hoped that the next stage in Temple's impressive evolution will be as meaningful lyricists.
Stormzy – Gang Signs & Prayer
★★★★☆
It has taken 15 years but grime seems poised on the edge of something big. The hard-hitting home-grown British rap genre was well represented at the Brit Awards earlier this week, acknowledging a year that has delivered hit singles and albums from artists such as Wiley, Kano and Mercury Prize-winner Skepta.
What it really needs is someone to carry it into the mainstream (as Dizzee Rascal once threatened to), with music that you don’t have to be a hardcore acolyte to appreciate.
Stormzy is Michael Omari Jr, a 23-year-old, 6ft 5in, swaggeringly charismatic south Londoner with ambitions to match his physical presence. “I find it strange to aim for anything less than the greatest,” he said in a recent interview in which he identified “indie bands, soul singers and rock icons” as his competitors. “I don’t want to be the best rapper in the UK. I want to be the best artist.”
Stormzy delights in defying expectations on a debut album that counters the genre’s reputation for confrontational aggression with softer, deeper and more introspective sides. The title, Gang Signs & Prayer, plays up Stormzy’s dichotomy as a church-raised, God-fearing high achiever who revels in gangland battles but frets about the state of his soul. About half the album comprises witty, belligerent, repetitively phrased rants over high-tempo beats with fizzy, earworm electronic hooks, peppered with slang that will be all but incomprehensible to anyone for whom a “banger” is still another word for sausage.
This may well be grime’s forte, but I remain unconvinced it has real crossover potential. Like heavy metal, it is simply too unyielding for the uncommitted. But Stormzy’s more thoughtful side comes to the fore on softer, American R’n’B flavoured sing-song raps Velvet, Cigarettes and Cush, 100 Bags and Don’t Cry For Me.
He unveils a warm, fluent singing voice on Blinded by Your Grace (Parts I and II), an out-and-out gospel anthem, complete with choirs, pianos and cheesy electric guitar. If there are contradictions here, Stormzy grapples manfully with them. His ambitious debut ends on a starkly vulnerable and introspective note with Lay Me Bare, contemplating the emotional aftermath of being abandoned by his father. “There’s some s--- I hate to share,” he raps over dark and dreamy chords, then finds the courage to share it anyway.
His peculiar mix of antagonism and soul-searching may not be enough to convert non-believers, but this bold, ambitious debut suggests that grime has found its most accomplished ambassador yet.
Nikki Lane – Highway Queen
★★★★☆
"Yippee-ki-yay!" These are the very first words heard on Nikki Lane’s third album, a cowboy cliché yodelled with lusty intent. It signals the 33-year-old singer-songwriter’s absolute commitment to her genre, just in case you were left in any doubt after viewing an album cover in which she bestraddles a Texas longhorn cow. The former fashion stylist from South Carolina looks like a poster girl for country music.
She snaps out hard-bitten couplets about hard working lives in a voice that mixes the sweet lilt of Loretta Lynn with the flat drawl of Johnny Cash. The snaky weave of twanging lead and tremulous pedal steel guitar that power her arrangements are all familiar tropes – and none the less effective for it. But this is a version of country so retro-cool, acutely stylised and emotionally edgy that it sounds contemporary.
Country is, effectively, the national music of the biggest market in the world, which goes some way to explaining its peculiar endurance in the digital pop world. It is inherently old-fashioned, built on acoustic guitars and formally structured songs, frequently espousing conservative values. It remains uncool, hampered by sentimentality and its tendency towards glistening, harmonically perfect over-production very much at odds with modern trends. Despite all this, in sales (albeit not in streaming) it still outsells pop and dance music in America. It has global reach too, with home-grown duos Ward Thomas and The Shires both topping the UK charts in recent years.
Lane draws on the outlaw country music that thrived in the Seventies, with such charismatic figures as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, adding a streak of liberalism still shunned by mainstream American country radio yet in tune with modern pop.
The first half of Highway Queen offers a succession of belters in which Lane rebrands the outlaw sensibility for the modern woman, appropriating the genre’s masculine clichés of drinking, driving, gambling and philandering.
But it is the second half of the album that actually shows why country persists against all odds: at its best, it is unafraid of telling stories that dig deep into ordinary lives. Big Mouth is a sharp-tongued song about the destructive power of gossip; Muddy Waters a philosophical lament about losing to another woman. And you won’t hear a more bittersweet song about the tough choices of divorce than Forever Last Forever, in which Lane laments: “We swore for better or worse/ And it was better at first/ And worse at the end.”
It is on tracks like this that you understand why those weepy steel guitars will never go out of style.
Rag ’n’ Bone Man – Human
★★★★★
Some songs seem so obvious the first time you hear them, you wonder why no one has written them before. Rag ’n’ Bone Man’s Human is one such song. It is not just that the hook line, “I’m only human, after all”, is a familiar phrase that rings here with profundity. It is also the way the weight of the beat, the ache in the melody, the dark tone of the chords and the rough gravity of the voice all fall in perfect synchrony, driving on to the heartfelt plea: “Don’t put your blame on me”.
It is perfectly succinct, a blast of empathy for the tribulations of existence. Released late last year, it has already become inescapable, popping up on television trailers, covered by X Factor contestants and number one in a dozen countries (number two in the UK over Christmas). And there is more where that came from.
Rag ’n’ Bone Man’s debut album does something pop arguably does better than any other art form: compress universal experiences into short bursts of energy and emotion. A big, bearded, tattooed singer from Uckfield, East Sussex, 31-year-old Rory Graham has a rich, baritone voice with a raw, tender falsetto that brings conviction to every line. He has gone through strict hip hop and blues phases over a decade on the fringes of the music business only to arrive at a solid, old-fashioned form of songwriting. Skin is a poignant, apocalyptic love song. Bitter End a bruised plea for a relationship on the ropes. Odetta a moving ballad about a wounded man saved by fatherhood. These are muscular tunes with verses, bridges and choruses in all the right places, simple hooks, heavy beats, and a deep core of compassionate, philosophical lyrics.
Graham won this year’s Brits Critics’ choice award and seems destined for massive stardom. This hasn’t happened by accident. A surprising number of well-connected writers and producers have been involved in his debut, names who have worked on everything from the unabashed bubblegum of One Direction and Little Mix to the sophisticated soul of Emeli Sandé and Sam Smith. It is fair to assume Graham is being groomed as a male answer to Adele, a rough and ready character with a huge voice. What is perhaps surprising is that so many cooks have concocted something so unfussily potent, which would suggest the artist himself (credited on every track) is the dominant personality.
Although it has some hip-hop swagger, Human is not particularly modern, forsaking the pliability of contemporary R’n’B for age?old blues structures and uncluttered arrangements. It is a reminder that, beyond the thrill-seeking singles, the mainstream audience still favour meaningful, emotional songs, delivered with passion. Rag ’n’ Bone Man’s debut is full of them.
Sampha – Process
★★★★☆
Sampha Sisay moves in the most elevated circles of modern pop. The 28-year-old Londoner has sung hooks and made samples for Drake, Kanye West, Beyoncé and Solange Knowles. His debut album, however, demonstrates little of the superstar swagger of American hip hop and R’n’B. It is painfully convoluted, a wracked internal monologue taking place in a warped, amorphous, dreamily introverted sonic space. It is also spookily beautiful.
It is easy to see what has attracted the global pop elite to Sampha. His voice is immediately distinctive, soft and high-strung, rasping at the edges, thick and warm underneath, constantly fluctuating as if every line is wrought with emotion. It is a sound that has bubbled through the UK dance underground, percolating tracks by Jessie Ware, FKA Twigs and the world-music-flavoured electronica of SBTRKT.
Left to his own devices, Sampha has plunged deeper underground. You could dance to some of these tracks, certainly, but only if you didn’t mind starting and stopping arbitrarily, while fretfully peering over your shoulder to see if anyone was watching.
The key song on the album is undoubtedly (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano. Written in the wake of his mother’s death from cancer in 2015, it is a desperately sad ballad about processing feelings through music. Ironically, in technical terms, it is the least “processed” song on the album, stripped to its bare elements. While piano and vocals lie at the intimate core of Sampha’s music, everything around constantly mutates and discombobulates in a haze of colliding synthetic and acoustic instruments, layered vocals and distorted beats. Emotions, though, ring out loud and true.
There is a lot of anxiety on display. Blood On Me is a nightmare of pursuit and fear, with Sampha’s vocal gasping for breath over a whirling storm of sound. Reverse Faults is a claustrophobic miasma of guilt and jealousy, in which shimmering, stuttering rhythms break into brief, blissful melodic escape only to be immediately sucked back into darkness again.
There is so much going on, it proves a hard album to fully get to grips with, a shifting tableau of songs and sounds with only that mesmeric voice to hang on to. But when it gets under your skin, it proves immensely difficult to dislodge.
Pushing through the same porous musical borders as accessible experimentalists the xx, James Blake, Frank Ocean and Bon Iver, Sampha’s beguiling debut is a further reminder of just how peculiar pop is becoming.
Process seems unlikely to make Sampha a household name in his own right. Yet it has a drama and intensity that should increase his influence on those who already are.
Elbow – Little Fictions
★★★★☆
There is a moment on the opening track of Elbow’s seventh album that makes my heart surge. In that moment, the strings of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra arrive with a burst of depth and urgency beneath the band’s onrushing groove, and Guy Garvey’s languid voice swells with emotion. The song is called Magnificent (She Says), and it is magnificent, a stirring paean to a childhood epiphany. You couldn’t mistake it for the work of anyone but Elbow.
Emerging in the wake of Britpop, Elbow seemed capable of the same kind of singalong anthems that saw their contemporaries, Coldplay, achieve stadium-filling superstardom. But Elbow never made it to the top, commercially. There has always been something stubbornly unfashionable about their dense lyrics, jazzy melodies and intricate arrangements. They are like a British Steely Dan, only with a taste for pints and everyman wisdom, instead of cocktails and irony.
A stout and genial barstool philosopher, Garvey is one of the most gifted lyricists in contemporary song. He relishes metre, and can conjure up striking images. In the track All Disco, he gently mocks the critical tendency to subdivide and categorise, too: “What does it prove if you’d die for a tune/ It’s really all disco”.
The theme of this inspiring album is graceful surrender. The 42-year-old frontman married the actress Rachael Stirling last year, and Little Fictions is crammed with romantic joy (“Across the city there’s a golden chill/ A rare holding still/ As if somebody’s going to sing,” he trills on Head for Supplies) allied to more sombre reflections on his past habits (“I used to love a bar full of flickering stars far from home,” on Trust the Sun).
The band add welcome bite to proceedings with the result that this album is immensely more satisfying than Garvey’s fussy 2015 solo debut, Courting the Squall. Together since school, Elbow evolved their peculiar style to fit Garvey’s ramblings. They conjure up delicate atmospheres peppered with detail, rising and falling around the singer rather than following formulaic song construction. Which is, perhaps, another reason why Elbow have never played the world’s biggest stages – for all its beauty, Little Fictions would have more crossover potential if it were more tightly focused.
Instead, what Elbow offer is an eloquent, immersive, emotional journey that can suddenly soar into the ether. The extraordinary eight-minute title track concocts comic pathos from childhood memories of family squabbles, then builds into an epic about the overriding imperative of love. As the band surge into a glorious coda, Garvey proclaims: “Love is the original miracle.” And it really does feel like an act of grace.
Kehlani – SweetSexySavage
★★★★☆
Everything about Californian singer Kehlani seems very on trend, from her mononymous name to her disregard for punctuation. Her debut album, SweetSexySavage, is filled with declarations of passion and independence, a form of standard pop bravado in which she proclaims affiliation with bitches and gangstas and all manner of ne’er do wells.
Small, lithe and pretty, her appearance is toughened with cropped hair and enough tattoos to start a parlour. Indeed, she looks like she could understudy for Rihanna, and with the Barbadian pop queen following her own maverick path more recently, you can see why the music business might be excited about a potential replacement. She has been tipped as a future American pop diva by everyone from Apple Music to Rolling Stone magazine.
Only 21, Kehlani Parrish has already been around the block as part of teen group Poplyfe, finalists on America’s Got Talent in 2011. She was developed as a solo artist by the show’s presenter and producer Nick Canon, sang the theme for last year’s superhero movie Suicide Squad, duetted with One Direction’s Zayn Malik on his solo album and was Grammy-nominated last year for an internet-only “mixtape”. Although this is billed as her debut, it is effectively Kehlani’s third full-length release.
SweetSexySavage certainly justifies the hype. Her seductively understated blend of R’n’B and hip-hop is the zeitgeist sound of the charts, weaving pop melodies and provocative lyrics through sinuous soul grooves. More adventurous talents, such as Kanye West, Frank Ocean, James Blake, Bon Iver, and the xx, have established the template but it is still fresh enough to offer relief from the gaudy plastic excesses of electronic dance pop.
Kehlani proves adept at conjuring mobile beats from ghostly, stripped back rhythm sections, delicate patterns of tricky hi-hats and handclap snares set to slow moving synth bass. Unfussy, spacious arrangements are held together by finely textured webs of backing vocals.
It is in this department that Kehlani comes into her own. The mellifluous quality and range of her singing harks back to the sensual nuances of Nineties Nu Soul: Maxwell, D’Angelo, Jill Scott and Erykah Badu. Indeed, there is something deeply old fashioned lurking beneath Kehlani’s tattooed skin.
The personality that emerges here is surprisingly gentle, with lots of slow jams about self-awareness, positive personal philosophies and respect for others. Musically, it would seem that Alicia Keys is a stronger personal role model than Rihanna. For all the swagger, then, Kehlani proves rather more sweet than savage.
Courtney Marie Andrews – Honest Life
★★★★★
“Some people take a little more time to grow,” sings Courtney Marie Andrews on the title track of Honest Life. It is a telling statement from someone who has been knocking around for a while, honing her skills, before finding it within herself to craft an absolutely perfect little gem of an album at the sixth attempt.
Andrews is only 25 but has already spent almost a decade on the road as a professional musician, touring since she was 16, singing backing vocals for arena rock band Jimmy Eat World and travelling as lead guitarist for cult Americana star Damien Jurado. She has also recorded five previous albums of poetic heart-on-her-sleeve sensitive singer-songwriting, so when she tells us “this ain’t no rookie dreaming” on the opening of her sixth release, you can genuinely sense the weight of experience in her voice.
Unfolding with a very unhurried, understated assurance, Rookie Dreaming serves as a compelling introduction to an album that uses life on the road as a framework to explore youth and maturity, where dreams of escape are shadowed by the notion that freedom might come at a cost.
Honest Life is full of songs of longing and regret, tinged by a belief in the redemptive possibilities of change and wrapped up in stories of everyday, hard-working lives. Classic country material, in other words, delivered with an unfussy blend of acoustic and electric guitars, resonant pianos and weeping pedal steels. She is not reinventing the wagon wheel but sometimes it is really about the little things done well, and every song here sparkles.
It is evocative of the roots country rock pioneered by Gram Parsons and adapted by the great Seventies singer-songwriters of Laurel Canyon. Andrews’s voice is pure and sweet with nuanced warbles and flutters and a little break on the top notes, bringing to mind the tremulous flow of Emmylou Harris with hints of Joni Mitchell’s worldly wisdom, while the poetic economy of her lyrics is right up there with such masters of the country vignette as Guy Clark and John Prine.
What really separates this from her earlier material is a quality of dispassionate distance that makes personal and emotional details land with impact. These are not songs that beg for the listener’s sympathy. It really sounds like Andrews’s first audience is herself, and this is her coming of age.
If this was a debut, we would be hailing Andrews as a precocious young genius. But perhaps, in this age of acceleration, amid a pop blizzard of viral memes and instant digital fame, the slow maturing of a truly substantial talent is something to really celebrate.
The xx – I See You
★★★★☆
A brass fanfare is probably not what anyone was expecting from the opening of a new album by the xx. Which I suppose is the point. The London minimalists have been key architects of the new quiet, an understated spaciousness that has slowly wormed its way into pop music via the downbeat hip hop of Drake and hushed R’n’B of Frank Ocean.
With their Mercury-winning debut in 2009, the very starkness of the trio’s dubby sound immediately set them apart from the clubbing crowd, establishing a reputation as the most moody and introverted exponents of sensuous hush.
But when everyone is turning down the volume, the shock of silence can no longer be relied upon to command attention. So while it is certainly a surprise to hear the xx come charging out of the blocks on Dangerous, a brashly synthetic bass-driven dance track about taking chances, it proves a welcome one.
As the softly modulated, inherently mournful voices of singer-bassist Oliver Sim and singer-guitarist Romy Madley Croft blend, it is reassuringly apparent that the xx’s very particular emotional aesthetic and pop songcraft is not actually dependent on atmospherics for effect. Even the sound of keyboard and sample merchant Jamie Smith (aka Jamie xx) firing off a siren in the background cannot shatter the intimacy the duo vocalists conjure up, with an understated delivery that trembles with passionate veracity.
Before confirmed fans swap their slippers for dancing shoes, though, it should be noted this is not an album of xx bangers. All things being relative, their most overheated dynamics would still register as chilled in a techno club. The influence of Smith’s solo dance album, In Colour, is apparent in stronger electronic flavours and a preponderance of loops and samples but they never overcrowd arrangements, maintaining the subdued tone of a party going on in another room. These splashes of new musical colour correspond with a growing confidence and maturity in the songs themselves, but the overall mood remains intensely vulnerable.
The xx have been such effective minimalists because they have always made sure each individual element earns its place, while the beating heart of the song remains tenderly exposed. They make little things count. It remains true of an album filled with songs of gentle, profound self-revelation, where the key seems to be finding confidence to speak deep and sometimes painful truths.
On Brave For You, an astonishingly exposed song of surviving grief after the death of a parent, Madley Croft defines herself as someone doing “the things I am afraid to do”, which could serve as a description of this fragile trio’s entire modus operandi. Even at their boldest, the xx still sound like they are treading on eggshells.