Album Review: U.S. Girls – Bless This Mess
Since releasing her first album as U.S. Girls in 2008, Meg Remy has been a prolific powerhouse of ideas, filling eight records with rich, vital and idiosyncratic pop music. Recent years have seen the Toronto musician leap deftly from the rough textures and patchwork grooves on 2015’s Half Free to dense, churning psychedelia on 2018’s In…
Keep readingWinter Highlights 2022-23
I’ve not been short of albums to review since I last posted. The last couple months of 2022 and the first few weeks of 2023 have seen some of the albums I’ve been anticipating for months, even years, released to great acclaim and excitement. But what I have been short of is time. And so I’ve,…
Keep readingReview: Taylor Swift – Midnights
Consciously or not, Taylor Swift has always been pop artist. No matter whether the song is tingling with teenage emotion and country jangle like Fearless, glazed with the 80s sheen of 1989, or crystallised in pristine chamber folk as on Folklore, underneath the surface is an effortless talent for melody and shamelessly pop sensibilities. After 2020’s…
Keep readingReview: Björk – Fossora
Since her 1993 debut, every Björk album has come with a concept, a theme that defines it against the rest of her discography, whether it’s the sublime sensuality of Vespertine, the entirely a cappella album Medúlla or the nature-inspired Biophilia with its accompanying apps. Fossora is no exception. When the Icelandic musician announced her tenth studio…
Keep readingReview: Nicole Cassandra Smit – Third in Line
Very rarely does a first album showcase as much raw talent and imagination as Cassandra Nicole Smit’s dazzling debut Third in Line. The Edinburgh-based Indonesian-Swedish musician is not afraid to take risks on this LP, melding soul, jazz, hip-hop and electronica into her own sonic elixir. Yet the fluidity and sense of artistry underpinning every track…
Keep readingSpring Highlights 2022
Inevitably, I don’t get the chance to review every album that catches my attention. For each review I post, there will be several other great records released that I don’t get to write about. And the last few weeks in particular have seen a surplus of fantastic new releases, making it tough to prioritise what to…
Keep readingReview: Pictish Trail – Island Family
As musical tributes to the Scottish Hebrides go, Johnny Lynch’s salute to the Isle of Eigg, Island Family, is certainly an unusual one. There’s barely an acoustic instrument in sight, no soaring fiddles or intricate guitar to evoke the windswept landscape and rough seas. Instead, jagged electronics and coarse percussion cut across seas of seething synths…
Keep readingReview: Jenny Hval – Classic Objects
The fact that Jenny Hval calls her latest LP Classic Objects her ‘pop album’ speaks to just how left-field her previous musical ventures have been. Far from conventional, Classic Objects opens with a vibrant, rhythmic meditation on the institution of marriage and concludes questioning the value of art in a commercial system, slipping into spacey ambience,…
Keep readingReview: Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
‘It’s a little bit magic,’ promises ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You’, the title track of American indie folk-rock band Big Thief’s latest album. At 80 minutes long, this mammoth record was born out of drummer and producer James Krivchenia’s desire of capturing the full range of vocalist Adrianne Lenker’s song-writing talent in one…
Keep readingReview: Lana Del Rey – Blue Banisters
Just the day after the release of her seventh studio album Chemtrails Over The Country Club in March of this year, Lana Del Rey announced her next project Rock Candy Sweet would be out in June. Then postponed until July and retitled Blue Banisters, the album was teased with a collection of singles, before being postponed…
Keep readingReview: Sam Fender – Seventeen Going Under
Happy songs are easy to come by. Political commentary is woven throughout the popular music canon. But creating music that speaks truth to power while affirming the very things that make life worth fighting for is a much harder task. Bruce Springsteen could do it, Stevie Wonder could do it, and Sam Fender can certainly do…
Keep readingReview: Yola – Stand For Myself
Following her Grammy-nominated 2019 debut Walk Through Fire, English singer and songwriter Yolanda Quartey returns with an impressive second album. Much like its predecessor, Stand For Myself is rooted in country, soul and a smattering of rock ‘n’ roll, Quartey’s indomitable vocals coursing through the soundscape of 60s and 70s America. But along with more lavish…
Keep readingReview: Bleachers – Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night
Maybe it was the dusky blue cover artwork or the vibrant energy of the singles or perhaps just the enticing, twilit romanticism of the title, but Bleachers’ third studio album Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night seemed poised to be their most cohesive and expressive LP to date. And on one hand the album does…
Keep readingReview: Billie Eilish – Happier Than Ever
Last time she was the bad guy, the monster under your bed, revelling in the stuff of nightmares. Now, two years after her award-winning debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Billie Eilish returns with a softer, more personal album. Stretching across pop, R&B, folk, rock and even bossa nova, Happier Than Ever…
Keep readingReview: Spellling – The Turning Wheel
For Chrystia Cabral, better known by her playful pseudonym, Spellling, music is eternal, ethereal, organic, woven throughout nature. ‘I hear the musical words / in the arc of a rainbow, / in the spider’s harp,’ she sings on the final track of her magnificent third LP, The Turning Wheel. Nature – its beauty, its nurturing powers,…
Keep readingReview: Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee
Jubilee, the latest release by Japanese Breakfast, the project of American musician Michelle Zauner, could well be called an emotional rollercoaster – if rollercoasters only went downhill, that is. The album takes us from the infectious openheartedness of the buoyant lead single ‘Be Sweet’, to the devastating loneliness of final track ‘Posing for Cars’, which finds…
Keep readingReview: Wolf Alice – Blue Weekend
Four years after the release of their Mercury Prize-winning album Visions of a Life, London-based band Wolf Alice return with another LP, brimming with their signature blend of fuzzy shoegaze and extravagant alt-rock. Blue Weekend sees the band aim for a grander, more lavish sound than they have produced thus far, resulting in a record that…
Keep readingReview: Olivia Rodrigo – SOUR
‘It’s brutal out here’ asserts Olivia Rodrigo on the opening track of her debut album SOUR, singing of the pressures and the exploitation that come with teenage stardom. It’s a bold statement putting this noisy, punk-flavoured song at the top of the track list but it announces Rodrigo’s commitment to singing honestly and unashamedly from her…
Keep readingReview: St. Vincent – Daddy’s Home
Four years after the release of her acclaimed electropop album Masseduction, Annie Clark takes us in a new musical direction on Daddy’s Home, reflecting on her father’s release from prison, as well as her experience as a woman in the music industry, over a series of ferocious funk grooves and sultry, soulful jams. Daddy’s Home is…
Keep readingReview: Fleet Foxes – Shore
For Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes’ lead singer and song-writer, songs are ‘perfect angels in the snow’. Delicate and flawless, they are impressions left behind by the legends who write them. On ‘Sunblind’, a stand-out track from his latest project, Shore, he pays homage to his musical heroes, namechecking Elliot Smith, John Prine, Judee Sill and Jeff…
Keep readingReview: Taylor Swift – Folklore
Taylor Swift’s surprise album emerges from lockdown with minimal bombast but rich in detail and storytelling. Aptly titled, Folklore traipses through forgotten childhood haunts, meanders along timeless love stories, delves deep into the musical and poetical mythos, and trips lightly through memory and the imagination. Stripped of its pop sheen, Swift’s song-writing alongside producer Jack Antonoff…
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Myriad Voices 