Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher
"When the speed kicks in / I go to the store for nothing/ And walk right by / The house where you lived with Snow White / I wonder if she ever thought / The storybook tiles on the roof were too much/ But from the window, it's not a bad show/ If your favourite thing's Dianetics or stucco." Second album from the 25-year-old indie artist from LA singer is a meditative, beautifully reflective set of 11 songs partly fuelled with the bitterness of her ex-relationship with disgraced musician Ryan Adams. It's full of offbeat, dry killer lines, and the soundscapes are mesmerically floaty. Her love songs are more about what those feelings have on people's lives and her curiosity is fierce and her analysis intelligent. I See You is the most direct about Adams, while Kyoto and I Know The End are about the disappointments of touring. Intelligent, eccentric, and alluringly inventive. Out on Dead Oceans.
Phoebe Bridgers - I See You
Norah Jones – Pick Me Off The Floor
Eighteen years since she shot to success Come Away With Me, Jones has consistently released albums of maturity and grace within the slow soul/jazz/blues area, and this is no different. Like a fine wine, it grows on with extra listens, and is perfect for a quiet evening and a decent vintage. After some very unpretentious lockdown performances, it's good to hear some bigger production numbers now too, expanding on melancholy and heartbreak. Highlights include the intimate, minimal piano and orchestrations on opener How I Weep, Flame Twin, and the powerful Hurts To Be Alone, and also which builds and builds, as well as Heartbroken, Day After all the way to the climax of Heaven Above. Loneliness and melancholy done with class, smoky emotion. Out on Virgin.
Norah Jones – Were You Watching?
Neil Young – Homegrown
Old and yet new. Following Hitchhiker, the 1976 album released in 2017, this is another lost album from the 70s, one from Young's lighter, acoustic side, and is filled with ploddingly beautiful songs. It was recorded in December 1974 and January 1975 after Young split up with his partner Carrie Snodgress, then cancelled in 1975 because he felt it was too personal. But it's a gorgeous release with openers Separate Ways and Try, with Emmylou Harris on backing vocals, and Love Is A Rose, which later appeared on Decade. Others that stand out include Kansas, and the oddity of spoken word that is Florida - about a glider that flies into the city and kills a child, and White Line, from 1990’s Ragged Glory, but here stripped down. A collector's item, certainly, but more than that too. Out on Warner.
Neil Young – Try
Chloe x Halle – Ungodly Hour
Most artists tend to begin an album with their best songs, but somehow this isn't the case with this second album by the Atlanta sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey. It's an album of bad boyfriend pop songs, and the first few are filled with R&B and Autotune pop cliches, but somehow things get more interesting halfway through with the soulful Tipsy, where their voices begin to really fly along, Ungodly Hour, one that Beyonce would be proud of, Busy Boy, a finger clicking R&B in which the boy is discovered to playing away, soaring vocals on Overwhelmed, and perhaps best Don't Make It Harder On Me, one that could be called a soul Classic, followed by the Whitney Houston-like other-woman track Wonder What She Thinks Of Me. In between a few duds, some sparkly and bright bling. Out on Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia Records.
Chloe x Halle – Ungodly Hour
Jonah Yano – souvenir
Sensitive, exploratory, hard-to-define work from the Toronto-based singer, songwriter, who was originally from Hiroshima and moved abroad after his parents split. He is equipped with soulful, genre blurring vocals and searing, personal lyrics, and sounds from gentle acoustic guitar to woodwind to electronica. Low-key funk to soul, minimal and melancholy, from the opener Poor Me, to the self-derogatory Congratulations, You're In First Place, to the clarinet-decorated Monarch, it's an intriguing listen, full of family experiences, experimentation and defiant hurt. And all in lower-case. Recorded in Tokyo’s Red Bull studios, a log cabin in Nagato, Toronto’s Studio 69, and his own home. Out on Innovative Leisure.
Jonah Yano – shoes (feat. tatsuya muraoka)
Noveller – Arrow
After recording a series of albums in cities like Brooklyn, Austin, and her home state of Louisiana, multi-instrumentalist and film-maker Sarah Lipstate has now settled in Los Angeles, and this latest is a set of instrumentals that are absorbingly odd and immersive, like a futuristic soundtrack in a parallel world to Bladerunner, shimmering, delicate, echoey, ghostly, sustaining. Highlights include Effektology, Pattern Recognition, Canyons, and Thorn, but the album is best heard in sequence to transport you to another space. Out on Bandcamp.
Noveller - Effecktology
Article 54 – Stayin' Alive
Written, arranged and produced by Rhodri Marsden, writer, instrumentalist, all round good egg and band member of various from Scritti Politti to TV instrumental entertainers Dream Themes, this joyous project is the second disco album riffing on the Studio 54 reference. The first the caustically funny and funky The Hustle, parodies the farce of Brexit, and is another must listen of wit and invention. Here though Stayin' Alive, with a nod to the Bee Gees, is a disco-dancing response to the horrors, life changes and cockups of Covid-19. With a team of session singers guesting, this is top-quality fare, and with eight glitterball, hip-thrusting funky fancies to enjoy, from We're Not Going Out Tonight to New Normal, how can we live without it? Out on Bandcamp.
Article 54 - Not Going Out Tonight
EP of the week:
Jockstrap – Wicked City
There's simply nothing quite like Jockstrap. The London-based duo of Taylor Skye and singer Georgia Ellery create bewilderingly wonderful mixtures of classical and dubstep, fuzzy electronica and deadpan humour in this five-track EP, from strange, stop-start opener Robert to Acid (previously highlighted on Song of the Day), the rippling piano of Yellow In Green, moving into the City and City Hell, oddball adventures into hallucinatory urban experiences. It's out there. Check it out. On Warp and Bandcamp.
Jockstrap – The City
Reissue of the week:
Bessie Jones – Get In Union
Now more than relevant than ever, the wonderful Georgia gospel and folk singer from the mid-20h century had a background steeped in American history. Her accordionist grandfather, Jet Sampson, was enslaved as a child before the American civil war. He taught her songs from his lifetime, and lived to the ripe old age of 105. Bessie sang at the Poor People’s March on Washington in 1968, in Carnegie Hall in Manhattan, and at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration before her death in 1984. But key to this album, Bessie decided to preserve the music history handed down to her travelled 1,000 miles to ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s New York flat in 1961, tellling him, in no uncertain terms record her, and this is a set of remastered 60 songs that includes a cappellas and spirituals with the group of which she became a member the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Full of stirring, beautiful gems that capture hardship, emotion and survival. Out Alan Lomax Archive.
Bessie Jones – Get In Union
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