Tim Burgess – I Love the New Sky
The Charlatans singer releases his fifth solo album, a smooth delivery of gentle songs touching on the everyday and the universal with oodles of loss, love and belonging, in a style continuing to reach some way beyond his original 90s baggy indie roots. Like the album's title, the music sails softly across the listener, light and fluffy and yet gently complex. Perhaps the new sky is the quiet, clear one with see during Covid-19 lockdown. Burgess is an amiable, softly treading alternative to the style of Stone Roses’ Ian Brown. No covers on this album, and its highlights include Empathy For The Devil, a gospel style piano-based rockabilly skip, Lucky Creatures, which harks back to those old early 90s syncopated days, Sweetheart Mercury, the eccentric but simple Comme D'Habitude, the Nilsson-esque Sweet Old Sorry Me, and the Lennon Heaven-inspired Undertow, which Burgess describes as “a mood-changer, influenced by 10cc”. Out on Bella Union
Tim Burgess – Empathy For The Devil
The 1975 – Notes on a Conditional Form
Following 2018's A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships, this is an epic 80-minute behemoth of genre-switching - a messy full kitchen sink by Wilmslow's pop rockers. What a mishmash - opening with a self-titled piece of meandering ambient background to an impassioned speech by Greta Thunberg (she's perhaps the most gripping thing here, jumping then to an angry, pretty, powerful and sweary punk track, People, and then things go all over the place – classical orchestral (The End, or Streaming), dubstep with vocoder (Frail State Of Mind then Yeah I Know), country-sytle rock-pop (The Birthday Party or Roadkill), stadium mainstream rock (Then Because She Goes), acoustic folk (Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America), rave (Having No Head) and even something that Take That might have done (Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied or the R&B-ish Tonight). Apparently it took 19 months and 15 studios to finish, and sounds like it. Some interesting, oddball stuff here (I Think There's Something You Should), but the overall effect is meandering, experimental notebook of commercial material. A confusing release for bewildering times. Out on Dirty Hit/Poyldor
The 1975 - If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)
Badly Drawn Boy – Banana Skin Shoes
Ninth album by Damon Gough, who gently leapt straight into the limelight with the wonderful Mercury-winning The Hour of Bewilderbeast in 2000, was fairly prolific in that decade, but this is his first for eight years since 2012's Being Flynn. His latest is an eccentric mix of heartfelt honesty combined with upbeat funky slightly psych pop. That applies to the title track, Colours and Is This A Dream? showing a spring in his musical step, as well as an ode to home town Manchester, focusing on that famous music impresario and Factory Records founder – Tony Wilson Said. Many of the others are slower songs of straight up sincerity. Some just pass you by, but I'm Not Sure What Is It Is harks back to some of his previous best. Overall, breezy, easy, pleasant listening. Out on One Last Fruit Records.
Badly Drawn Boy - Banana Skin Shoes
Nnamdï – Brat
The follow-up to 2017’s critically acclaimed Drool by the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Nnamdi Ogbonnaya is an eccentric melting pot of oddball R&B, hip hop, jazz, acoustic folk and dextrous introspection, stop-and-start vocal chatterings, electronic whines, vocal overdubs and funky grooves. Opener Flowers To My Demos is a gentle, acoustic-based opener, Gimme Gimme is a bubbly cauldron of variously paced vocals, Bullseye an idiosyncratic dubstep, Glass Casket a mesmeric ambient song laced with low spaced-out Autotune. Hard to define, sugary light and lemony strange, with blips, beats, trips and hums. Out on Sooper Records.
Nnamdï – Wasted
Steve Earle and the Dukes – Ghosts of West Virginia
This 20th studio album by the American is a tribute to the coal-mining communities of the mountain state, specifically those affected by a 2010 explosion that left 29 miners dead. It's a powerful, moving work, staying solidly in the bluegrass and country genres, as solid as the rock upon which it mines, capturing the tragedy of lives lost as well as the bonds between family members, on such tracks as It's About Blood. But there's nothing sentimental here, with plenty revealing the hard, sometimes pointless toil of these working lives, such as on Devil Put The Coal In The Ground, Black Lung, and the softer, more reflective If I Could See Your Face Again. Earle's gravelly voice couldn't be more evocative. Out on New West Country.
Steve Earle & The Dukes – Black Lung
Woods – Strange to Explain
Another Earle now, not Steve, but Jeremy Earl, the singer within the New York psych-folk band Woods, with their latest, a rather beautiful dreamy, softly sung, yet unsettling, Mellotron-filled album. It echoes 2010's At Echo Lake, and that is a very welcome return. With John Andrews’s warm keyboards, the title track is gorgeous, while Can't Get Out has a heavier, driving drum sound, and Next To You And the Sea trips along with a seductive oddness, led by Earl's soft falsetto. A perfect album for these strange times, soothing, and yet never complacent, hinting always at tragedy and loss. Out on Woodsist.
Woods – Strange to Explain
Eve Owen – Don't Let The Ink Dry
With a hauntingly beautiful alto voice, 20-year-old British singer-songwriter Eve Owen has decorated others' music (for example The National's Where Is Her Head) but now gets a chance to shine on her debut album. And so she does, from tracks on this gently piano and guitar-based folk record, on such tracks as For Redemption, Mother, the delicate Bluebird, and A Lone Swan. At times she echoes the qualities of Mazzy Star (on So Still For You) and Fiona Apple. A very promising, and eerily exquisite debut. Out on 37d03d.
Eve Owen - Tudor
Nídia – Não Fales Nela Que a Mentes
Intricate, eclectic sounds by the Lisbon-via-Bordeaux producer Nídia on this new album out on Lisbon's Príncipe label, which specialises in breaking down race barriers. African, particularly Angolan rhythms are combined with electronic sounds, mixing kizomba, tarraxinha and tarraxo. The album feels like a light, distant party, from Capacidades to the mid-album song Rap, and in particular a great final track, Emotions. Out on Príncipe.
Nídia - Capacidades
EP of the week:
Jessica Winter – Sad Music
Blessed with a powerful, soaring high voice, a talent for heavy synth-pop melody and a wonderfully dry sense of humour, the south-London based Jessica Winter has worked with an impressive array of artists from Fat White Family to Gorillaz, and is one half of the writing and singing duo for Pregoblin. This five-track EP is ideally released for these melancholy, crazy times, a mixture of unfettered pop, big-chorus dancefloor joy, dark tragedy. Winter’s projects include political, social and eco activism, often pushed through a sharp prism of wry, ironic self-deprecation. Guests on this album include Jason Cooper from The Cure on drums on World On Fire. "I'll make it through by listening to ... sad music," Winter sings. Good advice, especially these. Out on Roya/Warp.
Jessica Winter – Sad Music
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