Still riding high on awards and big sales, the London rock band’s fourth LP, following 2021’s Blue Weekend, explores a wider breadth of styles into more piano-based pop and 70s rock, with songs broadly about self-acceptance, wellbeing, contemplating identity and some stylistic echoes of Fleetwood Mac and ELO. Working together for 15 years and entering their 30s, there’s a calmer, more relaxed aura to the quartet, exemplified by the serene reflection on The Sofa, a candid, soft focus number in which singer Ellie Rowsell contemplates her dreams and ambitions and finds being at peace a sense of home back in London and area where the band wrote many of the songs: “Didn't make it out to California / Where I thought I might clean the slate/ Feels a little like I'm stuck in Seven Sisters / North London, oh, England / And maybe that's okay.” Bloom Baby Bloom is a cleverly composed, piano-syncopated, rhythmic number on which Rowsell soars high into a Axl Rose-styl rock territory, flowering with optimism (“Yes, I'll bloom, baby, bloom / Every flower needs to neighbour with the dirt”. Just Two Girls is punchy 70s-feel funk -pop, and contemplates body consciousness also with a positivity, describing confident attitudes “I was looking at her extensions / She looked so pretty, it was fucking offensive / She said, "If you want long hair, then just go and get it" I said, "You're so right"). Bread Butter Tea Sugar has a catchy ELO-style orchestral gallop, uses food and drink as a metaphor for personal acceptance (“Don't want a dish without salt / Tea without sugar/ If it's bad for me, good/ I feel bad suits me better”) and in the spoken coda reaches that point of happiness to explain the album’s title (“Under the shadow of a mountain / I pay no mind to move/ There is still some scattered light/ It warms me up like it could reach me inside / And then I come into a clearing.” There’s a breadth of styles touched upon on this broad-appeal release, but perhaps the best number is the wonderfully warm, catchy psychedelic taut guitar and bass thrum of White Horses, in which drummer Joel Amey takes lead vocals, reflecting on heritage, family and identity, then underlined by Rowsell joining on the chorus with the mantra: “Know who I am, that’s important to me.” An album well worth the four-year wait. Out on Columbia Records.
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