A to Z
LEO ABRAHAMS Scene Memory 2
FIGURE EIGHT
7/10
Brian Eno sidekick with a pulsating album of FX-laden guitar instrumentals
Like its 2006 predecessor Scene Memory, this is an album of guitar instrumentals, although Abrahams pushes his instrument through so many effects units that it rarely sounds like a guitar. Where the first album consisted of slow, lugubrious, arrhythmic, ambient drones, this one throbs with energy throughout, with digital delay pedals creating a pulse which are the bed for simple modal improvisations. Abrahams always self-deprecatingly describes himself as a “non-musician”, but some of the playing here is beautifully effective: “The Wides” sounds like a blissfully blues-free Peter Green, “Supplicant” sounds like Pat Metheny playing soft suspended chords over juddering systems noise. JOHN LEWIS
ADMIRAL FALLOW The Idea Of You
CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND
7/10
Glasgow folk-rockers break long silence with fourth album
Half a dozen years since their last album, it comes as a pleasant surprise to learn that Louis Abbott’s Scottish quintet has not been lost in action. Abbott has been busy writing an opera with composer Gareth Williams while singer and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Hayes returns from the You Tell Me side-project with Field Music. Their reunion is a felicitous one on nine songs of beguiling melodic uplift, from the sunshine harmonies of “Sleepwalking” to the surging jangle-pop of “Dragonfly” via the haunting “Night, Shortly”. The air of warm, carefree optimism serves as a welcome reminder of what pop music used to sound like before pandemic angst set in. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
ICHIKO AOBA
Windswept Adan BADABING
8/10
New adventures in dreamy Japanese psych-folk
Despite an acclaimed canon of releases in her native Japan, including film scores and collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, composer and singer-songwriter Ichiko Aoba has only just begun picking up global attention with this exquisitely crafted, lightly experimental chamber-folk album. Cooing ethereal vocals over elegant woodwind and strings, chiming piano and fingerpicking guitar, Aoba couches dreamy retro pastiche in contemporary electro-ambient production with effortless finesse. Not a note is wasted here, from breathy, pared-down, late-night jazzy chansons like “Red Silence” or “Hagupit” to the twinky music-box reveries “Pilgrimage” and “Luminescent Creatures”, which sound like flashbacks to some great lost psych-folk cult album from 1970. Sublime. STEPHEN DALTON
ARCA
Kick II XL
7/10
More delirious electronics from master manipulator
Arca is the Venezuelan producer stars such as Björk, Kanye and Lady Gaga turn to for a dash of aural madness, who shapes songs in a flurry of audacious sound design like Edward Scissorhands tackling topiary. KICK II, the second instalment in Alejandra Ghersi’s KICK quartet, is another batch of weapons-grade psychedelic reggaeton that buckles and grooves with sinuous grace (see “Luna Llena”, “Rakata”, “Confianza”), pulling the listener, reluctantly and then ecstatically, into genuinely new territory. The sole clanger is “Born Yesterday”, a pedestrian collaboration with Sia that sounds rather too much like Sia, despite Arca’s frantic garnishing.
PIERS MARTIN
MARIO BATKOVIC
Introspectio INVADA
7/10
Swiss accordion virtuoso thinks outside the box
Accompanied by multiple musical heavyweights, soundtrack composer Mario Batkovic’s second solo album provides his accordion with refreshing new environments. Electronic producer James Holden helps lend “Chorea Duplex” a prismatic quality, and saxophonist Colin Stetson breathes additional life into the impressively physical “Quis Est Quis”, on which Batkovic plays his instrument like Lubomyr Melnyk plays piano. “Sanatio” employs Berlin’s Cantus Domus choir for an Arvo Pärt-like funereal opener, and Portishead/Radiohead drummer Clive Deamer converts “Repertio” into a thrilling Portico Quartet soundscape, but “Surrogatum”’s analogue synths and menacing drones most recall the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s remarkable Mandy soundtrack. WYNDHAM WALLACE
JOE BONAMASSA
Time Clocks PROVOGUE
7/10
Stakhanovite blues guitar hero puts in another hard-working shift
With almost 40 studio, live and collaborative albums to his name in only half as many years, Bonamassa can seem too prolific for his own good. Yet he’s not content to rest on his axe-hero laurels. “I was never a teller of stories,” he sings on the title track, yet that’s exactly what he’s become as his songwriting has blossomed and his once workaday voice has become an increasingly expressive instrument. If Time Clocks stays largely true to his love of power-trio blues-rock, he adds an inventive prog seasoning to “Mind’s Eye” and “Curtain Call”, and his determination to keep moving forward is commendable. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
THE BRANDY ALEXANDERS
The Brandy Alexanders GYPSY SOUL
8/10
Windsor, Ontario, newcomers impress with polished, high-powered debut LP
If Kevin Parker had grown up in Canada listening to Utopia, and , Tame Impala might have sounded like The Brandy Alexanders. The first album from the quintet, fronted by brothers Alex and Daniel Dick on vocals/guitars and keys/ synths, respectively, fuses sleek dynamics and thick atmosphere, from the massive guitar/synth eruption that ignitessequencer in the coda of “Anastasia”, the chunky “Gloria” lick that radically shifts the vibe of “Hey, Why’d You Do It” in mid-song and the harmonised guitars that cement the connection between “Conventional Lie” and Todd Rundgren’s “I Saw The Light”.
