THOMAS ADÈS/LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC
Dante
NONESUCH
7/10
Epic ballet score from top British composer
Written to accompany Wayne McGregor’s ballet production of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, this is an incredibly ambitious piece in three movements. The first, “Inferno”, is a tone poem which references Liszt, Puccini, Berlioz and mid-20th century horror soundtracks. The woozier, more ambivalent second section, “Purgatoria”, manipulates and distorts recordings of singers from the Great Ades Synagogue in Jerusalem (a place distantly connected to Adès’s own Syrian Jewish ancestors) and sets them against Middle Eastern musical tropes. By the finale, the ecstatic, 27-minute “Paradiso”, the music is radiant, spiralling, constantly modulating and verging on 12-tone serialism. These are pastiches, but they’re incredibly well done.
JOHN LEWIS
THE ALARM
Forwards
TWENTY FIRST CENTURY RECORDING COMPANY
7/10 45 years in, still much to say
Surprisingly, considering The Alarm’s firm place in early-’80s nostalgia, the Welsh band have been releasing a new album virtually every year of late. Basic, commonplace, hard-rock melodies abide, amid challenging lyrics probing fiercely into the world’s new order. “Love And Forgiveness” and “Transition” are powerful highlights, but it all peaks with the closer, “New Standards”, wherein Mike Peters sings “Nobody’s gonna stop the war” while everyone lands in the bait.
LUKE TORN
THE ALBUM LEAF
Future Falling
NETTWERK
6/10
Seventh album returns to more secure territory
Following 2016’s cheerier, less distinctive Between Waves and his subsequent soundtrack work, Jimmy Lavalle returns to the more melancholic, considered pleasures of his 2004 breakthrough, In A Safe Place. With his Rhodes no longer receiving top billing, however, the emotional tug is less effective, and though trumpets offer “Stride” some redemption, “Cycles”’ fuzzy tension remains unsatisfactorily unresolved, while “Give In” suggests an unfinished Air sketch. Still, it’s not all instrumental: New Zealand’s Kimbra provides the twilit “Afterglow” with tasteful vocals over a rhythm track beaten out on a piano frame, and Natasha Khan’s gently treated voice floats atop another plush downtempo track, “Near”.
WYNDHAM WALLACE
NICHOLAS ALLBROOK
Manganese
SPINNING TOP
7/10
Pond frontman brightens his darkest corners on fourth solo outing
On his fourth album made beyond the bounds of his reliably exuberant psych-rock outfit Pond, Nicholas Allbrook often displays an atypically heavy heart. Sorrow colours his remembrance for a late friend in “Jackie” and his references to Australia’s history of environmental exploitation and its impact on the country’s indigenous peoples in Manganese’s title track. Elsewhere, Allbrook sings “The Endless Jetty” with an edge of desperation that evokes The Triffids’ David McComb at his most wracked. Yet thanks to the casual brilliance of the musical settings and their ramshackle, trippy array of flute, horns and synths, the album’s mood remains sprightly and inviting.
JASON ANDERSON
BAR ITALIA
Tracey Denim
MATADOR
7/10
Buzzy London-based newcomers show their stuff
Their name (that of a Soho café institution) and album title recall Pulp’s interest in ersatz sophistication, but this trio play a very different game. Tracey Denim is a reintroduction – they released Bedhead in 2021, on Dean Blunt’s label – but it delivers their woozy, monochrome and slightly introverted pop-rock aesthetic to a wider audience. Two vocalists steer the songs through several miens, leaning on piano (Monade-like opener, “Guard”), artfully spindly guitar (“Nurse!”, which suggests an indie-fied “Bull In The Heather”) and ’90s grunge (“Friends”), though dreamy, mid-paced numbers with nods to early Cure and The xx dominate. At 15 tracks it rather drags its anchor, but there’s much promise here.
SHARON O’CONNELL
BEACH FOSSILS
Bunny
BAYONET
8/10
Indie auteur reaches for the gilded splendour of The Byrds and REM
Over a series of recordings dating back to 2010, Dustin Payseur has incrementally expanded Beach Fossils’ sound from the lo-fi bedroom reveries of his debut LP to a widescreen jangle. Bunny, the proper follow-up to 2017’s strings-enhanced Somersault, continues this evolution, unfurling with an intricate stateliness akin to that of the band’s Brooklyn-based contemporaries Real Estate. On the filigreed dreamscapes “Don’t Fade Away” and “(Just Like) The Setting Sun”, Payseur’s murmured vocals nestle cosily into the chiming dual-guitar interplay, exuding a half-awake languor that extends even to The War On Drugs-like motorik cruiser “Sleeping On My Own”. Every moment shimmers with atmosphere, as the rippling melodies and contoured choruses enclose Payseur’s knotty ruminations in sun-dappled serenity.
BUD SCOPPA
McKENDRICK BEARDEN
Bright As The Mines Out
SELF-RELEASED
8/10
Georgia guitarist goes solo, with startling results
A member of the Athens band Grand Vapids, who’s worked with Faye Webster and toured as a guitar tech with Drive-By Truckers, McKendrick Bearden opens his solo debut with an ambient sonic collage called “Grace Henderson”, which bleeds directly into the Southern glam stomp of “Continental”. It’s a dramatic is quietly adventurous: Bearden writes with the roomy melodicism of Red House Painters, and he favours finely grained guitar textures over pyrotechnics, which adds depth to the carefully observed details in “Shoulder Of Joy” and the devastating “Elkanoh”.
