Still here with us
Dido Still On My Mind BMG DIDO’S voice remains as clear and affecting as ever, as startlingly touching as it was on the chorus of Eminem’s Stan and on her own hits like Here With Me and White Flag.
But on Still On My Mind, her first album since 2013’s Girl Who Got Away, Dido experiments with various musical contexts to convey new moods. The spare, synthesized grandeur of Have To Stay, about her maternal feelings, may be the simplest, but also the most successful.
The single Hurricanes uses her voice like the eye of the storm, pulling in all sorts of dance music drama and noise before refocusing. And few singers can use straightforward ballads as defiant anthems the way Dido has, adding Give You Up and Walking By to her already-formidable catalogue. However, Dido can still manage some surprises. The thudding Hell After This is a sly, Tracey Thorn-ish thrill, while the loping swagger of Mad Love is a fun change of pace.
Still On My Mind shows Dido, with help from her brother Rollo Armstrong of Faithless fame, still crafting her own vision of pop, untouched by the outside world. – Glenn Gamboa/Newsday/Tribune News Service Foals Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1 Warner THIS year we are promised not just one Foals album, but two. And after listening to the first, we’re very, very lucky indeed.
The British indie-pop art rockers offer 10 new crackling tracks on Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost _ Part 1, their first since the departure of bassist Walter Gervers.
While the band’s last album, 2015’s What Went Down, veered toward Coldplay, this time they seem more Radiohead-ish, with more complexity, shards of distorted synth and a nightmarish vision of the world.
Exits is one of the standouts, a paranoid, post-apocalyptic pop-rock beauty (“The cities underground/The flowers upside down,” frontman Yannis Philippakis sings). The gentle-sounding Sunday takes that theme and adds burning cities and birds singing about the end of the world.
Syrups is a psychedelic trip with a driving funk beat, squealing guitars and lyrics about robots and the devil. On The Luna is a terrific childhood memory rocker interrupted by the present (“Trump clogging up my computer”) and frayed sonic edges.
Foals are their most Radiohead – both bands hail from the city of Oxford – on Cafe D’Athens (you’ll swear Tom Yorke is singing.) And listen to In Degrees and applaud the insane mix of ‘80s new wave pop, house, rave and trip-hop that somehow works.
Like many Foals albums, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1 is top-heavy with great songs before petering out. (The 44-second instrumental Surf, Pt. 1 may make more sense if there’s a follow-up on the next album, but it seems like wasted time here). The album ends – after all that fascinating exploration – with the simple, mournful piano dirge I’m Done With The World (& It’s Done With Me). It’s a real downer: Leaves are on fire, Philippakis is on his knees and it’s raining. But there’s one bright spot: In a few months, we’ll get Part 2. – Mark Kennedy/AP Patty Griffin Patty Griffin PGM recordings/Thirty Tigers THE turning point of Patty Griffin’s 10th album comes in the middle, in the haunting, tension-filled What Now, where she asks of the sea, while Robert Plant provides background howls: “Where to? What next? What now?”
Before that song, Patty Griffin focuses on intensely personal matters, as the narrator of Mama’s Worried sings of the emotional toll that economic hardship takes on a family, while River uses the powerful imagery of nature to explain the dynamics of a relationship.
After that song, Griffin steers the album toward broader topics, where she examines how we can try to move forward together in a world that currently seems to thrive on people tearing each other apart. In Coins, Griffin talks about how some men use money to dominate women who are intellectually superior to them. In Boys From Tralee, she tells a harrowing tale of immigration over a Celtic arrangement, connecting the current immigration debate to the experiences of previous generations of immigrants. And in What I Remember she uses a gorgeous acoustic ballad to tell a stunning story that reveals itself to be from a sexual assault survivor.
She is even more direct in the bluesy The Wheel, where Griffin draws parallels between trying to fight the rain and trying to fight racism, as she tells the story of Eric Garner, who died on Staten Island in 2014 after police put him in a choke-hold.
Griffin has always been one of the best singer-songwriters around, with her work covered by everyone from the Dixie Chicks to Kelly Clarkson. (Her brilliant new ballad Just The Same should be a hit – if not for her, then someone else.) Since her diagnosis with breast cancer two years ago and undergoing treatment, Griffin has said she sees the world differently. The result is one of the best albums of the year. And with Patty Griffin, we all benefit from her recovery. – GG