SOUND JUDGEMENT

The latest album releases reviewed

DANCE FEVER FLORENCE + THE MACHINE

★★★★✩

While recent albums have seemed a vehicle for Florence Welch’s voice, Dance Fever injects some of the dynamic songwriting of her 2009 debut Lungs.

Album opener King is driven by a rumbling bassline and uses empty space to elevate Welch’s folksy vocal runs, while tracks like Free use synths and driving melodies to create a euphoric musical climax.

Welch’s media-shyness may have created an image of po-faced seriousness, but on Dance Fever she pokes fun as herself, introducing the track Choreomania with a monologue in which she knowingly describes “freaking out in the middle of the street with the conviction of someone who has never had anything really bad happen to them”. The song refers to the ‘dancing plague’ across Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries.

An album of dramatic highs, vulnerable lows, and a reminder that going back to basics can reap rewards.

BLUE HOURS BEAR’S DEN ★★★★✩

The fifth album from folkrock duo Andrew Davie and Kevin Jones is a deft and heartfelt exploration of mental health and the ways we grapple with change.

Blue Hours, tackles numerous subjects: the loss of loved ones, the excitement of becoming a parent, dementia and is partly inspired by their respective moves out of London in 2019 and the realisation that your worries follow you wherever you go.

All That You Are is an atmospheric piece that swells to a beautiful climax, while the title track looks back to the driving, glossy rhythms of the 1980s for inspiration.

Davie and Jones offer a distinctive British style, and inject it with real depth of emotion.

DROPOUT BOOGIE THE BLACK KEYS

★★★★★

The 11th offering from eclectic duo Dan

Auerbach and Patrick Carney leans ever more so into alt-boogie and blues.

Featuring collaborations with Billy F Gibbons, Greg Cartwright and Angelo Petraglia, it’s good to have rocking music with bluegrass tendencies back on the radio waves as relaxing in the sun and late evening BBQS are on the horizon.

First single Wild Child leads the way to a more subdued but funky It Ain’t Over which burrows into your soul before you land slap back in Bluegrass country with For the Love of Money.

Overall, a chilled rock album.