SOUND JUDGEMENT

The latest album releases reviewed

MERCURY – ACT 2 Imagine Dragons

★★★★✩

Las Vegas rockers Imagine Dragons present the sequel to last year’s Mercury – Act 1.

Act 2 opens with lead single Bones, easily one of the best singles of 2022 and the highlight of the album.

The track is an instant hit, blending catchy piano with frontman Dan Reynolds’ harsh vocals on the pre-chorus refrain. The mood often shifts between tracks and the tail end of the album contains several slower songs.

Ferris Wheel is a particularly sweet and romantic tale.

Surprisingly, this lengthy 18-track work doesn’t contain any bad songs and sees the Dragons continue on their path to world domination.

TOAST Neil Young And Crazy Horse ★★★★✩

Neil Young finally releases

Toast, an album he shelved in 2001 as it was too sad. That’s quite the statement, with Young no stranger to heartache and break-up songs, not to mention Tonight’s The Night’s raw grief, but these seven tracks all bring the darkness.

It won’t get the party started, but Toast adds to Young’s formidable legacy and deserves to be heard.

LEAP James Bay ★★★✩✩

The title of

James Bay’s third album was inspired by a quote from the 19th century American naturalist John Burroughs: “Leap, and the net will appear.”

If his 2014 debut, Chaos And The Calm, was a collection of easily digestible folk ballads, 2018’s Electric Light saw the 31-year-old proudly embrace his commercial pop ambitions.

His new album, recorded in Nashville before the pandemic struck but tweaked and added to throughout lockdown, is not so much a leap. Instead, it is a concentration of the sounds and themes of his last record.

Bay strips away the sonic experimentation and focuses on delivering classic pop songwriting with glossy production courtesy of Grammy-winner Dave Cobb.

And he does so successfully.