Music reviews

Juliana Daugherty

Light What a beautiful voice Juliana Daugherty possesses. It’s like honey oozing, spilling gently over the twanging of guitar strings, all songbird softness and subtlety but with the power to hypnotise The singer-songwriter from Charlottesville, Virginia, lays out her most intimate feelings on this vulnerable, haunting album, largely using disarmingly delicate music while undressing the issues around mental illness.

“I wrote this record partly to strip mental illness of its power,” Daugherty says, adding that “there is nothing useful or beautiful to be gleaned from the experience of depression”.

8/10 Father John Misty

God’s Favourite Customer Only a year since his previous album, Father John Misty’s new record God’s Favourite Customer is yet more evidence that he is one of his generation’s foremost songwriters.

Josh Tillman, to give him his real name, is another in a long line of artists running from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Sufjan Stevens and Rufus Wainwright, men who spin stories across any combination of keys, guitars and sweeping string arrangements with a dry wit, underlying melancholy and timeless musical tone. The kind of musician who would feel as at home fronting a 10-person band in a packed auditorium as he would slumped in front of a dive bar piano at four in the morning.

Yet throughout this new record – variously described as a “heartache album” or about “misadventure”– he never seems to break a sweat.

7/10 Roger Daltrey

As Long As I Have You The Who frontman is joined by guitarist Pete Townshend as he returns to his soul music beginnings, when the band started out playing in small church halls.

Two new tracks are nestled in between covers of some of Daltrey’s favourite songs. The 74-year-old completely owns some of these re-workings. His soulful howl soars over honking horns and hot guitar licks during a barnstorming rendition of Stevie Wonder’s You Haven’t Done Nothin’. A more unusual choice is Nick Cave’s sombre Into My Arms. Daltrey ‘s version is too similar to the original.

7/10 Ben Howard

Noonday Dream Ben Howard’s third LP is an album crying out for a chorus. The Brit-winning, Mercury-nominated British folk musician has continued his journey into the sonic textures he explored on his last album.

These textures can be beautiful, but lack direction. Opening Nica Libres At Dusk sets the pace nicely, The Defeat is an interesting experiment in electronica, and lead single A Boat To An Island On The Wall evens finds a groove in its second verse. But many tracks follow the format of end track Murmurations, with the music desperate to become epic at any moment, but instead forced to stay in the sonic sludge. Foals and Bon Iver have explored similar sound territory, but Noonday Dream lacks the singalong moments that make their best work shine.

6/10