Albums of the week: three new releases
Tori Amos’s 16th album is “her most exquisitely serious” in years, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. Comparisons with Kate Bush are borne out on the title track, a “wholesome plea for environmental recovery” with a prog-rock feel and an “unhealthily catchy chorus”. On Speaking with Trees, the American singer, who lives in Cornwall, addresses the death of her mother in 2019 “within the pagan earthgoddess persona she has always threatened to inhabit”. Eccentricities aside, this is a “musically rich and thoughtful collection”, full of colour, character and “appealingly focused songwriting”.
The record is suffused with grief, said Liz Thomson on The Arts Desk, as well as frustration about the closure of borders during the pandemic. Swim to New York State is a “languorous opening with beautiful sonorities”. And Flowers Burn to Gold is a profound meditation on the death of a loved one: a delicate song of yearning, with multi-tracked choral interjections and Amos’s “undulating piano accompaniment drifting between major and minor”.
Biffy Clyro’s new album is billed as a “sister record” to 2020’s superb A Celebration of Endings, said Andrew Trendell in NME. That’s “sister” in the unpromising sense that it was conceived as a release for leftovers that didn’t make the cut. But when they were forced off the road by the pandemic, the Scottish rockers rewrote and lovingly recrafted the material, and the result is an album that actually outshines its predecessor. It’s “one hell of a happy accident” – from the “wonky electro and simmering rock” of Separate Missions to the Kraftwerk textures and “silky Justin Timberlake soulfulness” of Existed.
This is Biffy as “we know and love them”: intense, dynamic and brimming with creative confidence, said Fiona Shepherd in The Scotsman. Highlights include A Hunger in Your Haunt, with its signature blend of “mighty, catchy chorus, involved metal riffola and salvos of punky rage”; and the “impish” Slurpy Slurpy Sleep Sleep, which loops Simon Neil’s vocals over “nosebleed speed metal before being released into an ocean of synths”.
Abba’s first studio album for 40 years will also be their last, they have confirmed – so it’s a pity it’s so underwhelming, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. They were always a “consummate singles outfit” rather than an album band, but “there is nothing here that strikes the pure gold seam of their classic 45s”. Instead, Voyage is “weighed down” with “portentous theatrical ballads and schlager-style romps” in which the downbeat lyrics sometimes sit awkwardly “with the tone of triumphant return”. It seems the “dancing queens have lost the spring in their step”.
Defiantly uncool, Abba have always divided audiences, said Helen Brown in The Independent, and it is true that there are tracks here that could have been lifted from musicals. But fans won’t care: the longedfor reunion has resulted in a “terrific, familyfriendly smorgasbord that delivers all the classic Abba flavours” in songs that address the “traumas and triumphs of their past with admirable honesty”. This is the end, and “I think we can let them go now”: thank you for the music.