SOUND JUDGEMENT

The latest album releases reviewed

TREMBLERS AND GOGGLES BY RANK Guided By Voices HHHHI

Guided By Voices leader Robert

Pollard has written almost 3,000 songs over the band’s long career, so he’ll have had plenty of material to choose from here. Quantity leads to quality on opener Lizard On The Red Brick Wall, Pollard singing “we write the songs about the planet and stars” over an insistent heavily fuzzed up guitar riff.

The lyrics tend towards the obscure, but key track Alex Bell is a tribute to cult 1970s power pop band Big Star, complete with trademark jangling guitars.

Elsewhere there are nods to The Who and the melancholy Americana of Roosevelt’s Marching Band. A great way for the uninitiated to tap into the prolific Pollard’s ceaseless vision. Review by Matthew George

SONGBIRD (A SOLO COLLECTION) Christine McVie HHHII

Christine McVie’s solo output is often overlooked in favour of her timeless work with Fleetwood Mac (the 78-year-old singer-songwriter was responsible for classics such as Don’t Stop, You Make Loving Fun and Songbird).

This collection aims to put her later recordings centre stage, drawing mainly on

1984’s Christine McVie and 2004’s In The Meantime.

It includes two previously unreleased studio recordings and a pretty, if slightly overblown take on Songbird – a track that was, in its original form, devastating in its simplicity.

Review by Alex Green

TRESOR Gwenno

Gwenno Saunders; third album was written in St Ives, Cornwall, just before the pandemic but its themes were prescient – isolation, retreat and the double edged-sword of domesticity.

It is the singer-songwriter’s second album almost entirely in the Cornish language a.

Her inventive, psychedeliaflecked folk is something special. Tresor carries you away to its own world.