One of the year’s best albums?
There is also new music from Foxes and White Lies
WHITE LIES — AS I TRY NOT TO FALL APART
THE latest album from indie rock stalwarts White Lies begins on a promising note with opener Am I Really Going to Die introducing funk elements as frontman Harry McVeigh considers his mortality.
The titular track, meanwhile, serves up a pleasant back beat but lacks emotion.
Roll December fails to justify its almost seven-minute length and really demands a rhapsody of multiple sections such as on Radiohead’s classic Paranoid Android or Muse’s Knights of Cydonia.
However, memorable vocals matched with pounding guitar make I Don’t Wanna Go a highlight.
The London-formed outfit offer little variety between tracks to give meaning to the tracklist.
In a landscape saturated with indie rock, it is important bands have something that sets them apart.
White Lies, although talented, fail to do this on an ultimately unsatisfying sixth album.
5/10
(Review by Mason Oldridge)
FOXES — THE KICK
SINCE her commercial breakthrough in 2012 on the Grammy-winning hit Clarity, Louisa Rose Allen has been exploring electronic music’s various stylistic nooks and crannies.
Her 2014 album Glorious delivered glossy synth-pop while follow-up All I Need, released three years later, shifted the focus towards pop melodies but lacked the kind of solid songwriting vital to such music.
On The Kick, the Southampton-raised singer opts for the sort of emotive, melancholic pop expertly delivered by Robyn and Jessie Ware in recent years and does a good job offering her own take.
Her voice is suited to introspection, and set to high energy dance beats Allen is able to recreate both the catharsis of the dance floor and the anxiety of lockdown, during which the album was conceived.
Growing On Me introduces a pop-punk feel, while Potential is retro-futurist funk reminiscent of Daft Punk.
Working with the producer Ghost Culture, whose CV includes collaborations with cult underground figures Daniel Avery and Kelly Lee Owens, appears to have made a difference, bringing a subtlety previously absent in her work.
While The Kick may sometimes lean towards imitation as opposed to innovation, it remains a giant leap forward for Foxes as she marks 10 years in the music industry.
7/10
(Review by Alex Green)
METRONOMY — SMALL WORLD
IN METRONOMY‘S latest album, Small World, singer Joe Mount writes teenage pop for ageing millennials.
It has been 16 years since Mount’s vehicle Metronomy first burst onto the scene in 2006. Since then he has found critical and popular success with a series of off-beat pop albums.
However, like most other music artists, Mount has spent much of the pandemic at home — unable to tour. Instead of writing songs on the road he has been forced to write them while homeschooling his kids and sitting in his back garden.
Aware of his status as an ageing incumbent, Mount has joked before that he will stop performing when he no longer sees young people at the front of his gigs.
Indeed, Metronomy’s latest album poses the question: How can a dad in his late 30s write songs about teenage heartbreak and angst? And answers it with a hefty dose of nostalgia and pared back guitar.
In Hold Me Tonight Mount, who has been with his girlfriend for 10 years, sings of unrequited young love.
While mournful ballad Life and Death channels the morose musings of a would be Young Werther.
Mount has said that he finds platitudes fascinating, and on It’s so good to be back he uses a line of typical post lockdown small talk to create a summer anthem.
With its funky beat and chorus of “Its just something in the air oh yeah. It feels so good to be back”, it is the album’s closest thing to a readymade hit.
Although Small World will struggle to appeal to younger listeners, older fans are sure find it a delight.
8/10
(Review by Luke O’Reilly)
BEACH HOUSE — ONCE TWICE MELODY
RELEASED in winter but looking forwards to the summer, One Twice Melody is a shimmering soundtrack for hazy sunshine-drenched days.
With hushed vocals, burbling synths, lowkey beats and buckets of the melodies promised by the album title, this is a record to immerse yourself in.
It is the eighth studio album from the Baltimore duo, and the most fully realised, produced entirely by Beach House and using a live string ensemble for the first time.
With 18 tracks, none much shorter than four minutes and Over And Over stretching over seven, there could be danger of the double album starting to sound samey.
But the over 80 minutes of music are so well crafted that each track sounds unique, a tribute to the attention that goes into each one, with subtle strings on the wistful ESP and acoustic guitar and live drums on Sunset.
Vocalist Victoria Legrand and cowriter, guitarist and backing vocalist Alex Scally have released this cinematic epic in four “chapters” over three months.
While the quality is maintained throughout, the irresistibly catchy Superstar is a real highlight, along with the hypnotic Illusion Of Forever and epic Over And Over.
Scally has previously lamented their reputation as “wafty, wavy, floaty, dreamy” and they are a different proposition live, loud and intense.
But there’s a reason they are so often referred to as dream pop, and nothing here is in danger of being mistaken for Napalm Death.
Beach House are now touring the US and by the time they reach these shores in late May Once Twice Melody will be established as one of the year’s best albums.
9/10
(Review by Matthew George)