SOUND JUDGEMENT

The latest album releases reviewed

WILL OF THE PEOPLE Muse ★★★★✩

Muse are on top form with their new album, which opens with the title track, an anthemic chant, before Compliance, an electronic piece full of nods towards lockdown and pandemic laws.

Liberation is an operatic opus, whereas Won’t Stand Down touches upon metal and earns its place as lead single.

You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween is the standout, incorporating organ sounds to make the perfect spooky soundtrack, while latest single Kill Or Be Killed is Muse at their heaviest.

Will Of The People stands alongside some of Muse’s best work and is close to a perfect album from the trio.

ALL OF US FLAMES Ezra Furman

★★★★✩ “I watch you flicker on my TV, the teenage girl I never got to be,” Ezra Furman sings on Ally Sheedy In The Breakfast Club, a stately ballad on All Of Us Flames.

The John Hughes high school film is from 1985, a year before Furman was born in Chicago, and she’s seen it 90 times, adding resonance to the lyric, “I build my world on versions of your VHS visage”.

All Of Us Flames is her best since 2015 UK breakthrough Perpetual Motion People, angry and tender. Furman says of the album: “I wanted to make songs for use by threatened communities, and particularly the ones I belong to: trans people and Jews.”

The result is a triumph.

VIVA LAS VENGEANCE Panic! At The Disco ★★★✩✩

A solo vehicle for

Panic At The

Disco frontman Brendon Urie, Viva Las Vengeance completes his transformation from witty emo-punk to bona fide pop star.

Nods to the bombast of classic rock abound while the album also draws on the campy energy of musical theatre.

The trademark knowing halfsneer of Panic! is long gone, replaced with earnest self-help anthems such as Local God.

This is not necessarily an issue, but at times it can seem a little scripted, a little thin.