NEW ALBUMS

Michael Kiwanuka, Neil Young, Angel Olsen, Elbow and more.

Michael Kiwanuka ★★★★ Kiwanuka POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP

MICHAEL KIWANUKA’s last release, 2016’s Love & Hate, was a textbook ‘difficult’ second album, recorded while the north London singer-songwriter weathered a perilous crisis of confidence. This dark night of the soul marked the first speed-bump in a career that had only gathered velocity as Kiwanuka graduated from releasing demos on MySpace, to cutting low-key EPs on Ben ‘Mumford & Sons’ Lovett’s Communion record label, to accruing Mercury and BRIT nominations with his debut full-length, 2012’s

Home Again.

But as his first album mopped up the plaudits, Kiwanuka contracted a debilitating dose of

Imposter’s Syndrome, provoked in part by a disorientating, unsatisfying collaboration with Kanye West that left him feeling “out of my depth, unworthy”. Months later, his label rejected the first draft of what would become Love & Hate, claiming it didn’t contain any singles, and that they didn’t know how to sell it. First, Kiwanuka got mad – fantasising about lamping his A&R person. Then he got personal – channelling his anger, his confusion, his sense of cultural and emotional dislocation into a new song, Black Man In A White World, that renewed his sense of self and purpose. Aided by two new production foils, Inflo and Danger Mouse, he reshaped his sophomore slump into a bleak, moving, uplifting triumph, topping the UK albums chart and securing second-place in MOJO’s Best Albums of 2016.

Though its follow-up is informed by the lessons learned on Love & Hate, and shepherded again by Inflo and Danger Mouse, Kiwanuka is by no means simply “more-of-the-same”. As the title suggests, Michael enters his third album with a surer sense of himself, galvanised by the accolades and acclaim his soul-baring second received, and driven by this newfound confidence. It opens with You Ain’t

The Problem, swapping the heart-sick introspection of the previous record for party ambience, ebullient Isleys-esque guitar, solar flares of psych-funk fuzz and a lilting vocal hook that’s wise, reassuring, upbeat – though never frivolous. It’s followed by Rolling, a prideful funk-rock thing powered by a riff brash enough that, should Michael need the money badly enough, it could probably be leased to advertisers to sell razor blades or high-end motor vehicles.

Thus far, Kiwanuka eschews the epic melancholy of his previous album, though listeners paying sufficiently close attention will have already detected a darker undertow to his lyrics: the rallying opening track shadowed by imagery of a gun and an anonymous “they” “shooting for fun”; Rolling warning of “A bullet if you run away/ Another lost one”. Such is life for a black man in the white world where “black lives matter” is a somehow controversial statement, though if Love & Hate’s lead single made its polemic explicit, the subtler messaging here is no less powerful for taking an indirect approach.

As the album begins its inexorable turn towards darkness, the interstitial vignettes – lifting dialogue from documentaries about the ’60s Civil Rights movement and the sit-in protests – provide enough context to suggest Michael Kiwanuka’s blues run deeper than the simple heartache his earlier records expressed. On Piano Joint, an exquisite, Trouble Man-esque gloom, he’s eulogising a love that can deliver him from a life of “sadness and fury”, from an existential alienation. On Hero, he’s singing his own creative emancipation – celebrating his refusal to adopt an alter ego just because some guy at a record label can’t pronounce his surname – but he’s also channelling the spirit of Black Panther activist Fred Hampton, invoking the words of James Baldwin (“Am I your negro now?”) and pondering the kind of heroism that doubles as a death sentence.

It’s heavy stuff, but Kiwanuka’s inspired touch makes such bleak matter transcend its gloom. I’ve Been Dazed is wonderfully unhurried, a slow, epic build towards Stones-y gospel transcendence bearing more than a touch of Spiritualized’s aching grace, Kiwanuka investing well-worn truisms like “time is the healer” and “truth is the answer” with enough yearning to electrify. He sounds older than his years, and like he doesn’t have to strain for such weightiness, evoking the quiet dignity, the weathered strength, the easy profundity of Bill Withers.

Kiwanuka doesn’t just plumb emotional depths, it renders these journeys into the darkness as beautiful pop. The symphonic leanings of Love & Hate are the launching point for this more sonically adventurous third album, Danger Mouse and Inflo enabling Kiwanuka’s bolder brush-strokes, stretching his canvas Cinemascope-wide. Hard To Say Goodbye is his grandest such masterpiece, its swelling choirs, fuzz-toned guitars and martial drum rolls dreaming up soul as Portishead imagined it, or as David Axelrod upholstered it, the high stakes heartache positing Michael as stoic, heroic, withstanding love’s outrageous misfortune. Its haunting chord changes and lush, inventive orchestrations cook up a sadness that’s delirious, delicious, irresistible – soul music in excelsis.

Kiwanuka closes with Light, a moment of hope on an album where that resource seems precariously low in stock. But within its lyric lies the truth from which Kiwanuka’s best songs spring: “I had to lose to understand”. It’s a lesson with which Michael first became familiar during the humblings that provoked Love & Hate

– that pain and loss are the very substance of his music, and the wisdom they deliver is precious indeed. On Kiwanuka, he works such truths into achingly persuasive songs, continuing the journey he began with Love & Hate, and leaping in fearless new directions, yielding an album that’s thoughtful, emotional, expertly crafted and often sublime.

“It’s heavy stuff but Kiwanuka’s inspired touch transcends the gloom.”