Broken hearted rocker who’s now a soul siren
IMELDA MAY: Life Love Flesh Blood (Decca) Verdict: Startling reinvention ★★★★✩ FATHER JOHN MISTY: Pure Comedy (Bella Union) Verdict: Sprawling tour de force ★★★★✩
WITH her blonde quiff and songs harking back to Fifties rock’n’roll, Imelda May had been carving out quite a niche for herself. Championed by Jools Holland, the Irish singer also sang with Lou Reed and U2. Her most recent album, 2014’s Tribal, made the top three.
But now, chastened by a painful divorce and the collapse of her old band, she has changed her outlook, and her new album is an open-hearted foray into rock, blues and soul.
She looks different, too. That cartoonlike coiffure has been replaced by longer, darker hair and a more feminine image, although the most dramatic transformation here is the one that sees the fiery rockabilly rebel morph into a tender torch singer.
Imelda, 42, became a mum five years ago, but her 13-year marriage ended in 2015 and the aftershocks are all too evident here. Life Love Flesh Blood is a break-up album that wears its heart on its sleeve.
Black Tears and Should’ve Been You address her divorce, while her guilt comes to the fore on Human (‘I’m a fallen angel’) and Leave Me Lonely (‘I hate to admit it, but I’m crazy’). No wonder she calls it ‘the story of my life’.
But there is a sense of moving on, too, and a string of sultry ballads find May singing about her needs and desires.
‘You got my mind in the gutter of love,’ she coos on Sixth Sense. The suggestive How Bad Can A Good Girl Be? is a song ‘to make the guys blush’.
There are moments of light relief. Bad Habit admits to an online shopping addiction. Acoustic ballad The Girl I Used To Be is an affectionate tribute to her Dublin roots.
With American producer T. Bone Burnett adding twangy guitars and brushed drums — plus cameos by Jeff Beck and Jools Holland — these songs bring the best out of May as a singer. Fellow Dubliner Bono calls her ‘a siren with an ache in her voice’ — and she lives up to the billing.
ACOUSTIC singer-songwriter Josh Tillman is also hellbent on reinvention. Once the drummer with American folk-rock band Fleet Foxes, he adopted the jokey pseudonym Father John Misty because he grew tired of making ‘sad b ***** d music’ and wanted to have fun.
If your idea of a good laugh is a sprawling, enigmatic diatribe on the wretched state of humanity, then his alter ego’s third album is the one for you.
Unlike last year’s romantic I Love You Honeybear, inspired by his marriage to photographer Emma Garr, Pure Comedy tackles a bewildering array of themes with wry humour.
The Maryland-born singer, 35, writes songs that echo textbook American troubadours such as Jackson Browne and Don McLean, but his gorgeous vocal harmonies and the string and brass stylings of classical arranger Gavin Bryars lend his tuneful piano ballads a warmth that is as much Elton John as Father John. And, over 75 epic minutes, this is his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
NO TOPIC is off limits. Two Wildly Different Perspectives satirises political division, and The Memo bemoans today’s boy bands — ‘just like before, but with their standards lower’.
Total Entertainment Forever rhymes Taylor Swift with the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift.
Many will find Josh Tillman infuriating. He pokes fun at his own vanity on Ballad Of The Dying Man and describes himself as ‘another white guy in 2017 who takes himself so goddamn seriously’ on Leaving LA. The latter song is Pure Comedy’s centrepiece. A 13-minute, ten-verse operetta, it is a drawn-out saga in the tradition of McLean’s American Pie. Like much of Pure Comedy, it is clever, poignant and very knowing — but there’s a lot to take in.