Bad Takes / 01

Music, briefly discussed.

Music, briefly discussed

Five Fairly New Albums, in five sentences or less.

This Is Lorelei: The Singer in My Band

Somebody owns some Elliott Smith albums, then. Nice harmonies and decent production, with reliance on earnest, country-adjacent jangling. Billy Came Back’s good, as is Watching Heaven Fall, which bounces along in a quasi-Neil Young kinda way. A great Sunday-morning lie-in record.

Stick it on and take the missus breakfast in bed, you champion.

Unfathomable rating system rating: 89

Bloc Party: Anatomy of a Brief Romance

Advance warning: we really liked Bloc Party’s early stuff, then they went a bit too electronic, in our view, but we’ve kind of missed them, as they remind us of being young and dumb and full of hope in 2004.

This is a really nice piece of work, mostly thanks to the band making good choices: Kele is the focal point, and his voice is central, obviously, but there’s a lightness of touch that’s really welcome. Helicopter-era yelping this is not.

Definite echoes of Kele’s more minimal solo material, but with classically angular guitar elements, this is a dense, modern guitar-rock record.

Unfathomable rating system rating: 78

Interpol: This Mirror Weighs a Ton

It’s an Interpol record - you know exactly what it looks like, smells like, and sounds like, surely?

Barry Scott from the Cillit Bang adverts, lost in New York as the rain starts to piss down on both his sloped shoulders and his aspirations of romantic success.

A row of big, monotone choruses and clattering that’s so Interpol even our dog knew who it was.

Hell, it’s been working for them since 2001, and it still works here, although not to the rapturous extent of their early stuff, obviously - we’ve all got older, of course.

But we loved them then and when they’re good, they’re this good.

Unfathomable rating system rating: 563

Ezra Collective: Here Because of Hope

More density, and expert musicianship from London’s new-jazz media darlings. Letitia Wright supplies the opening narration. A suitably cinematic entrance. The soundtrack to the writing of your first novel, or some really complex, multi-layered washing-up. We’re fans, but we don’t need hours of this - as much as we love their blend of dub sensibilities with jazzy textures. Really high-quality sounds that facilitate doing something else, hopefully equally well.

Unfathomable rating system rating: 129

Jhené Aiko: Westside Whimsy

Tell you what: this is a proper surprise. We’re not very soul/R’n’B people, but the delivery and the production are really interesting. Ghost is spare, minimal and at once modern and very, forward-looking, like the album Janelle Monae made before she went all Tesla-James-Brown on us. If anything, we’d like this more if it was even weirder, and started treading on Greentea Peng’s toes, but nah, this is alright. Multiple further listens required we reckon.

Unfathomable rating system rating: 422