January’s normally quite a slow month in terms of new releases, but there were some great albums making their debut. Here’s my view on the best of the month – and a playlist to boot!
1: The Twilight Sad – It Won/t Be Like This All The Time
Rating: 8.5/10 – Read full review
Here’s my view on what were the best albums released last Friday 25th January. I’ve reviewed the top three if you want to discover more about the albums before listening. Links below. There’s also a Spotify sample playlist so you can get a feel for the artists.
Chelmsford born Jordan Cardy, A.K.A. Rat Boy, has pulled off quite a trick with Internationally Unknown, merging pop, punk, rap, reggae, dance, dub and ska into a feast of infectious tunes.
Chip on My Shoulder launches us into the album headfirst and screaming, a raucous punk effort that will have you bouncing around. There are a fair few all-out pop-punk episodes peppered across the album including I Wanna Skate, Dad’s Crashed Car and So What, which are tremendously enjoyable tributes to Green Day et al. But it’s when Rat Boy pulls in other elements that the album gets really interesting.
My Name Is Rat Boy takes a trip around Reggae, Ska and Dub while Rat Boy raps almost as energetically as he plays trashy guitars. Night Creature, is a slower Reggae track that throws in a bit of Dubstep to boot.
There are influence flying in from all over the place, from The Clash and The Sex Pistols, to Fatboy Slim, The Specials, De La Soul, Sisters of Mercy and Rage Against The Machine. Despite all that, Rat Boy manages to pull them all together into coherent and hugely enjoyable pop numbers.
Internationally Unknown is undoubtedly a pop album at its heart, drawing on the tried and tested ‘Ode to disaffected youth’ formula. However, I get the feeling that it’s a pop album that arrived a couple of decades too late.
It’s most certainly worth half an hour of your time, but with so many throwback influences it may struggle to land with a younger audience. Perhaps Rat Boy is a boy out of time.
Release date: 25 January 2019
Rating: 7.5/10
Standout track: My Name Is Rat Boy
For fans of:
Canadian cellist Julia Kent has, with Temporal, produced an achingly beautiful album, that while sitting firmly within the neo-classical genre, shows a wide range of influences.
Twelve-minute opener Last Hour Story, sets the bar high for the rest of the album, which fortunately it manages to match. The looping and building of strings on strings pulls at your own heartstrings and by the end of it you may be an emotional wreck.
Through all her tracks, Kent leans on elements of electronica to centre the album in the here-and-now. Without it many of these tracks would be well-suited to the dramatic parts of some of our darker period dramas.
The electronic influence is more obvious on tracks like Imbalance, which features a pulsating deep-bass synth and electro ticks and pops to counterbalance the cello and organ driving the piece.
Similarly Conditional Futures places us in a dystopian landscape, where looped strings and low-key synth tones provide the backdrop as Kent’s cello drifts in and out of the scene, before the tone lightens towards the end to provide that glimmer of hope amongst the gloom.
There are more uplifting moments to be found on Floating City, with its plucked strings and house-style pianos, and again on Through the Window which has an almost Balearic feel to it.
Crepuscolo brings events to a close, with Kent’s cello sitting alongside echoing piano notes, ambient swirls and the sound of chirping crickets as the whole album drifts off into entropy.
Temporal is a cerebral listen rather than one to get your feet going, or even to use as backing music at a dinner party. But if you are the kind of person who is moved by music – brace yourself – because this will be an emotional journey.
Release dates: 25 January 2019
Rating: 8/10
Standout track: Last Hour Story
For fans of:
This is the second EP release from the German electronic-neoclassical maestro recorded during the sessions that resulted in last year’s masterpiece All Melody.
While the first EP Encores 1 was a further exploration of Frahm’s delicate piano work, Encores 2 takes a more ambient approach and to my mind is the far stronger of the two works.. It still struggles to reach the dizzying heights of the album that preceded it, but then again not much does. This 26-minute four-track EP, however is a fantastic addendum to All Melody and has some wonderful moments in which you get truly lost in the sonic landscape Frahm creates.
There are no weak moments on this piece, but the 12-minute epic that is Spells truly stands out as a work of art.
If you have enjoyed his work in the past, this will not be a disappointment.
Release date: 25 January 2019
Rating: 8/10
Standout track: Spells
For fans of:
Things are really stepping up this Friday with a glut of new releases to plough through. There’s a new EP from Nils Frahm to look forward to, some loud guitars from the likes of Bring Me The Horizon and Mike Krol, and the return on classic ska ban The Beat. Even the new Dandy Warhols album sounds promising.
It’s going to be a busy week…
Nils Frahm – Encores 2 (EP)
Swervedriver – Future Ruins
Julia Kent – Temporal
The Beat feat. Ranking Rodger – Public Confidential
Bring Me The Horizon – Amo
Mike Krol – Power Chords
Balthazar – Fever
The Dandy Warhols – Why You So Crazy
Nicola Cruz – Siku
Rat Boy – Internationally Unknown
Toy – Happy In The Hollow
Gum Takes Tooth – Arrow
Sneaks – Highway Hypnosis
Sharon Van Etten is an accomplished singer-songwriter with a voice that could break hearts and Remind Me Tomorrow is a wonderful way to showcase it
Breaking away from the traditional acoustic guitar accompaniment that many female singer-songwriters favour, Van Etten instead uses ominous bass undertones across the record that juxtapose superbly with her heavenly vocal.
Opener I Told You Everything begins with delicate pianos and frailty in Van Etten’s voice, but as echo-laden bass and guitars are employed, her harmonised vocals kick in – bringing real depth to the piece. This self-harmonisation is a frequent appearance across the album’s tracks, but it never proves unimpressive.
There are times on Remind Me Tomorrow when her pop side surfaces, such as on Comeback Kid, which has strong flavours of Arcade Fire, but again her vocals move the track away from ever sounding too twee.
Seventeen, a lament to her younger days, No One’s Easy To Love and You Shadow also continue the pop influence, but it is on the multi-layered atmospheric tracks where the album truly hits the high notes.
Take the slow, pulsating bass synth of Jupiter 4, which provides that earthy contrast to Van Etten’s rich vocal. Similarly on Malibu, we have a dark undercurrent running through the track for her to bounce off.
All this comes together on the magnificent Hands, which pulls all these elements together in truly epic fashion. Hands-down, the best track on the album
Release dates: 18 January 2019
Rating: 7/10
Standout track: Hands
For fans of:
The Twilight Sad have been knocking around for a few years now but, much to my shame, this is my first encounter with the Scottish post-punk five piece. But I’ll certainly be exploring their back catalogue after this.
It Won/t Be Like This All The Time is and emotionally-wrought journey through a combination of indie-rock, post-punk and shoegaze, all heavily dipped in 80s-style synths that are reminiscent of Editors at their best.
Opener [10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs] sets the tone as a building track that layers sound on top of sound to devastating effect. It’s a style that’s re-employed across several tracks on the album, and is responsible for most of the album’s strongest moments such as Auge/Maschine and I/m Not Here [Missing Face].
Elsewhere on the album, there are a few tracks such as The Arbor and Keep It All To Myself that adopt a lower-key swing beat that will have your head swaying unconsciously, rather than the vigorous head nodding that will accompany most of the rest.
Vocalist James Graham’s heavily-accented folky voice is one of the things that makes The Twilight Sad stand out from their indie rivals but may not be to everyone’s taste. I’ll admit it took a bit of getting used to and initially I found myself enjoying the album in spite of it. However with further listens I’ve grown to appreciate the delicacy encapsulated within it, that adds to the beautiful bleakness this album oozes out of every pore.
It might be a little too early to be talking about album’s of the year – there’s a long way to go yet – but this album certainly has the potential to be in the mix and will be sitting on my playlist for some time to come.
Release dates: 18 January 2019
Rating: 8.5/10
Standout track: I/m Not Here [Missing Face]
For fans of:
It’s New Music Friday – hoorah! After the festive lull, releases are now starting to come in thick and fast. Particularly looking forward to getting my teeth into the new one by The Twilight Sad. Here’s what I’ll be mostly listening to this week:
The Twilight Sad – It Won/t Be Like This All The Time
Go Dark – Neon Young
Alice Merton – Mint
Subjective – Act One – Music For Inanimate Objects
Joe Jackson – Fool
Buke & Gase – Scholars
Hedvig Mollestad Trio – Smells Funny
Lost Under Heaven – Love Hates What You Become
Sharon Van Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow
Night Beats – Myth of a Man
My first new album review of 2019 is one that I was initially unsure about and nearly didn’t make the cut, but I’m very glad I gave it another try.
Lorelle Meets The Obsolete are a male/female duo hailing from Mexico and De Facto is their fifth album. It’s a glorious mix of pop, psych, indie, post-rock with shoegaze overtones that can send you off onto a hypnotic journey you don’t ever want to end.
The album starts with Ana, an almost-tantric hypnotic chanting track overlaid with ominous bass-heavy synth leading into desolate twisted guitars. This interruption of songs with distorted mind-blowing guitars becomes a bit of a theme throughout the album, and not one that is unwelcome.
There are some straight-out psych rock efforts with dreamy interludes such as on Acción and Resistir – the airy vocals of singer Lorena Quintanilla nicely breaking up the heavier tendancies of husband Alberto González. There are more poppy tracks, such as the disco-groove laden Líneas En Hojas, which would sound a lot like Saint Etienne if it wasn’t for the gorgeous scuzzy guitars filling up the latter part of the song.
There are also some proper wig-outs to be had. Unificado has the desert ‘trip’ feel similarly invoked by The Doors’ This is the End before melding into a shoegaze epic. Lux Lumina offers minimalistic dream-pop that launches into a marvelous full-on maximum feedback sonic assault.
In my view they saved the best until last with La Maga, a 10-minute slow build track that morphs into a wonderfully hypnotic synth-backed guitar groove that just doesn’t ever stop – and gets better and better as it goes along.
A cracking start to the year!
Release dates: 11 January 2019
Rating: 8/10
Standout track: La Maga
For fans of:
The Album Review 