Slow Club have always reinvented themselves with each album, and this is another example of the talent of one of this country’s best kept musical secrets.
She’s come a long way from those more quirky days, but Remember Us To Life is a good reminder that Spektor is still more than capable of conjuring up moments of magic.
A whirling dervish of an album, and a culmination of all their previous hard work, Nonagon Infinity is the sound of a band at their wigged out best.
It retains all that made them great in the first place – the swooning choruses, the punchy guitars, the massive productions – but at the same time offers proof of elegance and grace as their maturity grows.
The end result is arguably even better than Love’s Crushing Diamond. All the qualities that made that record so sublime have been built upon further on Skip A Sinking Stone, delivering a more expansive work of rare depth and poise.
At the centre of all of this, always, are Leschper’s remarkable vocals: brittle and quivering at one moment, bold and unfaltering the next, with an occasional folkish twang of Joanna Newsom or Jessica Pratt.
The loop pedals are still present of course, and it’s not a huge leap from previous albums The Magic Place and Nepenthe, but the overall sound is richer and lusher than ever before.
Trick may well be his masterpiece, combining all the elements that have made him such an enduring and much-loved musician over the years to create a genre-bending classic.
There’s certainly more highlight than filler contained in Freetown Sound and it is, ultimately, an album that deserves to be heard.
Thanks in no small part to the significant contribution of Homme, the shirtless rocker has created his best work since his early Bowie collaborations. It seems only right that Iggy should end his long career on such a high.
Defiant, solid, aggressive and powerful are all words which you could level at Adore Life. It’s also an album of supreme confidence, one which has no issue with simply stating its case, of which it is certain.
The tone for much of I Had A Dream That You Were Mine is set both musically and lyrically by its opening track – the warm, woody palette and the tinges of loss and regret.
At times listening to 25 25 is like you’ve broken into a hermetically sealed echo chamber in which reverberations from dance floor’s past, present and future now exist.
FLOTUS might be an experiment, but if it turns out to be the template for Lambchop’s future output then that would be no bad thing.
It’s just about impossible to live up to the hype that an album like this has been subjected to, but Ocean comes pretty close. Blonde is often a bit of a sprawling mess, but with some patience it becomes one of the most rewarding albums you’ll hear all year.
The Hope Six Demolition Project has plenty of harsh, ugly moments; this isn’t Harvey crafting beautiful vignettes. Instead, she’s often reflecting the ugliness she sees around her, conceding that the world ain’t always pretty.
The whole of Atrocity Exhibition takes Brown’s craft to a new level, even if his delivery occasionally grates. It’s by far the best thing he’s released and confirms his arrival among the rap elite.
It feels like the most human of his late works, with acoustic instrumentation carefully balanced alongside drum programming and vintage keyboards.
After a few plays, 22, A Million begins to make a beautiful kind of sense. It’s the natural evolution of Vernon’s sound, back from when he experimented with a vocoder on the final track on the Blood Bank EP, Woods. And the songs themselves, once they’re stripped of all the vocal trickery, are as heartbreaking as ever.
While her previous album Burn Your Fire For No Witness seemed like a huge step up for her, My Woman seems even more like a statement.
Anna Meredith’s self-described ‘collection of musical pests’ should welcomely plague many a listener for a long time to come. It’s a marvellously un-sobering boisterous beast of a record, and a sparkling début.
This is as compelling and coherent a collection as they have ever made. It’s a record that you can delve deep into and really inhabit; everything’s in its right place.
It’s a vital record that’s a blast of clarity in a muddy, chaotic world.
As from an unspeakable event a remarkable record has come. One that sits amongst Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ best. Skeleton Tree is full of grief, but full of heart too.