Starring
Astrel K, Gruff Rhys, Kevin Fowley, Loving, The Orb, The Pastel Waves, Paul Heaton, Wolfgang Tillmans
The Front Runners
Sadness Sets Me Free : Gruff Rhys
Gruff Rhys has written a fascinating set of songs that is perfect for the times. Sadness may set him free, but he’s released into a world of warmth and community and invites us to join him there.
The first thing that reaches out from the speakers to caress you is that the songs are so unexpectedly pretty. It’s almost courtly, poetry set to music.
The opening track ‘Sadness Sets Me Free’ sets the tone for the album. It prepares you for accepting sadness and melancholy. There’s something about its sensibilities that marks the album out as pastoral. Never referenced in the music I nevertheless experienced a series of rural images, of the sun rising over Welsh valleys and flooding their communities in warm sunshine. To me it urges acceptance of sadness and appreciation of the beauty all around us.
This is one of the lyrically strongest albums of 2024. It’s full of wonderful images. Cue short list of examples:
“As reliable as asking a seal to deliver the mail” (‘Bad Friend’)
“Shoot for celestial candy floss” (‘Celestial Candy Floss’)
“Be the mammoth in the room” (They Sold My Home To Build A Skyscraper’)
‘Sadness Sets Me Free’ explores the freedom to follow your own path. By the end it’s mixing chamber pop with country blues. ‘Bad Friend’ is one of the great songs of 2024, its honesty and reassurance wrapped up in a lovely melody. ‘Silver Linings, Lead Balloons’ is just one of the songs with a melody that soars, carried on glorious strings. ‘Peace Signs’ is a tumbling cascade of a song, perfect for rearranging as a round. Despite the darker tinge of its lyrics ‘Cover Up the Cover Up is typical of the warm sounds that trickle through this album.
The album builds to the crescendo of the final track. ‘I’ll Keep Singing’ is a defiant affirmation of complete release. It’s as warm and buoyant as anything on the album, and offers a licence to howl. Imagine how that sounded when the thousands at a festival crowd howled in unison!
Gruff Rhys has succeeded with a universal set of songs for the feelings that are personal to all of us. It’s one of the albums of 2024.
Taster Track : Bad Friend (It’s simply too good not to be singled out.)
Orboretum : The Orb
This collection of what, in days gone by, would be termed ‘Greatest Hits’ is an excellent deep dive into the work of The Orb.
If it proves one thing, it’s that Alex Paterson is the mad genius of electronic, chilled down dance music.He’s credited with inventing ambient house music, with slower and more ambient rhythms. There aren’t many people who have a new musical genre as their claim to fame.
In every song he takes you on a sonic trip. And it is a trip, a heady rush of effects, samples and rhythms set against beats that even the middle aged club goer can enjoy. Sometimes they’re silly, like naughty boys sneaking into the studio and having the time of their lives, but the end result is always entertaining. Rhythms in songs such as ‘Gee Strings’ stretch as far behind and in front of you as the ear can hear.
These pieces are works of electronic art. They’re flexible, capable of being turned to underpin different genres. His most recent work was with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. It’s not hard to imagine the Orb sounding like them if Syd Barret’s spirit had been unleashed on 21st century technology. Their tunes work with the reggae of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, and in songs such as the new version of ‘Perpetual Dawn’. With its fractured rhythms ‘Aftermath’ is the perfect partner for rap.
This is a continually inventive set. ‘A Huge Ever Expanding Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraverse’ starts with a slow dance cover of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’ before transforming into a rave classic, her high pitched vocals sounding like some freakish scream. Their electronica sometimes seems drawn from the chimes and movement of pealing bells. Listen to ‘Pomme Fritz (Meat ‘n’ Veg)’ to hear that. The strange ambient passages of ‘Toxygene’ are an overthrow of the old electronic empire, in this case personified in Jean Michel Jarre.
Even when they recycle their own songs they continue their work of reinvention. Consider that ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’, ‘Golden Clouds’ and ‘Appletree In My Back Yard’ all draw on the same source material but turn into three completely different songs. It’s breathtaking.
Think of the bands that transformed the sound of dance music in the 90s and are still going today - Underworld and the Chemical Brothers are probably the pick. Together with The Orb they all occupy as unique space in their field as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys did in the sixties. The Orb can be as heavy as they come. The beats at the end of ‘Blue Room’ demonstrate that. But the Orb own the quieter, gentler side of dance.
This collection is a heady pleasure from start to finish.
Taster Track : Apple Tree In My Back Yard
The Mighty Several : Paul Heaton
Ever since the days of The Housemartins and The Beautiful South, the arrival of a new Paul Heaton album has always been welcomed. This is no exception.
Look at his publicity photos and he now looks like a kindly Grandad, the national treasure he called his opening song. Don’t be fooled. He still has his songwriting eye on highlighting what’s wrong in the country - the unfairness, the hypocrisy and the desperation underpinning ordinary lives.
The thing is, in his musical hands it sounds so sweet. It’s the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. ‘National Treasure’ is the pop gem he’s been writing since the Housemartins. ‘Quicksand’ is four parts rock and roll to one part Benny Hill chase sequences. ‘Fish and Chip Supper’ and ‘Pull Up A Seat’ draw on the pub singalong of days gone by.
He writes vignettes of real life that are convincing because of his willingness to entrust them to collaborators. If he’s offering a woman’s perspective he’ll duet with Rianne Downey, the latest and perhaps best of his feminine alter egos. Or he’ll write a song like ‘After The Sugar Rush’ and give it to Downey to sing with Yvonne Shelton. On ‘Pull Up A Seat’ and ‘Small Boats’, Danny Muldoon sings like Paul Heaton’s well documented worst moments. The song that seems most representative of Heaton himself is also the least typical of the album as a whole - ‘Walk On, Slow Down’.
Heaton is the voice of life’s losers, and those afraid of getting hurt. He’s a songwriter to cherish, as acute in his observations as Elvis Costello, less clever, punning wordplay maybe but better songs than found in Costello’s late period.
With this album, Paul Heaton offers a travelling show of songs in which every song is a winner.
Taster Track : National Treasure.
The Chasing Pack
The Foreign Department : Astrel K
Astrel K operates in a likeable, slightly foreign world to create indie pop that will warm your heart and nourish your soul.
Imagine driving along the so called English Riviera, through the brash strands of amusement arcades littering Paignton and Torquay, tolerating the hordes of unaware holiday makers who stop start the traffic and the scorch of Summer’s one heatwave through your windscreen. Now imagine what it would feel like to leave that behind, climbing away into a turn that reveals the full glory of the coast, allowing you to drive at your own pace with the windows down. How long would it be before a calm, happy serenity took possession of you? That’s the effect of this album.
If such a thing can exist, this is alternative indie. It’s attractively off kilter , strangely calm and surprisingly lovely too. It’s swimming in less obvious but sunny melodies.It encourages you to open your ears to something a little different.
Astrel K is happy to wander through more experimental landscapes that act as links or precursors to what follows. He’s a friendly guide, not afraid to take unexpected turns. In essence he’s an auteur, and this album is personal, bearing his stamp strongly. I took off my headphones for a few seconds during ‘A Rudderless Ship’ and returned to what seemed to be a completely different song.
There are echoes, as there always are, of others occupying the same uncrowded musical space. Metronomy, the High Llamas, The Bees, Field Music, there’s even a little freshly squeezed Orange Juice in there. It’s a heady mix.
Astrel K helps you to appreciate pop’s rich variety anew.
Taster Track : By Depol
A Feu Doux : Kevin Fowley
Stark renditions of songs in the folk tradition, Kevin Fowley isn’t about to make it easy for his listeners.
In truth, this feels more for students of music than casual listeners. The songs are sung in French. They’re played on a single guitar, embellished - stained might be a better word - by ominous electronic backing, occasional jazz bass and other dark touches. It’s atmospheric, mournful and immensely powerful. It’s not music that expects applause, more hushed reverence. The squeak of guitars on ‘Aux Marches Du Palais’ serves only to emphasise its sparse, joyless nature.
It’s a strong taste, music for the dark to trigger darker thoughts. It feels drained of joy and life but, in its own way it becomes quite hypnotic. The casual listener, and that includes me, may find it daunting in the extreme. The EP opens with the seven minute ‘Ne Pleure Pas, Janette’ that leads you into the ten minute ‘A La Claire Fontaine’. Songs like these need strong melodies to be welcomed, but that’s not Fowley’s stock in trade.
‘Le Coq Est Mort’ qualifies as light relief, if only because it comes in at under three minutes. Weirdly it feels festive, music for the darkest hour before dawn where nothing stirs in bleak midwinter night except a sense of great anticipation.
Its saving grace is its difference. I doubt you’ve heard anything quite like this anywhere else during the year. Its power will stay with you.
Taster Track : Le Coq Est Mort
Any Light : Loving
Canadian singer songwriters, Loving, have the knack for good, romantic love songs.
Albums full of traditional pop love songs are unusual to the point of being rare these days. They’re songs for the sensitive partner in your life. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people who would love to express themselves as delicately and articulately, and even more who would love to receive such heartfelt expressions of feeling. And it is the feel of these songs that lingers, not their content. Belatedly you might recognise them as sombre, but they will still sound gentle, unhurried and comforting.
There’s a warm, Summer feel to the songs - quite an achievement when you consider that in their home territory of British Columbia the average annual temperature is a mere 11 degrees!
These are singer songwriter songs that drift pleasantly by. There’s a late 60s and early 70s vibe at play.They call to mind the lightly stoned sounds of Donovan or Nilsson’s ‘Everybody’s Talking. They have a graceful, cosmic dusting that will have you idly pondering the mysteries of life and the universe.
This is an album of songs made with care, craft and love. The album may come in at under half an hour, but not a moment is wasted.
Taster Track : Medicine.
Between Midnight and Morning : The Pastel Waves
The Pastel Waves are everything you could want in a band that grew up musically at the start of the 21st century and who had an ear for the best of earlier rock eras.
Occasionally, I’m approached directly by a band or a small record label to review one of their releases. For a while I wrestled with this. I didn’t want to build something up that didn’t deserve it and I didn’t want to mislead anyone into spending money or investing time in something that, in my opinion (and whisper it quietly), wasn’t very good. So the line I took was this. I would listen to everything, but if I couldn’t find something good to say about it, I wouldn’t write anything.
And that long preamble enables me to say that there was no struggle whatsoever in recommending this very good EP from The Pastel Waves.
The Pastel Waves are a Medway-based indie band who have been releasing music since 2015.
They’re the kind of band I would have loved to have discovered as a student and make all my own. They’re agonised and desperate to just the right degree, the perfect soundtrack to intense and alienated gatherings on bedsit floors infused with cheap spilled wine, stale tobacco and numerous other substances. Forget any hippie connotations. They are the conditions from which great music is born.
There are only four tracks on this EP, but they speak (or rather sing) volumes. Take ‘Bone of Contention’. It has a clear shoegaze influence but it also possesses an energy and attitude all too often missing from the genre. ‘Rolling Song’ seems to be the band’s favourite and it’s easy to hear why. It’s a song to thrill any arena. ‘Time At The Yard’ is a venture into the epic and ‘To Breathe’ sweeps and swoons its way into your head and refuses to leave.
There are numerous influences but they are melded into something that is both their own, and keeping paths open for the future. For those who like or find comparisons helpful, in four tracks I picked up echoes of Slow Readers’ Club, Comsat Angels (three cheers for that!) and The Verve.
It’s time for the Pastel Waves to fly above the horizon. If you’re ready for that, the EP came out on 13th December, and is available on Bandcamp. Treat yourself - after all, it’s Christmas!
Taster Track : Bone of Contention
Build From Here : Wolfgang Tillmans
This is an intriguing collection of synth and electro pop that never wanders down expected routes.
Tillmans is an artist and set designer as well as a musician. A sense of that artistic background percolates through this album. He shares Brian Eno’s perspective on avoiding the obvious and being prepared to experiment with ideas in sound. That’s not to say that it is inaccessible at all. On the contrary it is constantly surprising but always harking back to pop.
It’s fair to say that for all his artistic talents, he’s not a natural singer but he doesn’t need to be. His voice becomes part of the unexpected elements of the show. From the off he’s urging you to consider ‘Where Does The Tune Hide?’ It’s always there and, on a track such as ‘Language’, it’s worth making the effort to find it.
‘Regratitude’ is fractured and jittery. There are short and quiet diversions into ambient soundscapes hidden within the chatter of ‘Cab Ride’ and the interruption in ‘Morning Light’. That latter track has Tillmans embracing pop in his own way and having fun too. ‘We Are Not Going Back’ is a fully developed electro pop experience. ‘Build From Here’ is as minimal as it can be. ‘Grune Linien’ is as German as frankfurter sausages, and not just because he sings in the language. It takes a darker, industrial turn. ‘Modernist Survival Unit’ releases his inner Pet Shop Boys, but the Pet Shop Boys on the later album tracks, not ripping loose as with their dance floor bangers. ‘Not Telling A Friend’ uses insistence as performance.
If you remember reading Enid Blyton’s ‘Magic Faraway Tree’ stories as a child, this is the grown up equivalent. As you read you never knew if the next land at the top of the tree would be a threat or a treasure. That’s the effect of this collection.
Taster Track : Morning Light
Playlists
As ever this week's Taster Track playlists can be accessed at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7cSveL7NpVp1xgrKxPe4av?si=SkFlSnvySeuYFpgG0WJFmA or via the Spotify link on the Home Page.
The link to the Youtube playlist is https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwV-OogHy7Eh_sy55y6i18Qj7w_Z3CQft
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