Americana star Margo Price dazzles, Gaz Coombes ponders marital mid-life – the week’s best albums
Margo Price, Strays ★★★★★
Americana songstress Margo Price was briefly hailed as “country’s next star,” with endorsements from such luminaries as Willy Nelson, Emmylou Harris and the late, great Loretta Lynn. Yet a few years down the road from her cult 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, I am not sure we could even call her country anymore. Price’s fantastic fourth album, Strays, advances boldly into terrain occupied by such exalted US rock craftsmen as Jackson Browne and Tom Petty, with soulful vocal swagger, a widescreen band sound and a poetic lyrical depth that should leave most of her Nashville peers prostrate at her feet.
Price takes no prisoners on declamatory opening, Been to the Mountain, a churning manifesto proclaiming universal humanity in the face of suffering, pitched somewhere between Bob Dylan and The Doors. “I got a myth in my pocket / Got a bullet in my teeth / Goin’ straight in the fire / Gonna talk to the high priest.” With distorted guitars and urgent garage rock organ, Price spits out her own sermon from the mount until her vocal echoes, divides and repeats with cosmic exultation as she stares “into the void of the black magic vacuum” inhaling “the scent of death like a perfume.” We’re a long way from the Grand Ol’ Opry, that’s for sure.
A slow starter, Price’s recent memoir, Maybe We’ll Make It, offers a beautifully wrought narrative of cheerleading, waitressing, poverty, substance abuse, drunk tanks and grievous personal loss as she was rebuffed by the music business for over a decade. She was 33 when she got signed, essaying a rustic sound and deft way with a couplet harking back to outlaw country rooted in Hank Williams. But each of Price’s subsequent albums has broadened her sound, until only a certain ambience of pedal steel weeping at the edge of the mix connects to her roots.
On poppy cut Radio, an electronic pulse hints at Queen going GaGa, whilst Price duets with US alt rock chanteuse Sharon Van Etten on a song about social media overload, seductively winking “the only thing I have on is the radio.” At 39, married for 15 years to guitarist and co-writer Jeremy Ivey, Price revels in adult sexiness on the time-shifting Light Me Up, which moves back and forth between folky intimacy and psychedelic heavy rock to convey the sensory experience of lovemaking, with former Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell firing into the ether as Price conjures orgasmic metaphors.
Later, the haunting Lydia spills out as the melancholy stream of consciousness of a woman on the bad side of relationship choices, smoking a sneaky cigarette in an abortion clinic, worrying about her future, with a bold string arrangement pushing and pulling against rhythm and melody.
Plaudits to producer Jonathan Wilson, whose expansive style has contributed to career best work by Angel Olsen and Father John Misty. The bittersweet County Road motors along like a more mellifluous Bruce Springsteen paired with a countryfied War On Drugs. “Time cuts like a knife,” sings Price as she reminisces about a lost friend. “You think you’re gonna last forever, forever says you’re not.” Questions of lost time and finding your place in the world haunt Strays, but with work as deeply impressive as this, Price probably needn’t worry about being overlooked any longer. Neil McCormick
Circa Waves, Never Going Under ★★★★☆
Stalwarts of the festival scene, Circa Waves excel when it comes to writing summer anthems (see 2015’s T-shirt Weather sitting pretty with 113 million streams). Releasing their fifth album, Never Going Under, in the middle of gloomy January, they’re surely banking on fans having memorised the words in time to bellow them out in a field while being showered with warm Dark Fruits come summer.
It’s a rarity to have an album in which every song could genuinely be a single, but they’ve managed it here. The opening title track, a perfect show opener, possesses a rollicking bassline and catchy melody reminiscent of Royal Blood with a hint of Queens Of The Stone Age. Do You Wanna Talk benefits from a staccato vocal delivery and hand claps which will worm their way into your subconscious, while Hell On Earth is a song destined for the main stage.
Frontman Kieran Shudall became a father for the first time over lockdown, and the track features him worrying about the world he has brought a child into. References to fatherhood also weave through the likes of Carry You Home – a song you could hear being used in a perky 2000s-era GAP advert.
Your Ghost is a supernaturally romantic ballad, with Shudall crooning, “I hope your ghost will haunt me till the end”, all the while sounding jangly and upbeat. Album closer Living in the Grey is one of the most personal songs Shudall has ever written, speaking of the contrast between dreaming of something for years and the anxiety when the moment finally arrives and falls flat. The band have had to cancel several album launch shows due to ill-health, so fingers crossed Shudall gets well soon and fans witness these songs live, where they belong. Jen Thomas
Ville Valo, Neon Noir ★★★★☆
Everything to know about Ville Valo’s renowned former band HIM could be represented in one symbol. The Heartagram logo, scrawled into notebooks and inked into the skin of many a black-clad fan, brought together the cornerstones of their music: love and sex, darkness and evil. That band split up in 2017, but as Valo strikes out alone for his solo debut, he still seems to have the Heartagram on his mind. In 2023, Ville Valo is painting in a different shade of goth.
Climbing on the shoulders of acts from The Cure to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Valo reckons with the darkness in his life while searching for hope, and within that, love. His output is delicate in its theatricality – the title track’s layers of spidery guitar lines and pounding drums are effortlessly compelling, while the slow-burning Heartful of Ghosts is as graceful and eerie as its title suggests.
In contrast, the thunderous riffs of Saturnine Saturnalia practically crash down from a height but Valo’s low, soft croon cushions their landing and the two ideas play off each other for six and a half minutes without ever dragging. It’s just one example of how much Valo can achieve in the space of one track, to the effect that sometimes, his songs are like rooms full of artefacts in a museum – there’s a lot to marvel at, and a struggle to decide what to focus on first. Emma Wilkes
Gaz Coombes, Turn the Car Around ★★★★☆
Billie Eilish, no less, was amongst the A-listers rocking out side-of-stage when the reunited Supergrass graced Glastonbury’s Other Stage in June 22. Despite accruing considerable love transatlantically, that renewed ’Grass activity was apparently only ever planned as a touring victory lap, and now, barely four months since the trio’s final appearance at Wembley’s Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert, here comes their leader and chief songwriter with a fourth solo record.
Where its predecessors felt very much like a one-man studio enterprise, with an electronically-driven Krautrock sound often constructed around synths and drum machines, Turn the Car Around was recorded at Coombes’ home studio in Oxford with his solo touring band on board, and thus encroaches more on Supergrass turf, both sonically and spiritually.
With its massed singalong and pubby ivory-tinkling, Long Live the Strange even echoes the sentiments of Strange Ones off 1995’s I Should Coco, again celebrating popular music as a charmed playground where outsiders, weirdos and ‘normal’ people can party together. This updated variation on the theme’s every bit as catchy, too, and was apparently written after father-of-two Gaz took his daughter to see a performance by transgender tunesmith Cavetown.
Where this album strongly differs is that Coombes, now 46, is far from the carefree scamp of Britpop-era megahit Alright. It opens in rousing yet deeply thoughtful mood with Overnight Trains, where, after glimpsing his wife Jools sitting by their fireside, the singer ponders how romance’s initial racey thrill somehow settles into a mundane reality of paying bills and parenting. Much of what follows (Don’t Say It’s Over, This Love, Dance On) is about redoubling his resolve to keep their marital fire alight, to embrace his own failings and to keep living life to the full.
Coombes, a quite masterful musical auteur after three decades in the game, skillfully navigates the record away from one long mid-life nightmare, indeed dropping in a hilarious funk-rock monster called Feel Loop (Lizard Dream), based on a real dream of his where he’d morphed into an amphibian and paraded the streets looking for trouble. As such, it’s another hugely satisfying listen. Andrew Perry
Billy Nomates, CACTI ★★★★☆
Almost two and a half years on from releasing her debut eponymous album, Bristol-based singer songwriter Billy Nomates has returned with a humorous and heartbreaking second album CACTI.
This is a softer, more introspective approach than her barn-storming debut, but this 12-track album doesn’t lack the punch and bite of its debut in spite of this. There’s still the post-punk new wave vibe that has become synonymous with the multi-instrumentalist who played every single instrument on the album (as well as implementing the drum machines and loops).
Candid, thought-provoking and always vulnerable, she sonically navigates around her battles with mental health, previous relationships and the anxiety of returning to life post-lockdown. This is evident especially in the closing track Blackout Signal with lines like “I can’t wait for the black out signal. I dream of shutdowns now”.
The conversational Saboteur Forcefield is about a failed relationship and how “nothing is quite right”. Fawner is a country-esque sing-along diamond of a number that is one of the more serene moments of the album. Spite serves as an unyielding warning not to underestimate her with pithy lines including “I know you think you hold all your power over me, but you don’t”. The message is clear: underestimate Billy Nomates at your peril. Emma Harrison
James Yorkston, Nina Persson and The Second Hand Orchestra, The Great White Sea Eagle ★★★★☆
In January 2021, The Wide, Wide River established Scottish singer-songwriter James Yorkston and Swedish Karl-Jonas Winqvist, leader of The Second Hand Orchestra, as a fated folk partnership. Two years later, their second collaboration is a more far-ranging, adventurous and joyful venture. This is, in no small part, owing to the introduction of Nina Persson to the studio. It is her airily feminine voice that opens the album with a breathy count-in: “One, two, three, four”, before launching into a pared-back, folksy ballad that keeps pace with the steady thud of a tambourine. Persson seems delightfully at home with the largely improvised nature of compositions.
Only Yorkston, Persson and Winqvist had heard the songs prior to entering the studio, but the accomplished orchestra players build a textured, tonal world in the spaces and stories with ease. IT has the bristling intimacy of a live performance, which it is, to a degree.
Yorkston's piano-based songs took form in his Cellardyke, Fife studio in early 2021 (An Upturned Crab and The Great White Sea Eagle reference the sea he looked out upon as he wrote). He sent a handful to Winqvist, and - inspired to tweak their formula without a wholesale overhaul - they invited The Cardigans' Persson. Having shaken off the pop ingenue of 30 years ago, Persson – an accomplished solo artist in her own right – is a revelation. She is a Swedish Joan Baez, occasionally drifting into Joni Mitchell-style heavenly harmonics. There is a sweet naivete to the simplicity of lyrics and the generosity of space and quietness across these 12 tracks, especially in the piano-based A Sweetness In You, or the metallic, twangy guitar-based Mary, a dramatic, gothic folk ballad. The romantic weave of Persson's angelic soprano with Yorke's earthier delivery makes such intuitive sense that it's astonishing to realise this pairing has not existed forever. Cecilia Osterholm on nyckelharpa (keyed fiddle) and guitarist Peter Moren (of Peter, Bjorn and John) are also exemplary in a sentimental, tender homage to nature, family, legacy and faith in humanity. Cat Woods
Belle and Sebastian, Late Developers ★★★☆☆
Indie-pop band Belle and Sebastian have garnered one of British music’s most loyal fanbases over the past three decades; crowds continually pack out venues and festival fields for the Glaswegian septet, keen to hear their comfortingly familiar blend of twee, whimsical lyrics that double as on-the-nose social commentary.
Late Developers, their eleventh album (discounting their 2019 film soundtrack for Days of the Bagnold Summer), follows last year’s aphoristic A Bit of Previous, with its tracks having been born from the same recording sessions in lockdown. Upon the first few listens, it’s a confusing album: there’s plenty of their usual sing-song melodies and musings on modern dissatisfaction, such as on When We Were Very Young (“I wish I could be content with the football scores / I wish I could be content with my daily chores / with my daily worship of the sublime”) or Will I Tell You A Secret?, a tale of unrequited love that comes closest to reaching the heights of their all-time best work on 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister.
But it’s the synth-laden, poptastic I Don’t Know What You See In Me that seems glaringly out of place. A cross between 00s dance-pop band Cobra Starship and Julie Andrews’ Do-Re-Mi, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the song wasn’t by Belle and Sebastian at all, or was merely a victim of Gen Z’s annoying obsession with speeding up perfectly-okay songs for TikTok videos. Coincidentally, it was the band’s first co-write to date, with millennial pop composer Wuh Oh (real name Peter Ferguson). Frontman Stuart Murdoch said, when he first heard the mix of the song, he “allowed myself to forget it was Belle and Sebastian, and pretend it was the latest hit on some random radio station”. Fair enough, but for fans, isn’t Belle and Sebastian sounding like Belle and Sebastian exactly what’s desired? Poppie Platt
