First out of the box this week is a record born of grief. You can hear it in the title, White Roses, My God, as well as in tracks such as ‘Heaven’, in which Alan Sparhawk describes the afterlife, wrenchingly, as “a lonely place if you’re alone”. You can sense it too in Sparhawk’s decision to create this thing entirely on his own: every note, every lyric, every programmed beat. It would be reductive, even foolish, to see grief as the sole source or the final limit of this taut, brilliant, provocative and thrilling album, whose bold experimentation is powered by profound lyrics and propulsive beats.
In 2024, after an absence of 35 years, all four original members of ’80s band Fairground Attraction reunited with a brand-new studio album, Beautiful Happening. The band’s debut single, ‘Perfect’, went to #1 not only in the UK but in countries all around the world and, in 1988, it won Best Single at the Brit Awards. It has gone on to be regarded as a genuine pop classic. Like ‘Perfect’, the new album’s first single ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ was written by the band’s guitarist Mark Nevin and sung by their brilliant vocalist, Eddi Reader. In a similar upbeat country-pop vein as their huge hit, they finally answer the question on everyone’s lips: “What’s wrong with the world?”
While Pale Waves’ first three albums focused on the band’s immediate present, Smitten is a lot more preoccupied with past lives – some more recent than others. Written two years after Unwanted, and after the tour that followed, singer Heather Baron-Gracie found herself in a headspace where she could finally breathe, and reflect, like peeling through the pages of a long-forgotten teenage diary and being surprised by what she found. “I found myself writing about not just a certain time period, but my whole life, from years ago,” she says. “When I fall in love, I fall deep, and it’s interesting to me that you can feel so fascinated and smitten with someone and then they can become a total stranger. So I feel like Smitten really summarised perfectly what I felt for others at a certain point.”
Rhoda Dakar Sings the Bodysnatchers, released in 2014, was the original crowdfunded album. Rhoda did a deal at the time to produce a very limited vinyl edition for touring. The album has not been repressed since, but now Rhoda has remastered the whole album and added 3 previously unreleased tracks. The packaging has been completely redesigned with new album artwork, sleeve notes and vinyl colours.
Stream of Life finds Maxïmo Park in perhaps the most reflective state they’ve been in. Lead singer Paul Smith, this most lit-pop of lyric writers, took the album title from a short story by Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, inspired by both its stream-of-consciousness style and the way it prompts reflection on the inner mechanisms of people’s minds. It begs the question of why they do the things that they do, even when they can seem counterintuitive to the outsider. There’s an inner flow to every individual – a stream of life.
Our release of the week, Dance, No One’s Watching, is an ode to the sacred yet joyous act of dancing. It’s an album that musically guides you through a night out in the city, from the opening of possibilities as a new evening spans out ahead to dawn’s final hours as the night comes to a close. Written during a blistering 2023 in which Ezra Collective toured the world and became the first jazz act ever to win the Mercury Prize, the album is a documentation of the many dance floors they encountered. From London to Chicago, Lagos to Sydney, dance and rhythm connect us. These songs are a testament to that spirit.
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