Eight long years, Robyn fans have been waiting. Crazed tweets screamed #releasehoneydammit into the ether for weeks as the Swedish songwriter teased her new music.
Think of Karen "MØ" Andersen and you may well picture one of her smash hit videos. "Lean On", for instance, where the singer gyrates to a Bollywood/ house mashup. Or "Kamikaze" set in post-apocalyptic Ukraine. Yet, for all the Zeitgeist-y imagery what really made those songs so popular was really just simple youthful exuberance. "Forever Neverland" sounds like it should offer much of the same. Instead, it feels curiously grown-up.
MØ, it would seem, has moved in from her recent incarnation as the singer of Diplo pop songs. Diplo - the producer responsible for both "Lean On" and "Kamikaze" - only appears, here, on one song, "Sun in Our Eyes", a sweet slice of Balearic electro-pop. Still, his influence isn't entirely absent. Rather MØ has absorbed some of the superstar DJ's mojo, and mixed it with some Danish quirkiness.
The results feature some real nuggets. Top of the pile are "Mercy" and "Blur" both of which hark back to MØ's indie roots. The former is a particular gem - a slow-burning torch song that finds the singer at the peak of her vocal prowess. The elasticity of her voice, and her dynamic range is on a par with technical mistresses like Sia and Adele. "Blur" is much grungier with Graham Coxon-style acoustic guitars, and a languid melody.
MØ's voice also shines through on many of the electronic numbers. The best are the least self-conscious. "Beautiful Wreck" has a catchy electro-pop vibe, featuring a cool bass vocoder effect. "Red Wine" couldn't come as more of a contrast. Its Ace-of-Base-reggae-style is so wilfully uncool it's hard not to love it.
It's only where the album starts to take itself too seriously that things begin to drag. "It's All Over" featuring the usually irrepressible Charli XCX, sounds strangely po-faced. There are also a handful of tracks, such as "I Want You", where slick production seems to have been favoured over quality tunes. Of course, you have to admire MØ's decision not to include earlier hit singles initially intended for the LP in the finished version. But it makes the quality a little uneven. Then again, who still listens to albums all the way through, anyway? There's more than enough material here to confirm the Danish singer as not only one of the most interesting artists of her generation but also one of the best singers.
Overleaf: MØ's lyric video for "Blur"
The first release from Jess Glynne’s new album, “I’ll Be There” confirmed the North London singer as the first ever British female artist to have seven no.1 singles in the UK Chart.
Dance music duo Gorgon City exist within a fickle market. It’s all very well to mooch about on a Saturday night in Woking to house music merging into pop, R&B-tinted, smooth, garage-flecked, touched with just a whiff of Ibiza’s hedonic promise, but does anyone know who makes it or actively care enough to pursue them?
It’s hard to know who to write about when reviewing a new Gorillaz release. According to the official line, the band have shorn their usual guests to focus on the core creative team: vocalist 2D, drummer Russell, guitarist Noodle, and new bassist Ace, borrowed from The Powerpuff Girls.
There are albums that reveal themselves to you, their hidden depths become apparent over time as familiarity helps one to acclimatize to the terrain. David Crosby’s Sky Trails was one such release and has stayed with me since its release.
There are albums that burn with incandescent light from the get-go, albums that leave you smiling with glee as they bring warmth to your world and add light to your day. Indeed, in this category were two that, in any other year, would have been shoe-ins for my album of the year slot. The sparse, electronic experiments of Autarkic’s I Love You, Go Away contained beautiful, haunted emotion, while Red Axes’ Beach Goths contained just about everything else: from surf guitar and house beats, to spaghetti Western hoops rolling with extended drum loops, it had the lot.
Then there are albums that smack you around the head and face and leave you dazed, but richer for the experience – like a benevolent mugger who can’t quite get the hang of the job spec. Here we find Jin Cromanyon, hanging out on a vinyl only release on a small label, Macadam Mambo, that has quietly been releasing some extraordinary stuff this year.
Written, arranged and produced by Hidetaka Horie, 逆襲のスポンジ is a masterpiece full of frenetic energy and pop bounce, and as unashamedly ‘up’ as a children’s birthday party. It sounds like a J-Pop musical of Depeche Mode’s early years, but filtered through the fizzing imagination and very singular vision of a young man with a penchant for Chicago house and Italo disco. In short, it’s startlingly original, like nothing I’ve heard before and yet the songs resonate with such force, they may as well be Platonic forms.
At present, there’s no CD or digital release, but lobbying the record label seems like a good way to right this particular oversight. Whatever, I suspect you’ll be hearing a lot more from Mr Horie very soon.
Two More Essential Albums from 2017
Lucky Soul – Hard Lines
Abschaum – Moon Tango
Gig of the Year
Jane Weaver at Ramsgate Music Hall
Track of the Year
Vibration Black Finger – "Get Up and Do It"
Overleaf: Listen to Jin Cromanyon's "Zombie Pop"
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel hadn't set out to make a full-length follow-up to last year's Can You Pass the Knife? mini-LP, but once he had a backbone of songs, events sort of got away from him. I Love You, Go Away is the result and its nine songs, spread over nearly 40 minutes, appear, in one way or another, to deal with loss – of love, identity and self.
The title of opener “New Heimat”, referencing the German word for the feeling of belonging to a place, suggests a new beginning of sorts. While the lines “Home is where the hatred is” and “No more fighting for the state/No more bleeding for some faith”, repeated over electronic percussion and a background of distorted guitar drones, offer an overtly political and grand worldview, follow-up “Violence” begins, and immediately we are pulled into much more personal territory. A deliberation on envy and the darker side of love and loss, it addresses self-esteem as much as its predecessor does self-concept. It’s a neatly conceived conceit and the lyric “I don’t know what you mean when you say it’s not about that” captures, with both wit and wisdom, the futility and circularity of self-referential relationship arguments. That it does so to a punk-funk/disco-not-disco soundtrack is all to the good.
“How to Cheat” is a tune that Underworld would be proud of: a repeated musical refrain over which vocal snippets paint a picture of an emotionally punch-drunk husk trying to find the strength to fight back. “Gibberish Love Song”, meanwhile, continues a recent and welcome resurgence of truly progressive house, the track’s distortion sounding like the result of Spiegel turning the emotional gain to full.
While the vocals are often laser-guided to an emotional centre, occasionally they seem a close cousin of former Can frontman Damo Suzuki's, chosen as much for their punctuating power and ryhthmic heft as their actual meaning.
This is mostly, though not exclusively, the case on the album’s B-side – a more intense beast and shot through with bold experimentation. At times it boasts Radiophonic Workshop levels of abstraction, exploring its terrain with a keen playfulness, while sharing the emotional depth of contemporary peers such as Man Power, particularly on the stunning instrumental “Let the Water Run”. Closing pairing “Bongos and Tambourines” and “Warmth (How Mean Is Mean)” are simply breathtaking, colouring sparse, kosmiche tones with dense, earthy colours to create a palette that is truly Spiegel’s own.
Currently available on vinyl only, I Love You, Go Away, isn’t just a fine electronic album, it feels like a genuinely important piece of work from a producer who blends head and heart with rare warmth and intelligence. A clear contender for album of the year – once again.
Overleaf: Listen to Autarkic's "I Love You, Go Away"
Those coming to Lifetime of Love expecting something – anything – approaching Moses Archuleta’s day job in Deerhunter will find those expectations confounded. With his Moon Diagrams solo project, Archuleta has presented us with a sonic sketchbook of ideas that range from ambient, hymnlike refrains to hypnotic house grooves and epic experimentalism.
This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous.