Album: Tom Odell - Monsters
Growing singer-songwriter seeks depression's roots
It can be hard to separate this century’s male British troubadours, these children of Thom Yorke with their frail quavers, uniformly insisting on sensitivity, but too often sounding like entitled bleats. Maybe, as James Blake has defensively indicated, they simply reveal an epidemic of depression. In a desperate decade, mild yearning, not rage, anyway remains this genre’s default.