Album: Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt - Loose Talk

A match made in urban nightlife and the mysteries of everyday living

On the spoken word LP Loose Talk, Amelia Barratt reflects on her or other women’s experiences, real or imagined, over tunes drawn from Bryan Ferry’s demos, some from early in his career. To hear his instantly recognisable sound applied to a female sensibility, especially that expressed with such confiding intimacy by the painter, writer, and performance artist Barratt, makes for a unique and satisfyingly unsettling listen. 

Album: Will Smith - Based on a True Story

Big Willie’s back - but maybe he should’ve stayed home

Will Smith’s new album, Based on a True Story, is a prime example of why some comebacks should remain hypothetical. After two decades away from music, one might expect a seasoned, self-aware return – something with the wisdom of age and the energy of experience. Instead, we get a collection of tracks that feel like they were brainstormed during an awkward dad-joke marathon.

Album: Perfume Genius - Glory

Album seven from an artist carving out his own space in the most modernist of ways

I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t exist before: it’s a mapping out of the modern musical and subcultural landscape on terms defined by the millennial artists who’ve come to define it.

Album: Alison Krauss & Union Station - Arcadia

★★★★ ALISON KRAUSS & UNION STATION - ARCADIA Their first album in 14 years looks hard at the past, and its role in the present

Their first album in 14 years looks hard at the past, and its role in the present

It’s been 14 years since Alison Krauss and Union Station released an album – 2011’s Paper Aeroplane. The world’s shed a few skins since then, and little resembles the way it was. The ten songs on their new album, Arcadia, recorded in studios across Nashville, are tied up in that cat’s cradle of time, of the past and how it is remembered.

Blu-ray: Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper's frenzied, far out space sex vampire epic

Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.

Album: Toria Wooff - Toria Wooff

Assured but too measured debut album from Americana-inclined singer-songwriter

On the cover of her eponymous debut album, the Bolton-raised Toria Wooff reclines on a church pew located in Stanley Palace, a 16th-century mansion in her adopted city of Chester. In her hand, a Celtic Cross. Such imagery implies that what will be heard on the grooves within the sleeve might cleave to forms of gothic-inclined British folk. This, though, is not the case.

Album: Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco - I Said I Love You First

★★★ SELENA GOMEZ & BENNY BLANCO - I SAID I LOVE YOU FIRST An album by a pair of loved-up Hollywood celebs that is, whisper it, rather good

An album by a pair of loved-up Hollywood celebs that is, whisper it, rather good

Selena Gomez is the enormously successful Disney child star who grew up to be a Hollywood actor and global pop sensation. As notably, she’s the third most followed person on Instagram, the most popular woman, with 421 million followers. Benny Blanco is the golden boy American producer-songwriter whose many, many hits run the gamut from Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” to Ed Sheeran’s “Happier” to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”. The pair got engaged last December.

Album: The Horrors - Night Life

A new line-up proves no hindrance to a band bringing electro-rock zip to the darkness

For fans of The Horrors, the headline here is that, 20 years into the career, for their sixth album, the band have lost two of their founding members. Original keyboard player Tom Furse has gone, as has drummer “Coffin” Joe Spurgeon, to be replaced, respectively, by Amelia Kidd of Scottish synthy post-punkers The Ninth Wave and Jordan Cook of alt-indie Welsh outfit Telegram.