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
This fourth studio album from pianist, vocalist, songwriter and producer Oli Rockberger highlights his remarkable knack of marrying instantly memorable chorus hooks with captivating harmonies steeped in jazz, soul, gospel and R&B.
I have a confession to make. The first time I heard "This Town" – the debut release for Niall Horan's new album – I thought it was Ed Sheeran.
Which gives an indication of the general level of acceptability of Niall’s first solo foray outside of 1D – "This Town" is sure to stick around the airwaves for a while. Overall, Flicker is pretty mainstream in comparison to his fellow Directioners, who’ve opted for stylistic gimmickery (Zayne Malik), faux-rock-kitsch (Harry Styles), or impregnating super-famous celebs (that other one)… Niall has opted for a stalwart’s strategy, capitalising on his baby-faced, boy-next-door image.
It’s a decently crafted album of soft pop, sweet songs and tracks perfect for passive radio play. Mareen Morris brings a bit of gravitas to the Nashville-friendly “Seeing Blind” and “Paper House” has some hummy-strummy nu-folk niceness.“Flicker” is contemplative, flowing and actually quite lovely, the kind of song that carries the album and convinces it has legs. But there’s bad with the good. “She's on the Loose” is a forgettable Eighties pop-bop and “Since We’re Alone” smacks of B-side Jason Donovan on vinyl. “Too Much to Ask” is a snorey ballad you'd expect of a former X-Factor star, although perhaps not one who went on to be part of one of the most successful boybands of all time. “Slow Hands” steps the interest up with a bit of original rhythm and cadence, a strong drum beat underpinning a decent tune - until I realise the lyrics are "sweat dripping down our dirty laundry". Confused pause.
Credit where it's due though, Niall did co-write all of the songs on Flicker – which for the most part are well strung together. It didn't go unnoticed that he was the most musically coherent of all the Directionals, and now he's proving himself to be the true Gary Barlow of his group, only replacing the piano with a guitar.
In a world of gimmicky stylistics or flash in the pan insta-reactives aiming for a quick fix and a rush to download, marketing his easy listening run-of-the-mill appeal to the basic masses is a long-term recipe for success.
British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey’s new album, Wake Up Now, is one of the year’s finest. However, there’s a moment on the single “Myela”, a heartfelt Afro-Latin stomper protesting the plight of refugees, which can grate. The song suddenly stops and female backing singers begin a nursery rhyme chant of “I am your neighbour, you are my neighbour”. On record it seems trite; however, in concert at this eye-pleasing, airy Bexhill-on-Sea venue, it’s transformative. Mulvey and his five-piece band use the sequence as a launch pad for a cosmic jam, before settling into a brief snippet of Gary Clail & On-U Sound System’s “Rumours” (“of war”).
The song is one of this concert’s highlights and Mulvey introduces it by deadpanning, understatedly, that “truth is not rampant” in the world in 2017. His music, by contrast, is fervent in its truth-seeking. It seems to be aiming towards a higher purpose and, at its best, achieves elevation. He may look quite ordinary in his jeans, black shirt, beanie hat and dark beard, but his skill with a guitar is revelatory, and his quiet demeanour is belied by moments when the music takes off to somewhere else. In a funny sort of way – and not musically – there’s something of the Grateful Dead about it all, but Mulvey and co. have not yet reached the place where four-hour jams are de rigeur.
The set runs through most of the new album, dips into his first album, and even includes an unreleased song called “The Doing Is Done” which effectively combines drone harmonics with an African chant aesthetic. His sound is very WOMAD, a stew of global styles, built around his voracious appetite for learning new guitar techniques from across the world. His band is there every step of the way, notably his wife Isadora on ukulele and backing vocals, his multi-instrumentalist sidesman Frederico Bruno, and, most visual of all (including the frontman!), the striking, blond-maned valkyrie Fifi Dewey on synth and scorching electric guitar solos.
The band leaves the stage to allow for a rather tentative campfire-style audience sing-along to Mulvey’s most recognisable song, “Cucurucu”, which he has to restart due to a cough, but is there to add texture to quiet beautiful songs such as “We Are Never Apart” and the new album’s stunning meditation on death, “When the Body Is Gone”. They don’t play one of Mulvey’s most popuar older songs, "Nitrous”, but they get away with it because there’s enough potency to keep everyone happy in new songs such as “Unconditional” and the encore-opening, enthneogenic ballad “Infinite Trees” ("Seems to me a galaxy is calling us/Calling us on and on/Calling us into its infinity”).
If I had a quibble, it would be that there’s sometimes a solemnity which adds occasional unfunky weight when this band make music that's elastic, wide-eyed and lighter than air. This could just be because it’s the last night of the tour and, in any case, it’s nit-picking. It’s a great gig, and it climaxes with the second best song of this year, “Mountain to Move”, so we’re sent off onto the wildly windswept seafront singing its ecstatic chorus, “Wake up now!”, an anthem for our times.
Overleaf: watch the video for Nick Mulvey "Mountain to Move"
You might expect a posthumous 90-minute documentary – and that’s before you insert the ad breaks – about one of the biggest stars in British pop music over the last 30 years to shed some light on how said artist became so huge, but also how his career slowed to a crawl and his life came to such a depressing end. Freedom gives you some of the former but absolutely none of the latter.
Colors, the follow-up to Beck's meditative masterpiece Morning Phase, couldn't come as more of a contrast. It's a glossy, high-energy LP designed to make you dance, not think. The inspiration came partly from Pharrell Williams's mega-hit "Happy". When Beck heard it, in 2013, he was blown away by how exuberant it sounded. It made him wonder if he could write something with the same feel-good factor.
For four long years, Beck has been working on the formula. The result is not merely a cheery album, it's a studiously cheery album, full of choppy guitars, smooth synths and complex drums. All instruments were played by Beck and his friend Greg Kurstin, who also shared some of the writing and production duties. Given Beck's genius and Kurstin's recent successes with Sia and Adele, you might have reasonably expected Colors to be perfectly slick.
Ultimately, though, there's just too much going on to create a simple, happy mood. The album's best moments are the least complicated. "Dear Life", based around a Beatles-style piano lick, is refreshingly straightforward. The album's other standout tracks "Up All Night" and "Dreams" are centred around a single musical element. "Up All Night" has a chorus that sounds like Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop the Feeling", while "Dreams" has a killer guitar riff.
Other songs, like "Seventh Heaven" and "No Distraction", are much less focussed. Sonically, they're a hotchpotch. Lyrically, they're just as confusing. There was a time when Beck's free-associating lyrics sounded bewilderingly cool. Now couplets like "With the pharaoh’s curse/ The apple flower doggerel" just sound like gibberish. Of course, some may argue that that's part of the fun. But it never quite feels like that. Colors may have a number of winning moments, but overall it just doesn't make you feel quite as good as you'd hoped.
Overleaf: watch Beck's video for "Up All Night"
When Miley Cyrus released the deliriously patchy Bangerz in 2013 she was as over-exposed as any pop star has ever been, as I subtly pointed out at the time. Far less so now. Her only album in the interim has been a slightly tedious, flung-out drug folly of a Flaming Lips collaboration in 2015.
It’s more than 40 years since Sparks appeared on Top of the Pops with “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”, one of a handful of hits from the brothers Mael, Ron and Russell, who grew up in 1950s and ‘60s LA detesting the “cerebral and sedate” folk boom and grooving to such British acts as the Who and the Kinks.
As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.
Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on the piano. Not for him an autocue – Sedaka has it all in his head and under his hands. Here’s one man unlikely ever to suffer from brain fade. Only the knees and the hips have aged – when he gets up from the piano stool, occasionally for a little bop, you notice his stiff gait.
Sedaka's is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure
In recent years, he has played with an orchestra. This time round he was completely solo, a man and his piano. Alone on stage, a screen projecting his image to those in what his friend John Lennon (for whom he wrote “The Immigrant”) would have called “the cheaper seats”, he cut a cheerfully unstagey figure. Sedaka is what an old-fashioned men’s outfitter would call “short and portly” – rather like Elton, who did much to rejuvenate his career in the mid-1970s, but the threads are more sedate: a blue sport coat atop an open-necked black shirt and slacks (as he’d surely call them) and comfy-looking shoes. His silvery hair is combed over and he has jowls – in other words, he’s happy to look onstage like the 78-year-old grandfather he is offstage. His eyes twinkle and when he refers to himself in the third person it’s mostly to poke fun.
The back projection offered close-ups of his hands and it’s fascinating to watch him play. For Sedaka is a real pianist, one who would most likely have pursued a classical career had he not heard the siren call of 1950s pop. He won a junior scholarship to the Juilliard when he was just eight years old, travelling to Manhattan from Brighton Beach for lessons. At 16 he played Debussy and Prokofiev for Arthur Rubenstein.
These days, he told us, his songs are written over a vodka martini or two, but those early hits which emanated from Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building were fuelled only by Coca-Cola and teenage effervescence as Sedaka teamed up with Howie Greenfield to write a string of hits that remain as fresh today as when they were written and which have been recorded by a roll-call of singers, from Frank Sinatra to Sheryl Crow via Elvis, Tom Jones, the Carpenters, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney and Connie Francis, and he’s featured in The Simpsons.
At the Albert Hall, the hits just kept on comin’: “The Queen of 1964”, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”, “Standing on the Inside”, “Our Last Song Together” (the last song he wrote with Greenfield following a 25-year partnership), “Solitaire”, “Where The Boys Are”, “Laughter in the Rain”, “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen”, “Next Door to An Angel”, “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “The Hungry Years”, “Betty Grable” and of course “Oh Carole”, written for his high school sweetheart Carole Klein, who the world came to know as Carole King. During a brief comfort break, a Cinebox video of “Calendar Girl” was played, Sedaka in red jacket and perma-tan, “the girls” in bikinis and furs: the American 1950s preserved in aspic. Returning, jacketless, to the stage, he quipped that “Miss January” had recently reintroduced herself to him in an LA club. “She looked so old,” he joked, pausing for a beat. “Of course I hadn’t changed at all!”
And vocally he hasn’t, for Sedaka’s is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure, the tessitura and timbre as distinctive as ever. The audience would have had him sing all night – and he looked as though he’d have been perfectly able to oblige. Long may he play on, his perfect miniatures bringing joy to our lives. Michael Eavis should book him for Glastonbury.
Overleaf: Watch Neil Sedaka play a medley of his greatest hits on BBC's The One Show
In the UK, the best-known version of “Shadows and Reflections” is by mod band The Action, who issued it as a single in June 1967. At that point, the north London outfit had merged their predisposition towards soul with a taste for American harmony pop and psychedelia. Covers of Byrds songs featured in their live set. The American song wasn’t originally theirs: it was co-written by Tandyn Almer, whose compositions were recorded by The Association, and had been issued in the States by Eddie Hodges and an obscure band called The Lownly Crowed.