Metronomy – Love Letters
Metronomy’s Mercury nomination for their third album, The English Riviera (2011), gave a giddily high-profile to what had begun as Devonian Joseph Mount’s bedroom-produced, solo project. Their breakthrough’s thin-voiced, faintly melancholy English dance-pop seemed to bracket them with Hot Chip, following a progressively more anaemic lineage that began with early New Order. Mount is an easy-going soul, but interviews suggest he sometimes smarts at being underestimated, fuelling an ambition to progress and prove his doubters wrong. Love Letters, recorded to tape in east London’s analogue, White Stripes-favoured studio Toe Rag, certainly rings the changes impressively. It’s Metronomy’s best work to date. Read the full review on The Independent
Aloe Blacc – Lift Your Spirit
The most contemporary R&B of the productions is on trend with the latest disco revivalist movement, which finds its expression with the Pharrell produced four-on-the-floor of “Love is the Answer” and would be right at home with the butterfly collars and bellbottom flairs decorating any ‘70s roller rink. On the socially conscious single, Blacc is delivering his best Bill Withers at the discotheque impression. The unabashed soul continues with plenty of triumphant strings and hip hop beats for the fist-pumping choral anthem, “The Man,” an epic song already featured on the national Beatz by Dre headphones commercial. The testosterone propulsions and more palatable braggadocio that thread much of the male-centric Lift Your Spirit is at its most cinematic on the funky “Solider in the City” which sports the kind of Blaxploitation scoring elements that personified such film soundtracks as Shaft and Trouble Man, if slightly brighter in tone. Read the full review on SoulTracks
Elbow – Take off & Landing of Everything
The sound of change is all over the band’s sixth album. During the recording of The Take off And Landing Of Everything, Garvey’s 10 year relationship ended, and although this isn’t a “break-up album” in the way that Leaders Of The Free World so explicitly was, it’s impossible not to hear the sound of the recently heartbroken in there (listen to a line like “I am the boy who loved her so in every song” and try to imagine it’s not autobiographical). Most surprisingly, these most Mancunian of bands have a new city in their creative eyeline: New York. Read the full review on Music OHM