The Fat Angel Sings

At the very beginning of the opening track of Sufjan’s tenth studio LP, he softly murmurs the couplets “Goodbye evergreen / You know I love you / But everything heaven sent / Must burn out in the end”. It’s a sentiment that’s poignant enough in and of itself, but, upon learning that the record is dedicated to his late partner Evans Richardson – something the artist only shared on the day of its release – these words assume a near heartbreaking significance. Although ‘Will Anybody Ever Love Me?’ is the most direct summation of the album’s mournful vulnerability, this thread is one that’s delicately weaved throughout its ten tracks – a sonic tribute to the pain of having lost, and the beauty of having loved in the first place.

A tough year for Stevens, as he continues to recover from Guillain-Barré syndrome and learns to walk again, with “Javelin” dedicated to his partner Evans Richardson, who died in April. Stevens’ tenth solo LP leaned hard into his singer-songwriter smarts, privileging the chamber-folk of 2015’s “Carrie & Lowell” over more conceptual tricksiness. Mostly played and assembled by himself, “Javelin” was nevertheless a many-layered, ineffably moving masterpiece.

On “Javelin”, there are more sonic flourishes than his early, folkier turns, but this is still where he whispers in your ear stories of the pain of heartbreak and the resiliency of the same heart to carry on. And just when you think he’s alone, a chorus joins him, as on “Everything that Rises,” to remind you that no one is truly alone. 

‘Javelin’ by Sufjan Stevens, released on CD, LP & Digital October 6th, 2023

One-time Smog collaborator Sarabeth Tucek returns after a decade away with a double album that works best when it’s spiky, In a year of auspicious comebacks, the return of American singer songwriter Sarabeth Tucek – now operating as SBT – was an easy one to miss. But the first album in 12 years from the former Bill Callahan backing vocalist and Bob Dylan support act was a stealth classic. Tucek’s a Los Angeles resident, but it was her Manhattan, New York upbringing that often informed the epiphanies of double album “Joan Of All”, its skinny, grimy chugs indebted to Lou Reed.

“Joan of All” is more exciting when SBT leans into weirdness. “13th Street #1” recalls her best work, spiky narrative cadence sparking against taut, Lou Reed rock, made explicit by lyrics about listening to his Coney Island Baby. Shame it isn’t joined by alternate version “13th Street #2”, as the album would be stronger with more of Reed’s gimlet-eyed relentlessness.

Sarabeth Tucek emerges from a decade-long hibernation with this new double-album “Joan of All” under the new moniker SBT – a longtime nickname given to her by the many musicians she has worked with throughout her career. After retreating from the fevered pace of the record business to concentrate on other creative endeavors, Sarabeth began to piece together the music that would eventually become her most ambitious, personal project yet – the sprawling double-album “Joan Of All”, via her own freshly-minted imprint Ocean Omen.

Sarabeth Tucek officially broke onto the music scene 2003 performing a series of spellbinding duets with Bill Callahan on the acclaimed Smog album “Supper”. This was swiftly followed by a memorable appearance in the prize-winning Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary DiG! Sarabeth also contributed material to their 2005 EP release, “We Are the Radio”. One of Sarabeth’s compositions covered by the band on that EP, “Seer,” would later be retitled and released in 2006 as Tucek’s debut single, “Something for You”, which became Steve Lamacq’s Single Of The Week on BBC Radio 6 Music.

Her self-titled debut album produced by Luther Russell and Ethan Johns hit stores the following year and garnered rave reviews in the press, leading her to supporting Bob Dylan and unfaltering support at the BBC. In 2011, Sarabeth followed up her extraordinary debut with a raw, uncompromising album entitled “Get Well Soon”, praised as an unflinching meditation on the subject of grief.

Out of Andy Fletcher’s passing, Dave Gahan and Martin Gore grasped a strange new imperative for Depeche Mode: after over 40 years in a band together, Gahan told us, “We had to find a way of becoming friends.” Strengthened by shared grief and renewed purpose, “Memento Mori” became the best Depeche LP in many years, a monumental reassertion of core electro-rock values, with cathedral-sized tunes and stainless engineering by 2023’s go-to producer, James Ford (Blur).

The rumours are true, new Depeche on the way. The band begun work on the album in the pandemic in 2020. The result is “Memento Mori”, their follow up to “Spirit”. 

“Personally, I’ve never been happier,” Jason Williamson recently told MOJO, but his herculean annoyance at UK life – “on this melting tyre of depression” – was as pointed as ever on the Mods’ latest album their 12th electropunk tirade. Williamson taking aim not just at his rulers, but his “white bloke aggro band” contemporaries.

Sleaford Mods performing live on KEXP from The Triple Door. Recorded April 19th, 2023

Songs: UK GRIM On The Ground Pit 2 Pit Force 10 From Navarone Tilldipper Mork n Mindy DIwhy Tory Kong Jobseeker Tweet Tweet Tweet Jason Williamson – Vocals Andrew Fearn – Music

Sleaford Mods – Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

The album distills my years of musical, political, and artistic life with these genre-breaking songs,” says The Raincoats’ Gina Birch of her first-ever solo album. “It’s a personal diary using sounds and lyrics, full of fun, rage, and storytelling.” That about sums it up. Producer Youth has a way of coaxing the best out of artists, creating a comfortable atmosphere that allows them to be themselves, and it’s clear that he and Birch hit it off. “I Play My Bass Loud” is terrific, funny, whipsmart, angry and never less than entertaining — a protest album that doesn’t forget to dance. Songs play like signboards, but feel more inclusive and defiant than didactic, even on a JAMC-ish, hissing force-of-nature song like “I Am Rage.”

Forty-six years after she’d co-founded The Raincoats, painter/ video-maker/post-punk pioneer Birch’s solo debut was a vigorous low-end manifesto, a celebration of feminist energy and bass moves (Youth co-produced, with heavy reggae accents). The vibes were righteous throughout, as Birch hymned Pussy Riot, denounced stilettos, roped in Thurston Moore for the Breeders-ish anthem “Wish I Was You”, and corralled five female bassists for the suitably rousing title track.

Almost certainly the only album in this list with titles in Old Norse (Blómi meaning “to bloom”), Sundfør’s first in six years was a widescreen meditation on family, spanning her linguist/theologian grandfather, Kjell Aartun, to her own daughter. Often ethereal, sometimes folk-inflected, at the heart of “Blómi” was a classical take on the piano ballad, with a gravitas that sat halfway between Kate Bush’s Aerial and Rufus Wainwright’s Want One.

It’s been six years since Sundfør’s last album, the critically acclaimed “Music For People In Trouble”. The time gap has been productive for the songwriter who became a mother, delved into regenerative farming and recorded more music. The forthcoming release is signposted by new two singles, “Alyosha” and “Leikara Ljóð“. These songs reveal different facets of Sundfør, an auteur, capable of producing impeccable pop tracks as well as haunting experimental compositions.

Dexys are back! 11 years since the release of their last album of original music, the acclaimed “One Day I’m Going to Soar”, the band return with a stunning new record. “The Feminine Divine” is Dexys’ fifth album of original material produced once again by Pete Schwier, along with acclaimed session musician and producer Toby Chapman. After taking some time out to refocus his energy, Kevin Rowland came back to music with a fresh perspective and new-found positivity. A personal, if not strictly autobiographical, record portraying a man whose views have evolved over time. Not just on women, but the whole concept of masculinity he had been raised with: an education and an un-learning that is traced across the arc of “The Feminine Divine” with dizzying effect. With two tracks on the album with Goddess in the title in ‘My Goddess Is’ and ‘Goddess Rules’, it’s no surprise Kevin chose to use a painting inspired by Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes, for the artwork. 

But I heard it and I have to say this – I think “The Feminine Divine” is a masterpiece recording, a brave beautiful statement where all the songs bar one are wonderfully constructed, inventive and totally irresistible. And then there is the other song….“My Submission” I believe to be the greatest song Dexys have ever produced. It is beyond categorisation. It is the music of the spheres, holy and sacred and truly other-worldly. But honestly, this album is an absolute gem.

The new single “Coming Home” taken from the forthcoming album “The Feminine Divine” out 28th July on 100% Records. The record’s first half is full of music hall-esque swagger, much of it written with original Dexys’ trombonist Big Jim Paterson. The second side of the record is like nothing Dexys have done before. A saucy, synth-heavy cabaret, written in collaboration with Sean Read and Mike Timothy. It’s steamy, fizzing and sultry, at times doom-laden and heavy and at other times raunchy and funky. Quite a heady mix.  

Long time Dexys fans have long been primed to expect the unexpected. Almost from the moment they first appeared, as the 70s became the 80s, it was apparent that this was a band that would run entirely according to their leader Kevin Rowland’s own, occasionally imponderable, internal logic. The release of a new Dexys album invariably heralded complete change: a radically different look, a new sound, a new line-up.

But even said diehard fans might raise an eyebrow at “The Feminine Divine”. It is not so much that it doesn’t look, or occasionally sound, like any previous Dexys album. The cover drawing of the Hawaiian goddess Pele looks as if it belongs on the sleeve of a psychedelic trance compilation; there are musical diversions into sleazy Prince-ish electronic funk, jangling Balearic house pianos and slow-motion breakbeats topped with spoken word vocals that bring to mind early 70s Serge Gainsbourg – but diversions are par for the course with Dexys. It’s not that Rowland spends a considerable chunk of the album excoriating his younger self, the Rowland who made the albums that diehard fans first fell in love with. That is par for the course, too, at least in Dexys’ latter-day incarnation – their first album in 27 years, 2012’s “One Day I’m Going to Soar”, was a self-flagellating exploration of Rowland’s failings, filled with self-doubt and dissatisfaction.

No, it’s that fans might be surprised “The Feminine Divine” actually exists. After all, after the release of 2016’s “Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul”, Rowland announced that he was done with music. The solitary Dexys’ release since was a radically remixed version of their biggest-selling album, 1982’s “Too-Rye-Ay”.

But clearly Rowland did a lot of rethinking during his time away: the songs on “The Feminine Divine” are meant to display a 180-degree turnaround specifically in Rowland’s attitude to women. It opens with a song he wrote in 1991, when he was in the grip of a debilitating addiction to cocaine. “The One That Loves You” bristles with condescending protective blokey energy – “You’re a very strong woman, but you’ll need my love,” sings Rowland, before offering to beat someone up on her behalf – set to the kind of perky mid-70s soul that is the initial half of the album’s default setting. You can picture these songs in an old Top 40, keeping suitable company with Billy Ocean’s Love Really Hurts Without You or Linda Carr’s High Wire. It is followed by a succession of songs that either examine Rowland’s mental health, frequently in a call-and-response style that effectively creates a dialogue between the singer and the backing vocalists, or repudiate sexism in favour of worshipping women as goddesses. “This is the only way, the way it has to be / Women have been put down for too long and it’s up to you and me,” sings Rowland on the title track, one of several lyrics you might decry as painfully earnest and on the nose were it not for the fact that complaining about painful earnestness on a Dexys album.

More questionable are the places “The Feminine Divine” goes in its second half. By “Goddess Rules” more spoken word, this time over the aforementioned sleazy electro-funk – not being sexist and worshipping women as goddesses seems to have transmuted into being a sexually submissive masochist, which feels like quite a leap. Then again, every album Rowland has made since 1985’s “Don’t Stand Me Down” has had at least one WTF moment that seems designed to leave even the most devoted fan scratching their head. “Don’t Stand Me Down’s” long journey from object of widespread ridicule to enshrinement as a wildly inventive masterpiece – and the similar journey of his 1999 solo album “My Beauty” acts as a kind of insurance policy for some of Rowland’s weirder trains of thought: if it all made sense in the long run before, who’s to say it won’t happen again? Besides, “The Feminine Divine” pulls back from the WTF brink. The piano ballad “My Submission” and the subdued electronic funk of closer “Dance With Me” are exceptionally beautiful songs that perfectly showcase Rowland’s mature voice: devoid of the old tics and yelps that betrayed the influence of Chairmen of the Board frontman General Johnson, richer, warmer.

Dexys latest “The Feminine Divine” album, out 28th July.

This is a pop record for tired times. Sugared with bits of shatterproof glass to put more crack in your strap. At long last, verse / chorus. A weathered thesaurus. This is OSEES bookend sound. Early grade garage pop meets protosynth punk suicide-repellant. Have a whack at the grass or listen while flat on your ass.

“A pop record for cruel times,” was John Dwyer’s sell for his 28th Osees album and, after the gnarly fundamentalist hardcore of 2022’s “A Foul Form”, he’d at least re-orientated his main band towards new wave. Devo sounded like a core influence on the frenzied synth-punk, as well as echoes of an old Dwyer side-project, Damaged Bug. Also noted: Dwyer’s other 2023 wheeze, a percussion improv outfit called Posh Swat.

Heaps of electronic whirling accelerants to gum up your cheapskate broadband. You can find your place here at long last. All are welcome from the get go to the finale…a distant crackling transmission of 80s synth last-dance-of-the-night tune for your lost loves. Suffering from Politic amnesia? Bored of AI-generated pop slop? Then this one is for you, our friends. Wasteland wanderer, stick around. Love y’all. For fans of Teutonic synth punk and Thee Oh Sees (who the fuck are they?)” — John Dwyer

available via In The Red Records.

If the Texan singer songwriter’s 2020 debut, “Optimism”, seemed adjacent to acid-folk, this second album provided a clearer angle on her spectral, literary art. “The Window Is The Dream” was no less subtle, but its spare and considered moves emphasised a closer affinity to art-pop than folk tradition: the vocals unforced, uncanny; the guitar lines a precise needlepoint. A candlelit Cate Le Bon, perhaps, or even a Lana Del Rey raised on Smog albums.

“The Window is the Dream” began as a failed poem. I wrote it as I was waking up… the last thing I want in this breath of existence / is not to throw myself into it / as any bird might stop flying / when the window is the dream. I think the original line was “toad breath.” My classmates were nice about it, even the teacher.

No Quarter Records Released on: 1st March 2023