Chris Cohen – Chris Cohen

My relationship with Chris Cohen's music began with ‘Odyssey’, a Cohen-penned track on Deerhoof’s The Runners Four, which remains one of my favourites in their formidable discography. (I was also lucky enough to see Deerhoof live during their Runners Four tour.) That song's gentle, lilting nature, at odds with the majority of Deerhoof's full-throttle garage-rock, struck a chord with me. I sought out his 2012 debut Overgrown Path thanks to Eleanor Friedberger's Baker’s Dozen piece on The Quietus – and I’ve followed Cohen’s output ever since.

A recent in-depth interview with Aquarium Drunkard focused on the influence of Cohen’s parents’ recent divorce on these songs. While there are references to his estranged father in gorgeous singles 'Edit Out' and 'Green Eyes', overall the album feels as much about coming to terms with one's place in the world and how we learn from each generation’s mistakes. What resonates with me most is that sense of longing for connection across time; the sinking feeling that you’ll never quite have the relationship with your family that you hoped for.

Part of the reason the backstory to this album resonates so strongly with me is that I lost my father to cancer in 2016. Although I now live in Australia and he's always lived back in England, I was lucky enough to spend two uninterrupted weeks with him before he became too frail. Even though there was plenty of unsaid stuff hanging between us, I feel like I came to terms with the fact that he wasn’t the man I wanted him to be. That feeling of acceptance, however painful, permeates this deeply empathetic LP.

The atmosphere of the album is typified by gently swaying opener ‘Song They Play’, which sounds like a cousin of As If Apart’s ‘The Mender’. The three lovely singles follow, including the spiralling bass-and-organ-driven groove of 'Sweet William', before folk staple 'House Carpenter' offers a welcome change of pace, its droning arrangement lulling the listener towards the end of side A after the dense harmonic shifts of the first four songs. Side B opens especially elegantly with 'Twice in a Lifetime', and album closer 'No Time To Say Goodbye' is heartbreakingly beautiful, buoyed heavenward by its beatific sax solo.

It's interesting to note that the album was mastered by legendary engineer Bernie Grundman, responsible for such classics as Steely Dan’s Aja. Chris Cohen has a wondrous depth and warmth, deft arrangements, and an intimate feel to Cohen's vocal delivery. Even though Cohen has an enviable melodic sensibility and plays the majority of the instruments with aplomb, there are tantalising glimpses of expansive new directions, such as the ending of 'What Can I Do', where there's a suggestion of a moody coda that's cruelly faded out. And while Cohen's wildly expressive guitar playing provides some searing counterpoint to the relatively serene songs, it would be amazing to hear where his songwriting could venture given further instrumental collaboration. (All of the guest musicians here make notable contributions, especially saxophonist Kasey Knudsen.)

Overall, Chris Cohen is another superb addition to Cohen's discography – and one I'll be revisiting for months to come. It's full of tuneful goodness, counterbalanced by a bittersweet edge, and I'm looking forward to receiving my vinyl in the mail.

[Chris Cohen is out now on Captured Tracks.] 

Feather Beds – Blooming

Michael Orange (The Star Department, Soft Bones) is a chef of the sublime, bringing familiar musical elements together so beautifully that it occasionally defies belief. Don’t get me wrong, the recipe is simple: impossibly dreamy washes of guitars, synths and other hard-to-identify textures, juxtaposed against crisp drum patterns. On recent single ‘Soft Yellow’, the real magic lies in the drop at 2:29 – the moment after the break when the beat returns, ratcheted up a notch, and the song starts to run away at a heady clip, chased by a gorgeous synth melody, raising the hairs on the back of your neck. Get a load of this:

Elsewhere, the momentum is sustained from the get-go by surges of guitars ('Drip Feed'), or is withheld in favour of vertiginous, atmospheric drifting ('Fear of Water'). While Feather Beds' debut The Skeletal System sounded more vulnerable and home-spun, Blooming feels lush and robust, able to carry the listener a significant distance, suspended aloft on clouds of ambient-pop.

The only criticism I could level at this release is that Michael’s vocal melodies tend to follow a similar contour from song to song, but when the overall feel of the album is this beatific, such nit-picking feels mean-spirited. Especially when not a moment is wasted across these 35 minutes. The only option is to go back for more.

And the more I listen to Blooming, the more it keeps, y’know, what’s the word...

[Blooming is released on Moderna Records on 27th October.]

Richard Dawson – Peasant

I don't know where we're going. What does our future hold? I worry about the world my daughter will inherit in the coming decades. During my journey to and from work, I observe my fellow commuters and feel alternately repulsed by them and deeply affectionate towards them. At our core we're all the same, and wherever we're going, we're going together – but our experience of that future will diverge wildly depending on where in society we find ourselves.

These divergent experiences are explored in vivid and moving detail on Richard Dawson's new album, Peasant. Individual tracks tell the story of different characters: 'Soldier', 'Weaver', 'Prostitute', 'Scientist', etc. However, no matter where in society these roles are played out, Dawson gives equal weight to their trials and tribulations. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. Everyone has their own cross to bear.

Dawson's wildly expressive voice and guitar playing have been a constant throughout his discography, but on Peasant we also find a massed choir of voices and strings, foot stomping and clapping, a herald of brass dissolving into tragi-comic parps. It's long, it's dark and dirty, and it's the most moving album I've heard in a fair while. 

For such a harrowing journey, Dawson has wisely front-loaded the album with the more accessible songs: the rousing 'Ogre', the sweetly sad 'Soldier', the hurtling 'Weaver'. From then on, although things become more knotty and bleak – especially during the nightmarish 'Scientist' and the climax of finale 'Masseuse' – individual songs have plenty of light and shade, whether it's Dawson's voice reaching delicately into the higher registers, meandering passages of slack-tuned guitar, or thunderous riffing that has more in common with metal than folk. It's a deeply disorientating and immersive journey.

While Peasant depicts plenty of suffering, the overall tone is one of hope and deep empathy. Ultimately, I'm reminded of a line from W.H. Auden's poem 'September 1, 1939': "We must love one another or die." Thank you, Richard, for creating such a raw, evocative and poetic album. Whether it will help us as we cascade towards oblivion is another matter... 

Gersey – What You Kill

For about a year, before Gersey vocalist/bassist Craig Jackson and his wife Camilla left Melbourne for L.A., I was lucky enough to play guitar in their band, The Sirens of Venice. Craig and Milli started writing songs together after Gersey guitarist Matt Davis moved to Paris, where he formed the instrumental band Bombazine Black, and things wound down for Gersey. Or so it seemed. Despite the friction of distance, the band reconvened for What You Kill, their fourth album since forming all the way back in 1997.

Before Craig left for L.A., Gersey (minus Matt) recorded 14 songs in Melbourne over the course of two weeks, with 12 making the final cut. The fact that the bulk of the album was completed quite quickly comes across in the easy, flowing nature of the performances, no doubt a product of the long-standing chemistry within the band. In Gersey’s soundworld, simplicity is a virtue, with chord changes and melodies unfolding naturally, unhurried. There's a sense of melancholic drift tempered by resilience, Craig's lyrics and vocal performances keeping things ambiguous, coloured equally with sadness and happiness. When they hit their straps, they're like the best bits of mid-tempo Mogwai with vocals – which is a very good thing.

  
For me, the highpoints of the album come when the band stretch out across six or seven minutes, such as on 'When You Hollow Out', 'Endlessness', and ‘She Knows’, a swooningly gorgeous waltz. On the more concise end of the songwriting spectrum are 'See Lucienne', and ‘Summer Days’, which evokes that mid-afternoon music festival grogginess, where you realise you’re happy and drunk, but dead on your feet with hours of bands left to watch – you can practically see the sun glinting off Jackson’s sunglasses.

The countless hours spent in rehearsal rooms and on stages across Australia, plus the new-found distance between members, could have resulted in an album that sounds tired and needless. Though the album stretches out across nearly an hour – so perhaps losing a couple of the less engaging cuts may have enlivened the whole – there's little here that doesn't sound vital and woozily ethereal. Like the gruesome monster on the cover, about to sink its teeth into a severed arm, Gersey still sound hungry.

Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool

Five years may be a long time to wait between albums, but for Radiohead to follow up their underrated eighth album The King of Limbs with A Moon Shaped Pool still feels miraculous. After the carefully planned teaser campaign – the flyers sent via snail mail, the whiteout of their social media accounts, the superb videos for advance singles 'Burn the Witch' and 'Daydreaming' – Radiohead's ninth album is deeply beguiling and occasionally overwhelming. 

The first surprise was the alphabetical tracklisting. A lucky accident or reverse engineering? Nothing with this band feels accidental, so I'd guess the latter. The second surprise was the generous running time of 53 minutes. Who the hell releases an album longer than 4o minutes at this time of fast-click attention deficit? Thankfully, A Moon Shaped Pool is more than worthy of focused, album-length listening; indeed, it feels neglectful to begin playing this album unless I can give it my full attention. 

My first impression was how well it works as a whole. The feeling it left me with was similar to my first listen of Portishead's cinematic Dummy – I felt like I'd experienced a profound and painstakingly crafted work of art, undoubtedly beautiful but emotionally heavy. Comparing this album to Radiohead's previous work, what's most immediately apparent is how different it sounds to not only its predecessor, but also their most widely revered releases, OK Computer and Kid A. There's plenty of piano, strings and choral voices, and not much in the way of effected guitars or fretboard histrionics. Even Thom's vocal performances are, on the whole, pretty restrained. Its closest cousin in their discography is probably In Rainbows, my personal favourite.

In terms of structure, the album feels 'circular', echoing the cover art, with the music radiating out from the centre in concentric waves. 'Glass Eyes' is the gorgeous, glistening sphere around which the rest of the album orbits. Among heavily filtered piano and a subtle, aching string arrangement, the lyrics tell a simple tale of arriving at a destination via train only to feel alienated – so the protagonist takes a walk out into nature to regroup.

Either side of the centre are two of the album's most upbeat, electric numbers, both of which were performed live during the band's 2012 tour. 'Ful Stop' reins in some of the hurtling urgency of its live incarnation, especially in the first half, but still manages to seethe and throb with almost sickening malevolence before erupting into a head-nodding krautrock groove. 'Identikit' has evolved notably in the studio since being played live, and wasn't immediately convincing on early listens; the dubby treatments, choir and itchy guitar solo all felt a bit 'remixed'. Thankfully, repeat listens have revealed the song's dynamism and winning melodies. 

Step out from the centre again to find the pretty, open-tuned folk of 'Desert Island Disk' and 'The Numbers' (previously known as 'Silent Spring'), which Thom Yorke debuted in Paris last December. Then, either side of these songs are two of my favourites. 'Decks Dark' is reminiscent of 'Subterranean Homesick Alien', with some fantastic bass playing from Colin Greenwood and splashes of spring reverb on the rhythm guitars. 'Present Tense', which Thom has been playing solo since 2009, is backed by a shuffling samba rhythm and swaddled in eerie tape echo treatments. 

'Daydreaming' is utterly devastating, especially when accompanied by Paul Thomas Anderson's video, which has brought me to tears more than once. While plenty has already been written online about the fact Thom is saying "half my life" at the song's menacing conclusion, I feel it's more likely he's referring to his time within the band than his relationship with the mother of his two children, especially because the song also features the line, "We are just happy to serve you". Penultimate track 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief' has taken the longest to reveal its charms, but is now sinking in nicely.

Finally, at the album's extremities, where Radiohead often position their most startling songs, we have the two oldest cuts. Addictive single 'Burn the Witch', supposedly dating back to the sessions for Kid A, scythes through the upper registers with its col legno string arrangements and soaring chorus. A long-awaited studio version of 'True Love Waits', debuted live back in 1995 (!), closes out the album on an elegiac note, with a similarly waterlogged piano tone to 'Daydreaming'. 

While it's easy to read the personal backstory that will no doubt have coloured the creation of this album – whether Thom's separation or the death of producer Nigel Godrich's father – Radiohead have never been a band to be taken so literally. If anything, some of Thom's lyrics suggest a potential environmental theme, which is also reflected in Stanley Donwood's recently posted artwork, with what looks like an aerial view of a planet flooded, engulfed in flames, swirling with pollution or smothered in vegetation.

Ultimately, like all enduring art, A Moon Shaped Pool is open to interpretation and richly rewards close attention. It's a dark, swirling vortex of glorious songcraft that reflects our hopes, our fears, our vulnerable, aching humanity.

[A Moon Shaped Pool is available digitally now, and on vinyl and CD on 17th June.]

Shearwater – Jet Plane and Oxbow

When I first moved to Melbourne and joined a band, I received some advice I shouldn't have heeded. After our first gig, a friend's wife recommended that I face the crowd more and perform in a way that acknowledged someone was watching. (Admittedly, I was playing in an instrumental band, which can be notoriously boring to watch unless there are visuals.) I tried being more animated for a couple of the gigs that came after, but it felt weird and unnatural, so I gave up and concentrated on playing the music well, hoping this would be enough for anyone watching.

What's this got to do with Shearwater? Well, this new album sounds like Jonathan Meiburg is self-conscious that more people than ever will be listening to his music, all of whom want to be impressed – and few of them will be paying for the privilege. Like its superb predecessor Animal Joy (2012), and the disposable covers album Fellow Travelers (2013) that followed, Jet Plane and Oxbow is released on Sub Pop. The stakes are high. It sounds like Meiburg may have considered that he needs to go big or go home. (He does have a parallel career as an ornithologist, so if Shearwater tanks, he could do that instead?) The promotional emails touting this release implored Shearwater fans to preorder, especially if they want the band to tour Australia. (I live in Australia, I'd love to see the band live, so my preorder dollars were immediately thrown their way.)

As much as I applaud the band's perspicacity, something feels awry. Let's suppose, for a moment, that it's possible to create a mid-tier indie-rock album in the 21st century without paying any attention to what's going on in the music industry, or of hoping to recoup the hours and dollars invested. Let's suppose that this music was created because its creators had a burning desire to do so – that this music needed to be made. Then, let's listen to Jet Plane and Oxbow and wonder how Shearwater got here, to these particular eleven songs. Much like Wild Beasts and Lower Dens – two bands whose recent albums (Present Tense and Escape From Evil, respectively) I also eagerly anticipated – there have been pre-release murmurings of a more '80s-sounding direction for Shearwater. First single 'Quiet Americans' seemed to suggest as much, with its prominent synth lines, strident drum sounds and in-your-face production.

Indeed, in an interview with Michael Azerrad on the Sub Pop website, Jonathan Meiburg makes reference to Bowie's Scary Monsters, Eno and Byrne's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, and Talking Heads' Remain In Light as influences. Great albums all, but their relationship with Jet Plane feels tangential at best. Those albums may have inspired Meiburg to employ synths, rototoms and gated snares, but these instrumental additions feel superficial.

What seems to have changed is Meiburg's confidence in occasionally reaching for a sound that could best be described as 'stadium rock'. When this confidence over-reaches, I can't help but cringe in embarrassment. 'Pale Kings' is the worst culprit, its breakneck banjos falling over themselves to keep up with the fist-pumping pace, the songwriting falling short of Meiburg's ambition. As far as I'm concerned, the song should never have made the final cut, which is especially perplexing when more worthy songs, such as 'Evidence' (the demo of which features on the Headwaters podcast), were abandoned. Later in the album, 'Wildlife in America' is a bland and uninspiring piano ballad, and 'Radio Silence' strives for a motorik momentum that soon wears out its welcome, dragging on for nearly seven minutes.

That said, when Jet Plane hits home, its power is undeniable. 'Backchannels' is stunning, with a guitar break reminiscent of Talk Talk's sublime Laughing Stock. 'Filaments' sounds like a re-work of Radiohead's 'Bangers and Mash', all bass filth and percussive clatter. New single 'Only Child' has elegance and restraint on its side, with a lovely turnaround on the bass. 'Glass Bones' is an anthemic rock song done right, its riff down and dirty enough to cut through my skepticism. And glorious closer 'Stray Light At Clouds Hill' injects some welcome space into the mix, its vocals sent boomeranging through a tape delay.

Listening to the Headwaters podcast, it sounds like Meiburg and his band developed the songs on Jet Plane through jamming. However, little on this album conveys these origins. Somewhere along the way, something has slipped off kilter, taking Shearwater in an unsatisfying direction for such a great band. With a frontman as intelligent and articulate as Jonathan Meiburg, some of the musical decisions here are frustratingly inexplicable. My expectations of this release were high, but like Spoon's latest album They Want Your Soul, what could've been a great album is simply a quite good one.

Roommate – Make Like

Make Like

Amid the devalued, ever-evolving music stream, most craft are bright and flashy yet flimsy and insubstantial, offering little more than brief respite from the waves before they dissolve into nothing or sink from view. Precious few craft give pause, feel solid or lovingly constructed, make you feel you could sail in them a while. Roommate's Make Like – which came to my attention thanks to a glowing review on Coke Machine Glow – has stood me in excellent stead for weeks now, its reassuringly lived-in, woody timbre holding me close like an old friend. I have no plans to abandon this ship anytime soon.

Roommate

Roommate is the songwriting vehicle of Kent Lambert, now four albums deep. Kent and his band – including Sam Wagster on guitar, Gillian Lisée on bass, and Seth Vanek on drums – have brought all their sensitivity and expertise to bear on these eight songs. As much as I'm warming to their preceding albums – Songs The Animals Taught Us (2006), We Were Enchanted (2008) and Guilty Rainbow (2011) – the more I listen to Roommate's discography, the more Make Like feels like a culmination of all that's come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose. Just shy of forty minutes, the album is astute, economical, meticulously performed and produced, and deeply affecting, both lyrically and musically. It's a thoroughly satisfying whole, an unselfconsciously classic-sounding record with masterful segues and a neat division into two sides that no doubt rewards listening on vinyl (the album was mastered and cut by the legendary Rashad Becker). In what remains of 2015, it's quickly assuming the same prominence in my life as Adult Jazz's Gist Is had in 2014.

What's most beguiling is how the album reminds me of several other artists and bands I love without being obviously influenced by anything in particular. At moments I hear the measured cadence and melodic nous of early Shins; the aching piano-driven beauty of Automatic For The People-era REM; the stoic magic of the sorely missed Sparklehorse. However, its true beauty, and singularity, only reveals itself with intimacy.

Make Like gets its (secret) claws in early thanks to something as simple as a drum beat. Back in the early '00s, I took a road trip across the US with my close friend Will. The album on continuous rotation during that trip was The Sebadoh, which kicks off with the great Jason Loewenstein song 'It's All You'. The drum beat that begins Make Like's opener 'People On Screens' is similarly catchy. Drum sounds tend to be fetishised to an absurd degree, but my instinctive response to this beat is to get fired up, ready to stick around for the duration.

As a commuter myself, the image of 'People On Screens' is all too familiar: half-asleep humans glued to their smartphones, unable to bear being alone with themselves, semi-engaged with shallow, distracting content. The song crams in enough devious production details (shakers, synths, effects) to make Spoon jealous, before building to an agitated crescendo of flanged guitars. Then, a segue into 'Secret Claw', which cements the feeling of experiencing something special, its eerie swells of brass and piano akin to a giant existential yawn.

Despite being one of the least musically dynamic tracks, 'Dancer Howl' is easily the most lyrically affecting – and seems to hold the key to the themes of the whole record: fear, dishonesty, redemption, all wrapped up in the mystery of human stupidity. Towards the song's climax, as Gillian Lisée joins Lambert on vocals, handclaps crunching disconsolately behind them, the atmosphere is close to overwhelming. Rounding out the first side with peals of aching pedal steel, 'Curses' features a winning vibraphone and piano melody that vividly reminds me of something I can't quite put my finger on (dEUS, perhaps?).

The first half of side two is unashamedly gorgeous. 'Wilderness' evolves from a desolate piano ballad into a delirious, widescreen extravaganza akin to The Besnard Lakes, before seguing into the fidgety 'Old Golden', with its anxious refrain, "I am choking on an old golden rule". While the closing two songs took the longest to win me over, they end the album on an ambiguous note, inevitably sending me back to 'People On Screens'; indeed, the lyrics of 'Riot Size' suggest this circularity with the lyrics, "Shiny things on tiny screens inviting us to fight, to justify". Plus, the way 'Tri Twi' weaves its tapestry of jazzy flutes and wah-wah guitar suggests a hazy, cinematic dissolve, leaving one indelible line to ponder at the album's climax: "I've been you / One day you will have been me, too".

A thread of heartening resilience runs through Make Like's atmosphere of confusion and frustration, while the balance it sustains between the widescreen and the intimate rewards repeat listens with fresh revelations. Ultimately, perhaps the single enduring idea I take away from this extraordinary album is a line from 'Dancer Howl': "Don't make like hate, when you're really just afraid".   

Make Like is available now on cassette, vinyl and digital download.

Jim O'Rourke – Simple Songs

There he is (I assume it's him). There's his back, anyway. He's shunning us. Or is he musing on something that lurks within the cover's inky black expanse? Either way, he's smoking a ciggie, dimly lit in red and green (is he stopping or going?). Bucket hat on. Cardigan snug. Oh Jim, you probably hate this new album already and it's only just being released...

He may be notorious for disowning his musical output, including my beloved Eureka, but I trust Jim O'Rourke. I trust that whatever musical direction he goes in – whether one-time member of Sonic Youth, collaborating with experimentalists like Oren Ambarchi, or releasing ambient drone via Bandcamp – there'll be something going on I can sink my teeth into. His Drag City releases have always been the most accessible, and Simple Songs is probably the most palatable of the lot. Exquisitely palatable, in fact.

I like the way Jim is unashamed of pulling classic '70s rock and MOR moves. Admittedly, the melodic flourishes he throws in here and there are probably tongue-in-cheek references – I'm sure I picked up some direct 'quotations' of Led Zeppelin's 'The Rain Song' and Queen's 'Don't Stop Me Now' on 'End Of The Road' – but it's all handled deftly, so it never comes across as pat. With typical O'Rourkian verve, these songs are far from simple. Knowingly absurd at times, but never resorting to cheap shots. He's too damn good for that.

On a purely sonic level, Simple Songs is delicious – and eminently crankable. Jim's spoken at length about his working process when it comes to recording acoustic instruments, and Simple Songs has the same wondrous instrumental depth as The Visitor, mixed with some of the playful Southern boogie of Insignificance. Then, when you start registering his usual wry, misanthropic lyrics, laying low in the mix to keep you guessing, the sour balances out the sweet and the whole cake slips down real smooth. The thirty-eight minutes fly by.

Straight out of the gate, 'Friends With Benefits' and 'That Weekend' are two of the most immediately satisfying vocal-led songs he's yet released. He riffs all over the shop, cramming in enough melodic ideas to fill an entire album. The Supertramp-esque 'Half Life Crisis' lays on the snark ("I can tell from your face you're a degenerative case"!) and some tasty unison guitar leads from the Thin Lizzy songbook, before 'Hotel Blue' and 'These Hands' dial back the groove for some wonderfully languid piano and pedal steel. 

There are no production tricks to generate interest; the songwriting, arrangements and dynamics hold me rapt. There's something deliciously immersive and pillowy about the way the album flows, but when Jim lets rip, you know about it. His throaty roar of "All seats are taken!" during 'Blue Hotel' sounds genuinely impassioned, and the second half of finale 'All Your Love' is basically an excuse to go full-prog on the drums – in a very precise and musical way, of course. 

It's been a six-year wait since The Visitor, so a new Jim O'Rourke solo album is a cause for celebration. Thankfully, Simple Songs is an achingly beautiful salvo from a master craftsman. No doubt this will be my favourite album of 2015 – or I'll eat Jim's bucket hat.

Simple Songs is available from Drag City in LP, CD and FLAC formats from 19th May. 

Fred Thomas – All Are Saved

Even though Fred Thomas has released dozens of albums, whether solo or in his band Saturday Looks Good To Me (plus numerous other outfits), I'd not heard any of them before All Are Saved, his latest on Polyvinyl. If any of his previous albums are even half as good as this gorgeous, warped gem, I'll have a long and fruitful time digging back through his discography.

Listening to this album feels like rooting around under the sofa cushions for the remote control, only to find a photo of your beloved departed dog, an unopened bottle of beer, a dusty cassette compilation made by an old friend, a dog-eared journal, and a pack of gum. It's surprising, ridiculous, hilarious, infuriating, brilliant, silly, beautiful, profound, knowingly throwaway and deadly serious. All Are Saved is truly an unexpected delight.

It starts and ends with songs about dogs, littered with tape hiss, cymbal crashes and tape echo. The lyrics – some of the funniest and most heartbreaking I've heard in ages – either tumble out in torrents of half-remembered ideas and f-words, or are measured carefully in Slint-like cadences, half-spoken, half-sung. So all the words don't become too much, Thomas throws in juicy instrumental synth confections 'July' and 'Thesis (Lear)' to keep things spacious and radiant.

While offering up a few reference points helps me understand where this fits in my personal history of musical enthusiasm – 'When They Built The Schools' is Radiohead's 'There There' half-asleep on the couch; 'Cops Don't Care Pt. II' is a prime Tobin Sprout cut from a lost '90s Guided By Voices album; and 'Monster Movie' is Elliott Smith with a backbone – the baffling thing about this album is that the deeper I dig into what I love about it, the more elusive its appeal becomes. All I can do is put it on again, writhe around in its warm recesses and itch-scratching edges, and let Thomas's inspired outpourings work their dark magic.

[All Are Saved will be released on vinyl, cassette, CD and digital by Polyvinyl on 7th April.]

Wild Beasts – 'Sweet Spot'

As if to put paid to any speculation that they've abandoned guitars completely on fourth album Present Tense, Wild Beasts' new track 'Sweet Spot' deploys both guitars and synths in a sensuous, slowburning way, gently ramping up anticipation of the album's release at the end of this week.



What makes Wild Beasts so good is all over this song: the interleaving of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming's distinctive yet beautifully complementary voices; arpeggiated guitar parts that simultaneously suspend the song in place and twirl it elegantly; the nagging sense that the song will serve as a small yet essential part of the bigger picture to come. In itself, it doesn't really go anywhere radical, but the subtle melodic pirouettes behind Fleming's voice and the cascading vocal harmonies are rather elegant and lovely.

What I am cynical about, however, is the deployment of synth. It's nothing too egregious, but it feels a bit anticlimactic given how recent interviews with the band have highlighted their eager adoption of synths on the new album. The tone of the synth in this track feels a bit flat, and features too prominently in the mix – and the song stops abruptly after the synth hints at a new direction towards the song's conclusion. Sadly, Wild Beasts appear to be the latest in a long line of guitar bands waxing rhapsodic about the inspirational power of the synthesizer and how it enlivened their compositional process. The question of whether it works for them will be answered once Present Tense is released. But is this synth rite of passage something that every band has to go through, even a band as singular and seemingly abundant in inspiration as Wild Beasts?