Starring
Bell X1, Haakon Ellingsen, Heavy Moss, Joe Goddard, Johnny Barr, Peel Dream Magazine, The Rifles, Sofia Kourtesis
The Front Runners
Merciful Hour : Bell X1
Bell X1’s 2023 album is ambitious, complex and utterly gorgeous.
It’s been out for a while, but it’s good to listen to it away from the marketing and promotional interviews. If I’ve learned one thing about Bell X1, it’s that they are best heard without any expectations. They shift their sound constantly from one album to the next, each album more intricate and sculpted than what came before.
Of course, the logical end point of that view is that you should stop reading this now, and go and listen to it fresh.
Well, go on then.
With Bell X1, you feel that every single song can be special once you’ve heard it a couple of times. And you know that hearing the songs live will reveal hidden depths and layers that persuade you that you’re listening to something sublime. Their songs are complex, but never unnecessarily so. Their sounds and arrangements reward careful listening. As soon as you voice that view though, they produce something with the beautiful simplicity of ‘As The Demons Have Their Say’.
As you allow yourself to sink into them, the beauty in these songs becomes more and more apparent. On ‘Light My Way’ you can pick up something gentle like crickets chirping or fireflies quietly buzzing. It transforms the tone in a flicker.
Listening to these songs is like being immersed in a warm, pastel coloured mist. They're less widescreen songs and more songs that give you 360 degree panoramic vision. They switch from a deeply felt romantic guitar based sound to a string driven approach in a moment. It never sounds quite as you expect it to sound, and it always sounds better.
They create new sounds and rare images. ‘Skipping Without A Rope’ is as at home with experimentation as it is with nursery rhyme melodies. It opens the album and wrong foots you from the off. ‘Lobster’ and ‘Space Walk’ also demonstrate how music that sounds genuinely different can also be completely accessible.
The band have been together for over 25 years now. They’re quieter now, slower, and by their own admission they’re more understanding and compassionate. All that works its way into the music. They make songs that speak to people lyrically and emotionally.
Bell X1 - the sound of great pop from world class songsmiths.
Taster Track : Haint Blue
Harmonics : Joe Goddard
There’s not much I can say about Joe Goddard’s album from last year ‘Harmonics’. It’s perfect, and I choose that word carefully.
It’s hard to review something in which you can discern no weak spots. This album sounds effortless and glorious. It’s the curse of the magician for his hours of hard work and painful nights honing his art and skills to be described as effortless, but that’s the magic.
Goddard has distilled sunshine and happiness into song. He’s done that before, but not across a whole album to such a consistently high level. He rules the world of chilled dance, in all its clothing. He draws in soul, funk, synthpop and his own legacy to make something completely his own. There’s a softness in his music that is unusual in a dance act but immediately pleasurable. Perhaps we should coin the word Goddardian to describe his disciples.
When you attain this level, how do you continue to improve? How do you avoid coasting? One way may be through collaboration. Eleven of the fourteen tracks here feature guests, including his own band Hot Chip! His contact list and record label roster serve him well. Barrie contributes a synthpop feel to ‘Moments Die’. Ibibio Sound Machine helps to make ‘Progress’ an absolute funky joy. With Florius, he makes ‘New world (Flow)’, perhaps the poppiest he’s ever been. He draws in an African vibe with Falle Niobe in ‘Miles Away’. His collaboration with Alabaster DePlume on ‘Revery’ shows his powers of innovation remain as vital as ever.
He seems to have a profound effect on his vocalists. He conjures a genuinely soulful performance from Jungle’s Tom McFarland on ‘Ghosts’. He shows that Wild Beasts’ Hayden Thorpe has an exceptional voice for chilled dance. It wraps its caresses around you, the vocal equivalent to Goddard’s music.
This is truly blissful and heavenly listening. I can’t make you listen to it, but I sincerely hope you do.
Taster Track : Progress (with Ibibio Sound Machine)
Rose Main Reading Room : Peel Dream Magazine
Peel Dream Magazine are described as ‘avant pop’. Or, in layman’s terms, they’re a band making some of the loveliest music on earth right now.
This album is an absolute treat from beginning to end. TS Eliot gave an avant description of the sound. It’s music for the still point in a turning world. It’s a gentle awakening from the last moment of happy dream sleep before waking. It’s balm for the ears and a virtual guarantee to bring you into a good mood.
Avant pop is described as experimental music that is also accessible. That’s fair. These are, above all, pop songs. They’re quirky, catchy as Velcro and perhaps a little twee. ‘I Wasn’t Made For War’ is like early Belle and Sebastian at their least intrusive, uncertain and appealingly shy. ‘Wish You Well’ captures the High Llamas at their best, if you turned them inside out and highlighted their catchiness rather than their experimentation. There’s the stylish pop of Pomplamoose in the mix too.
This is pretty, peaceful music. It’s not wild and natural. Clearly its impact is carefully constructed rather than emerging organically. It's the sound of a beautifully landscaped park waking at first light. One of the best memories I have of working in London is sitting in St James’ Park in the warm early morning sunshine, waiting for a friend before going to breakfast. This would be the perfect soundtrack to that.
Rose Main Reading Room is an unexpected and absolute delight from first note to last. It burbles, chimes and flutters its way past, and keeps it up for 46 minutes.
A new addiction is on its way. You have been warned.
Taster Track : I Wasn’t Made For War
Madres : Sofia Kourtesis
Leave Winter behind with this slice of pure Balearic joy.
‘Madres’ is one of those opening tracks that tells you to settle back and enjoy what follows. It’s full of half heard chants and sounds, a gorgeous testament to the ‘Adios Ayer’ world of sun soaked chill. What follows does not disappoint.
Kourtesis is a Peruvian DJ. She works the festivals providing the musical backing to the time of your life. She provides music as an enabler of pleasure. And she’s a good teacher too. In ‘How Music Makes You Feel Better’ she shows rather than tells you and lessons have never felt as good.
This is music that wants you to celebrate as if no one is watching. She sings in both English and Spanish. No sadness, strain or anxiety is allowed to stain the sound of her music. And she admits absolutely no negative thoughts!
As the album unfolds, the beats become a little more prominent, the music more experimental but the vibe stays the same. It only falls away a little in ‘Moving Houses’. Its experimentation feels like a break in the mood, like an enforced return to your hotel room while the fun continues outside. It creates FOMO through music. ‘Estacion Esperanza’ which features Manu Chao is a mixed up, shook up song as if rhythms and vocals from different songs have come together. It’s a weird but exhilarating sound as if you’ve moved from the beach terrace into the streets and are surrounded by competing sound systems. It’s an example of how parts of the music and vocals seem to come from far away and creates a real sense of music in 3D.
‘Madres’ is an album that brings blissful warmth into your life. What more could you want as Winter gives way to Spring?
Taster Track : Madres
The Chasing Pack
Why Act If Love Doesn’t Exist? : Haakon Ellingsen
These appealing and attractive songs, full of sweet charm, won me over because of their open hearted desire to stop the hate and change things for the better.
In the stripped back opener ‘Jump For Joy (Eldorado)’ Ellingsen is simply a man with a guitar, reflecting on how things used to be. He’s a minstrel as wholesome as homemade lentil soup. He’s a Norwegian singing in English and that gives him an oddly quaint way with words. Sounding like a man out of time, he’s a slightly eccentric figure hoping to change the world for the better one song at a time, a refugee from the first Summer of Love.
Here’s the thing though. He could succeed. ‘Letter To The Tsar’ could be addressed to any of the world’s leaders, and it glows with a human decency that is all too rare in pop. Over the course of the album we grow to like Haakon the man as much as his music.
Musically, there's a lightly psychedelic sixties feel to the songs. It’s in the character study that is ‘Such A Lonely Man’, the flute that introduces ‘The Secret’ and the intriguing sound effects reminiscent of early Pink Floyd that end some of the songs. It’s also in the boyish excitement of the Everly Brothers tribute ‘Everlasting Everly’. Haakon pays tribute in passing to Paul and John in ‘Jump For Joy (Eldorado)’ and if you mixed ‘Imagine’ with ‘Pipes of Peace’ you’d have something close to the feel of this album. It’s strongest in ‘Let’s Go For The Roses’.
At the beginning of the Bob Dylan film ‘A Complete Unknown’, Ed Norton, as Pete Seeger, attributes a quote to Woody Guthrie. It’s something to the effect that out of good music, only good will come. That should be Haakon’s dream for this album.
Taster Track : Let’s Go For The Roses
Dead Slow : Heavy Moss
If the title ‘Dead Slow’ from an artist called ‘Heavy Moss’ doesn’t entice you to savour the joys within, rest assured that this slice of psychedelic jammin’ is brimful of life and good tunes.
Sometimes your body takes over and tells you how you feel about a record. There’s so much to take in here, that it wasn’t until ‘Treadmills’ when my toes were tapping to the music without me consciously asking them that I realised I liked what I was listening to quite a lot.
This is impressive pop sparking your sense of ‘wow’! There’s so much going on in every song that you’re guaranteed to find something to hook you in, and you’ll also find something that makes you think twice about what you’re hearing. At times it’s an overwhelming auditory stimulation, as refreshing as a bracingly cold shower. If this were a painting it would be by Jackson Pollock, a blast of colour that makes no sense at all except that it thrills and excites you to your core.
It’s a big mixed up sound, an amphetamine fuelled jam that explodes in your ears. Not that it’s outrageously loud but, like London’s New Year’s Eve fireworks, there’s so much to take in all at once. These songs feel like they’re possessed by a kind of G force threatening, but not succeeding, to pull everything apart.
From the centre of this maelstrom there’s always a tunefulness lying in wait, ready to emerge from the noisy wonkiness around it. There’s a lot of melody there packed into proper choruses. Solos initially sound like an interruption until you sense they’ve positioned themselves as the song’s driving force. This is heavy pop, strung out so far that it feels simultaneously familiar and unrecognisable. It’s a 40 foot giant amongst mortals. There’s very little pause between tracks to absorb what you’ve heard, they come at you in a headlong rush.
This is a blast, and Heavy Moss are a band to make a long, boring road trip a lot of fun.
Taster Track : Distant Boy
Break The Fall : Johnny Barr
It’s a wonderful thing, the Internet, for sharing new music. I don’t think I would have stumbled across this without Johnny reaching out from Glasgow. He’s someone who understands the power of music to change and make sense of lives. He’s a trained musical therapist. That’s relevant because these songs are, above all, honest and passionate. They are an outlet for belief, that seems to come both from within and through the centuries.
In this blog I try to take music as it comes, listening to it for first impressions before having expectations formed by other reviews or promotional material. On that basis, this struck like a wake up call to Scotland with the rousing, at times ferocious, rock acting as a call to action. This struck me most as a passionate exercise in hard rock. There’s a core of granite running through it. From my Berkshire sofa I was transported to Celtic hills, windswept, soaked in history and echoing with assemblies. That’s a stereotypical Braveheart set of impressions - apologies for that - but it’s also the sound of music that reflects the voice of feelings and emotions forcing their way out to be heard in song.
This is rock that is a heavier descendant of traditional folk. There’s a flavour of that in ‘Break The Fall. Billy Bragg, although more stripped back than Johnny Barr, shares the same underlying emotions. And, Barr and Bragg both showcase their regional accents. That’s never done Billy any harm! Other influences are, inevitably, Big Country but also the early Celtic prince sound of Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy.
Honesty. Passion. Belief. They shouldn’t be the things that mark you out as an alternative. Thank Heavens for people like Johnny Barr that they can still be heard.
Taster Track : Remember To Breathe
Love Your Neighbour : The Rifles
These indie pop bullets from The Rifles are bang on target. (I bet no one has ever used that image before!)
The album opener ‘The Kids Won’t Stop’ tells us what we need to know. It may come across as a version of Jam lite fronted by Suggs, but that’s still a lot better than most indie poppers. Yes, it’s derivative, but it’s derivative of the best stuff and a reminder of the times our selective memories tell us were the good times. They even share a title with the Style Council (‘Money Go Round’).
It stands out because rather than just covering song structures and chord progressions, The Rifles have captured the attitude of the era. That’s something you can’t buy from HMV in a bottle. They sound like mates who would be happy playing in the back room of their favourite pub. There’s a light friendliness to these songs that’s a trigger for happiness and an escape from drab reality. They’re the kind of songs you want to hear outdoors when it’s still warm and light at 22:00.
What you get from The Rifles is an unpretentious, punchy collection of three minute indie pop crackers. They’re quick, here and gone, move on to the next song. They gallop. They have great, audience participation choruses. There’s a Madness like perkiness to ‘Mr Sunflower’. ‘Starting Monday’ is all positive vibes and happy to see procrastination as a virtue. They’ve almost left their acoustic phase behind them, but ‘Venus’ demonstrates that there’s still life in that phase if they want it.
This album is full of excellent, simple, traditional pop songwriting. It’s joyful, catchy and for the good times.
Taster Track : Starting Monday
As ever this week's Taster Track playlists can be accessed at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/42qDXrw3nLMlCSg45kCnRy?si=4499207642034207 or via the Spotify link on the Home Page.
The link to the Youtube playlist is https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwV-OogHy7EjHZr5_M3m0Zn5LEu_F3fMm&si=OhQF-ZPaBjUn4VMT
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