“The greatest miracle is burning to the ground,” laments Joe Duplantier with bafflement and urgency, singing about the Amazon but perhaps also the entire planet. Metal’s potential for thunderous anger makes it the most naturally expressive music to vent the fear, confusion and even shame of the climate crisis. Throughout, the open-ended sense of beauty is undimmed. It’s reminiscent of a surfer’s mentality, and Made Out of Sound feels thrillingly like the trusty unpredictability of broaching the sea: absurdist guitar begets quieter contemplation burnished riffs harden and soften, then collapse. BBT 43 Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt – Made Out of Soundįor this album, made remotely last year, guitarist Orcutt improvised to Corsano’s drum tracks, observing the waveforms as he recorded “so I could see when a crescendo was coming or when to bring it down”, he said. Whether it’s really him or a persona, he is haughty, easily hurt, lustful, clumsy and incurably romantic – a wonderful, flawed character. That success is testament to how particular and fresh their sound is amid the ordinary boys of British indie, further helped by a really arresting frontman, Isaac Wood. You don’t tend to get many Top 5 charting albums from bands who blend klezmer, post-punk, jazz and prog with lyrics about failed romance at a science fair, but Black Country, New Road managed it. BBT 44 Black Country, New Road – For the First Time “You’re told you need to grow cold to grow old,” Balfe says, but he remains charged up with human warmth on these songs. David Balfe, 30, reflects on a dead best friend, poverty, trauma and the intense vibrancy of young friendships and creativity, in long recitations set to music that reaches towards techno and house. Poignant memories seem to lengthen and soften as we age, but this album is a reminder of how much jagged heft they have when you’re looking back after just a few years or months. BBT 45 For Those I Love – For Those I Love So these songs are the work of a truly inveterate musician, and it shows – Fretwell has such a natural facility for an affecting turn of melody, his simple fingerpicked guitar made eerie by the subtle ambient tones that sit behind it. He hauled himself up and gave music another shot, apparently at the cost of his marriage. Photograph: David Levene/The GuardianĪ songwriters’ songwriter beloved of Elbow and Arctic Monkeys, Stephen Fretwell was washing pots in a Wetherspoon’s pub, his music career having flatlined amid fatherhood. Scunthorpe singer-songwriter Stephen Fretwell. To blissed-out, dreamy synth-pop that buoys you along like a lazy river – occasionally spiked by classic rap throwbacks and arcade-game electro – the four-piece dreamily hymn the joys of food, self-acceptance and protest, nurturing their own laid-back take on pleasure activism. The truly self-assured rarely make a noise about it, and so it is with the third album by Japanese girl group Chai. Dacus reflects on her teenage years – of church and bible camp, of budding queer desire amid a culture of shame and damnation, of the fantasies that let her escape these limitations – with such tender curiosity that these vignettes feel less like fixed memories than forensic crime scene reconstructions. Some of the year’s best musical storytelling lived in the Virginia songwriter’s third record, her writing newly amplified by subtle hints of pop propulsion and grit that evoked how Elliott Smith expanded his sound. Tracks such as Serf bring in a groove metal sensibility to help it all swing. The moody breakdowns allow the explosive choruses to land all the more righteously, with vocalist Kim Song Sternkopf – a survivor of faith cults as a child – venting majestically into the mic. Photograph: Sebastian Apelīlending the blast beats and acid-gargling glottal mayhem of black metal with the uplifting, even sentimental guitar dynamics of shoegaze, “blackgaze” has become a vibrant corner of heavy music – and Danish quintet MØL became one of its best exponents with their second album. cult survivor-singer Kim Song Sternkopf (centre) with band MØL.
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