ONE LAST SHIFT RHYTHM DOCTOR MAC
There's also the jangly "Dog Rose," which could be a Mac DeMarco song, and "Room" that gives off Beach House vibes while Arlo sings "I just wanna eat cake in a room with a view." There's also the delicate and intimate "Pegasus," which is lifted by guest Phoebe Bridgers and their voices sound great together. This is most obvious on "Devotion," which transforms from pretty and gentle into a roaring, crunchy rock track midway through her breathy voice works surprisingly well through the radical shift in dynamics. Working with producer Paul Epworth, who has been behind the boards for everyone from The Futureheads to Adele, Parks incorporates some of the '90s indie/alt music that she loved as a kid - Weezer, My Bloody Valentine, Deftones - into her sound. It won the 2021 Mercury Music Prize, and following up a universally praised album can be a daunting task, but if Arlo was sweating the expectations, you don't feel it on My Soft Machine, another easy, breezy, inviting record that also widens her scope. The follow-up to Arlo Parks' Mercury Prize-winning debut widens her scope and gets some help from Phoebe BridgersĪrlo Parks charmed pretty much everyone with her excellent debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, with its warm, jazzy vibe and her poetic but conversational lyrics. The new songs are terrific, too, and fit in perfectly, especially "Prom," which is basically a sister to "Photograph" and sways to wistful nostalgia. Also excellent: yearning "Triumph," the swaggering "Lion Tamer," and sweet, romantic ode "Katie." Buyer beware, but some companions are welcome, necessary even.Īrlo Parks - My Soft Machine (Transgressive) The reworks are all terrific: "This is a Photograph" adds sweeping '70s strings to great effect "Bittersweet, TN," his duet with Erin Rae, is nicely scaled back and "Five Easy Pieces Revisited" takes an already lush, soulful track into even grander territory while rewriting the perspectives of its characters. More Photographs features alternate versions of three songs from This is a Photograph, while adding six new songs. Occasionally, though, special editions are actually special. It's enough to make you shrug before you even look at the tracklist or give it a listen. It used to be that artists waited for a significant anniversary to put out a deluxe edition of an album, but now any record that gets decent reviews or racks up decent streaming numbers will receive "special edition" treatment - or a companion album, or the dreaded "remix" record - by the end of its release year.
Kevin Morby - More Photographs (A Continuum) (Dead Oceans)Ī companion piece to last year's 'This is a Photograph' reimagines some songs, and adds some new ones to them
Sparks are an enigma that should never be solved. (It's even better with Cate Blanchett.) How do they do it? Actually, please don't tell me.
Most of these are also songs that could've only come from the Maels, like the war-torn "We Go Dancing," which imagines Kim Jong Un as the ultimate club DJ: "Skrillex, maybe Diplo, they've got nothing on our dude." They've still got their finger on the pulse too, from the relatable disappointment of "Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is," or the title track that captures our post-2020 world in less than three droney, awesomely oddball minutes. Apart from a few current lyrical references, witty, idiosyncratic pop songs like "It Doesn't Have to Be That Way," "The Mona Lisa's Packing, Leaving Late Tonight," and "Not That Well-Defined" could've come out at any point in their career. Their 26th album, The Girl is Crying in Her Latte finds Ron and Russell, who are 77 and 74 respectively, sounding sharp as ever, mixing synthpop, glam and classical elements for tales of modern ennui, filtered through their twisted sense of humor and love of cinema. The band have been back in the public eye in the last few years, the most spotlight they've seen since the mid-'70s, thanks to two films - Edgar Wright's wonderful documentary The Sparks Brothers and Annette, their rock opera collaboration with director Leos Carax - and have found themselves back on Island Records, the label that released their two 1974 classics, Kimono My House and Propaganda, among others. Has any group maintained an image, sound and level of quality across 50 years as well as Sparks? Ron and Russell Mael were weirdo geniuses right out of the gate and have seen popular culture ebb and flow around their distinct brand of tongue-in-cheek operatic rock, while never trying to make music based on what was in at the time. ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Sparks - The Girl is Crying in Her Latte (Island)įifty years and 26 albums into their career, Ron & Russell Mael remain as wonderfully weird and amazing as ever
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