Album reviews: Blossoms - Blossoms, Wild Beasts - Boy King and more

Also Haley Bonar - Impossible Dream and Ed Harcourt - Furnaces

Wild Beasts, Boy King

★★★★☆

Download: Tough Guy; Get My Bang; Celestial Creatures

With Boy King, Wild Beasts regain some of the rugged conviction that rather dissipated on 2014’s more reflective Present Tense – which is not to say that the new electronic directions explored on that album have been entirely abandoned here. On the contrary, they’ve been more effectively assimilated into the band’s sound alongside monster funk grooves and guitar riffs which singer Hayden Thorpe describes as representing “that phallic character, the all-conquering male”.

It’s not a misplaced notion: from its title to its music, Boy King seethes with barely restrained masculine urges, whether that means acclaiming “Big Cat” as “top of the food chain”, mocking a rival in “Eat Your Heart Out Adonis”, or claiming “I saw death up the skirts of the world”, as Thorpe does in “Ponytail”. The heft of the arrangements propels the songs’ messages: there’s a sense of sinister momentum to the crunching electropop of “He The Colossus”, while the gun-show posing of “Tough Guy” (“I’d better suck it up, like a tough guy”) is borne along on the most brutishly effective of muscular electro-funk grooves. But all the while, there are nagging little doubts scratching away at the apparent confidence: the static-grazed, glitchy electronic backdrop to “Celestial Creatures” is stained with tragic piano chords, while the celebration of an “Alpha Female” is set to a buzzy synth that seems perpetually on the verge of splintering into shards. Clearly, there are cracks in all the apparent upfront macho posturing.

But it’s impressive how Wild Beasts manage to convey this conflicted character without losing the songs’ essential energy, by applying stealthy embellishments of inventive, squirming little synth motifs and understated hooks to the huge funk beats of tracks such as “Ponytail” and “Get My Bang”. The result may be the band’s best album yet, one on which they come closer than ever, as Thorpe avows in “2BU”, to successfully managing to “Dream something and make it real”.

Blossoms, Blossoms

★★★★☆

Download: Charlemagne; At Most A Kiss; Getaway; Cut Me And I’ll Blee

Stockport’s Blossoms have been acclaimed as saviours of indie-pop for so long now that this debut album is in effect a singles compilation: no fewer than eight of its dozen songs have been singles – though for all their iTunes presence, none has threatened the actual charts. Which is a problem, especially when they involve such sparkling melodies and seemingly blue-chip hooks as the lovely “Charlemagne” and “At Most A Kiss”, the former’s nimbly scuttling guitar effortlessly balanced by the latter’s lollopy, rolling boogie. Wreathed in mellotron, vibrato guitar and ghostly backing vocals, several songs evoke the windswept psych-pop of The Coral, whose singer James Skelly co-produces Blossoms. But whether the group can straddle the divide between indie cred and chart success remains to be seen.

Haley Bonar, Impossible Dream

★★★☆☆

Download: Hometown Girls; Kismet Kill; Called You Queen; Blue Diamonds Fall

Impossible Dream is infused with a midwestern ache of unfulfilled dreams and aspirations, embodied in the self-lacerating sting of petty barbs from “Jealous Girls” and the restrictive difficulties caused by young motherhood in “Kismet Kill”. Haley Bonar animates these quandaries through simple, skeletal beats, scrubbed or scuffling guitars, and haunted harmonies in the manner of her mentors Low, with jangly, flanged textures adding a pleasing shoegazey touch to some tracks. The issues she covers are complex at times – “Called You Queen” recounts a problematic period partnering a gay man, “before your body betrayed you” – but “Blue Diamond Falls” closes the album on a positive note, affirming feminist possibilities that “you can be whatever you like”.

Ed Harcourt, Furnaces

★★★★☆

Download: The World Is On Fire!; Loup Garou; Dionysus; Antarctica

Furnaces is presumably the “album of evil songs” Ed Harcourt promised a couple of years ago. Its dark, unflinching songs certainly ponder humanity’s less attractive traits, with arrangements to match: “Dionysus” hymns excess with a juddering metal-guitar barrage, “Loup Garou” celebrates feral instincts with a dangerous, nimble charm, and “Antarctica” fantasises escaping humankind for an empty, icy wasteland of the soul. Elsewhere, “The World Is On Fire!” seeks “the dark in the universe” against a forbidding wall of sound in which jagged guitar shards slash against eerie glass harmonica. “My milk of kindness is slim, my shining light has grown dim,” Harcourt explains in “Occupational Hazard”, though he doesn’t sound sorry.

Various Artists, Quiero Creedence

★★★☆☆

Download: Bootleg; Fortunate Son; Green River

Despite being Californian, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty somehow persuasively channelled the swamp-rock sound of the Louisiana bayous in the band’s hits. And judging by this compilation of CCR covers by artists from Texas and Mexico to Argentina, it also transfers well to Latin American modes, whether it’s Ozomatli’s cumbia take on “Bad Moon Rising”, the fizzy psychedelic swirl with which Enjambre envelops “Who’ll Stop The Rain?”, or Bang Data’s drum-heavy, multi-lingual rap-rock version of “Fortunate Son”. Other highlights include Los Lobos’ typically confident swagger through “Bootleg”, and the unusual alliance of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons with Colombian singer La Marisoul on a wonderfully gritty “Green River”.

Albert Ayler Quartet, European Radio Studio Recordings 1964

★★★★☆

Download: Angels; Ghosts; Spirits; No Name

Captured here on two radio sessions previously released as The Copenhagen Tapes and The Hilversum Session, free-jazz pioneer Albert Ayler was an outsider even amongst his peers. Bursting with vibrato, his tenor sax would state simple, often childlike themes before soaring off into ecstatic contrails on tracks such as “Ghosts” and “Angels”, his strident tone on the latter applied to a languid, woozy melody in which hints of his church upbringing are clearly audible, along with a New Orleans funeral-band flavour, all blended into free-jazz explorations whose wild spirits prompt wide smiles. Legendary performances, marked by a rare balance between graceful elegance, meditative reflection and bustling commotion.

Dinosaur Jr, Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not

★★★☆☆

Download: Goin Down; Tiny; I Told Everyone; I Walk For Miles

Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not continues the high standard set by Dinosaur Jr on their 21st century albums, forcing the sprawling grunge sound of their original releases through a pleasingly pop-shaped hole. The results are quirkily, unexpectedly appealing – the whiskery arpeggios of “I Told Everyone” resemble The Byrds playing through a fuzzbox, while even the desolate trudge of “I Walk For Miles” is brightly illuminated by one of Mascis’s skirling solo bursts. Best of all is the single “Tiny”, perhaps the most charming thing they’ve ever done, Mascis pleading “Call me back, I’ll get on track, I swear,” before crushing the song in a squeal of guitar distortion.