Album reviews: Kacey Musgraves, The Vaccines, Kate Nash, Frankie Cosmos, Sons of Kemet, Mount Eerie

Our writers take a look at this week's releases, from the wide-eyed country pop of Kacey Musgraves on 'Golden Hour' to the bare, anti-folk stylings of Mount Eerie on 'Now Only'

Kacey Musgraves, Golden Hour

★★★★★

Download this: Slow Burn, Golden Hour, Lonely Weekend, High Horse

Kacey Musgraves surprised everyone by revealing she was tripping on acid when she began writing new song “Mother”.

It "opens my heart and mind,” she told a fan on Twitter who fretted the Texan singer would make LSD sound “cool”. And the effect can clearly be heard on her latest record, Golden Hour.

The 29-year-old's third album flips between wide-eyed country pop and disco-electronica. Aided by co-writers and producers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, both Nashville pros, Musgraves conjures up a feeling of lightness; marvelling at nature and love and the universe as she melds the traditional and futuristic.

The Grammy-award winner has never sounded as confident as this; it’s as if a wall has been knocked down and a little of that bolshie attitude has been pared back to reveal her personal lyrics yet. Exquisite opener “Slow Burn”, which has terrifying potential to get overlooked as listeners delve into the more dynamic tracks on the record, recycles a line from her song “Burn One” with John Prine: “Grandma cried when I pierced my nose” but recalls the incident in a way that’s tinged with sadness rather than the cheek heard on the earlier version.

On “Space Cowboy” she uses ice-cold wordplay to cut her subject, a boy, down to size, proving that whip-smart tongue is still present beneath the wistful vocals. “Love Is A Wild Thing” has her marvelling at the strength of the bond that ties her to the one she loves. Her voice sits ahead of the sparse instrumentation on a bittersweet track like “Lonely Weekend” (Even if you got somebody on your mind/It’s alright to be alone sometimes”).

“High Horse” is disco western and the most radical departure from Musgraves' earlier sound. It’s a Kylie Minogue circa 2001-level bop that builds on summery guitar strumming with sweetly lilting vocals that hold just a hint of menace. The lightness returns on a song like “Butterflies”, with its cheerful bass line running beneath her sweet, dreamy vocals.

At a time where mainstream artists seem forced to dwell on all the doom and gloom we hear on the news, Golden Hour is a reminder that sometimes – often, if you’re looking in the right places – life is beautiful. You get the feeling that Musgraves could find the beauty in anything. (Roisin O’Connor)

The Vaccines, Combat Sports

★★★★☆

Download this: Nightclub, Young American, Luck of the Draw

There’s been a sudden rush of comebacks by former “saviours of rock 'n' roll” lately, but most of them have struggled to find a foothold; The Vaccines and their new album Combat Sports might just be able to buck that trend.

On their fourth LP, the London-based outfit have crammed radio-friendly pop rock tracks that feature all the youthful, frenetic energy of a band 10 years their junior. Singer Justin Young has a wonderfully affected drawl atop the buzzing guitars.

There’s a touch of The Smiths in “Luck of the Draw” before they switch up the dynamic on “Young American” which takes a page right out of Pete Doherty’s many notebooks (although the line “suffocate me between your thighs” is unfortunately more Morrissey than Libertines).

Things snap back on “Nightclub” with a fantastic guitar riff that recalls Blondie's “One Way Or Another”, while “Out On The Street” is as uplifting as Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”.

There’s an offhand sense of fun to this record, it bounces, with Young’s sharp lyrics and a voice that ranges from a shrill falsetto down to a drawling tenor. Combat Sports is a great return for The Vaccines, and an album that will soar live. (Roisin O’Connor)

Kate Nash, Yesterday Was Forever

★★☆☆☆

Download this: Drink About You

“You will be like ‘OMYMUTHAAAF*CKKKKIN ANGELS FROM HEAVEN ABOVE CHOCOLATE CAKE SLICES AND MONKEY DANCES YASSSSSS KWEEEEN SLAYYYYYY RUN A MARATHON BITCH,” Kate Nash promised of her crowdfunded album Yesterday Was Forever, which is being released, as she put it, “through the magical vagina of the internet”.

Unfortunately this record gets off to a dodgy start: Nash’s growling shrieks on opener “Life In Pink”, sound ludicrously manipulated and are virtually unlistenable, combined with those twinkly synths and dirge-like beats that pop up like an unwanted relative every couple of tracks.

Her winning formula back in 2010 was blunt honesty delivered in the form of spoken-word style poetry. Back then, she doled out witty, tongue-in-cheek observations and wry take-downs with ease. Attempts to recapture this style are marred by lazy rhymes and a delivery that’s often more just her speaking over the track.

Nash is clearly fixated on the riot grrrl music of the 90s; you can find multiple nods to Courtney Love, Skinny Girl Diet, Sleater-Kinney, and other acts like The Cranberries and Letters to Cleo, who were the go-to soundtrack bands of 1990s TV. That nostalgia is cemented by a line in “Take Away”: “I wanna watch Buffy in my room on the TV.”

I mean, come on, it’s 2018. She should at least be binging re-runs on Netflix. But that’s nothing compared to the monstrosity that is “Always Shining”. How it clawed its way onto the final album is a mystery – those croaky, off-key squawks sound more like the Nazgûl from Lord of the Rings than any human voice.

It is fun, in its way, and Yesterday Was Forever is clearly an album Nash is proud of. “Drink About You” is a rare highlight with a guitar hook that recalls Spiderbait’s “Calypso”.

Her sincere approach to themes such as mental health or self-image are welcome, but the sonic mess littered through Yesterday Was Forever piles up like an impenetrable wall, and it will take a strong-willed fan to knock it down. (Roisin O’Connor)

Frankie Cosmos, Vessel

★★★★☆

Download this: Carmelize, Jesse, Ballad of R&J, Ur Up

With Frankie Cosmos’ latest record, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Greta Kline has reached a milestone. At just 23-years-old, her fourth album, Vessel, is actually her 52nd release overall, thanks to the slew of music that ignited her career on Bandcamp. But this one is a coming of age moment for Kline.

Her Sub Pop debut serves as her most confessional work yet, fusing prolific poetry with her own struggles of ending a relationship and professional burnout. In it she goes on a journey of self-discovery through her own narratives and characters she creates.

Despite the moments of darkness, Kline maintains a sense of elation throughout the record’s 18 tracks. Yes, she’s doubled the length of her tracklist in comparison 2016’s Next Thing, but some of the tracks clock in at less than 60 seconds, yet still managing to forge a connection with the listener.

On “My Phone”, for instance, Kline muses about the importance of not being dependent on technology to sustain relationships and sings: “My phone will die, and I won't even cry / 'Cause I know you're nearby / I know you're nearby.”

In a brief, wryly written track “Hereby,” Kline uses legal jargon to convey her feelings about a breakup, then on “The Ballad of R&J” she uses fictional narratives to explore how distance from a partner can make you paranoid. When she’s not analysing relationships, Kline channels her spirituality on the cinematic “Carmelize” and shows her unwavering gratitude to her fans telling them, “I love you” on repeat (“As Often As I Can”).

Vessel is a return to form for Kline: bringing the sincerity that was threaded throughout her Bandcamp releases to the forefront once again. It’s heard through the loose count in on “Being Alive” and in Kline’s eruption of laughter on “Ur Up.” It’s the flaws on Vessel that serve as a reminder that sometimes you need to go back to where you started to find yourself again. (Ilana Kaplan)

Sons of Kemet, Your Queen Is A Reptile

★★★★☆

Download this: My Queen is Harriet Tubman, My Queen is Anna Julia Cooper, My Queen is Nanny of the Maroons, My Queen is Albertina Sisulu

Shabaka Hutchings is the first UK jazz name on global lips, an equivalent to the Kendrick Lamar-endorsed Kamasi Washington in the US. The Afro-Caribbean rooted, MOBO-winning Sons of Kemet are just one of three current Hutchings bands, but their third album confirms that this unconventional quartet of his tenor sax, two drummers and a tuba are the most pointedly original. Appropriate then that this first LP for John Coltrane’s old US label, Impulse!

"Your Queen Is A Reptile"’s knighthood-nixing title means to compare David Icke-style conspiracy theories to the equal absurdity of having hereditary power at all. Instead, every song title starts “My Queen is...”, and nominates black women made royal by their deeds, from Harriet Tubman to Doreen Lawrence.

Hutchings’ tenor is an exposed, isolated cry on “Anna Julia Cooper”, pressure dropping on him like a fox harried by hounds, till the mellifluous alto of Led Bib’s Pete Wareham offers balm, and drums add martial commitment. This wholly acoustic jazz sound takes on current urban feelings of nagging dread, and defiant holding on. Theon Cross then joins Hutchings on a slaloming, breakneck ride through “Angela Davis”, before “Nanny of the Maroons” contrastingly begins a spiritual, sunrise sax climb.

The shirtless teenagers dancing to Cross’s tuba as if at a rave at last year’s Love Supreme festival suggested that jazz isn’t being revived, so much as finding rhythm-friendly forms for young crowds indifferent to genre. This album’s intricate, pressurised urgency keeps Sons of Kemet at that movement’s head. (Nick Hasted)

Mount Eerie, Now Only

★★★★☆

Download this: Distortion, Earth, Tintin in Tibet

Phil Elverum’s wife Geneviève Castreé died of cancer in 2016. He was left to raise their daughter, and wrestle with her memory. His eighth album as Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me, began a public remembrance continued here. The themes and sometimes bare anti-folk style of his one-man musical outlet (previously paralleled by Castreé’s comic-books and music) perfectly suit the subject of surviving a loved one’s death. That subject has in turn ensured Mount Eerie’s greatest success, a wholly bitter irony picked through in the title track, when festivals invite him “to play these death-songs to young people on drugs”.

The masculinity-defying diffidence of Elverum's voice couldn’t be more indie, but his words now add all the weight he needs. Nor is the music all strumming acoustica: electric guitar’s ear-filling reverb begins the 10 minutes of “Distortion”.

Its lyrics are a tidal, seemingly undifferentiated tumble, fear of an unplanned pregnancy and the Iraq War equally marking 2003, even as he’s pulled back by the present’s black hole gravity. The American model for such tireless floods of autobiography, Jack Kerouac, appears in a documentary as a warning, when his ignored daughter recalls him “taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology”.

Elverum’s sundering between mourning for his wife’s sake and recuperation for his child’s is summed up on “Earth”. Here, sepulchral organ finds the emptied crevices of a home where he believes he sees Castreé’s bleached bones. “I don’t want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to,” he explains, “but also I don’t want you to be gone.” (Nick Hasted)

Holy Wave, Adult Fear

★★☆☆☆

Download this: Adult Fear, Nation in Regress, How Was I Supposed to Know

Psychedelia by way of My Bloody Valentine’s mantric thunder remains an underground perennial. The afterglow of 1960s idealism, and the mind-altering confluence of the era’s blissed music and its hallucinogenic equivalents, is something Austin-based Holy Wave’s third album maintains a keyboard-heavy adherence to.

There are hints of the political travails now being felt in their liberal Texan outpost in “Nation In Regress”, though the placidly calming keyboards and opiate haze of the vocal only want to drop out of such real-world drags. “I sent a letter to my state representative,” they note on “How Was I Supposed to Know”, but a hopeless shrug is all they can muster at the politician’s pointlessness. Nineteen sixty-seven’s Technicolor high of is their jam, not 1968’s street-fighting men.

There’s much to be said for music as a private, sublime refuge, but Holy Wave rarely hit those heights. They evoke only the mild, gauzy dislocation of dawdling in the midday sun. Lysergic transformations lie elsewhere. The title track’s keyboard glide does have a steely momentum that’s otherwise missing. Its video’s mumblecore motel horror further suggests how their drifting midsummer world could gain greater, shadowy purchase. (Nick Hasted)