Album reviews: The best of the week’s new releases

Album of the Week

Floating Points
Elaenia

Pluto

★ ★ ★ ★

Sam Shepherd is best known for immaculately produced, oceans-deep house music, DJ sets that run the gamut from soul, disco and Latin rarities to slamming house tracks and – most recently – his close relationship with both Four Tet and Caribou. He may still be in his 20s, but the Manchester-born producer's tracks Vacuum Boogie, Sparkling Controversy and Nuits Sonores stand tall alongside the work of Theo Parrish, Moodymann or any other American deep house legend you care to name. He has little to prove on that front.

Perhaps that's why his first full-length album is such a departure. He's not a dance music lifer – his background is in classical composition and jazz piano – and Elaenia is not your average dance music LP. The format has given him the chance to stretch himself musically and as a result these seven tracks, recorded with a live band, have more in common with Portico, Polar Bear or classical minimalists like Steve Reich than his house peers.

Much of the record is beatless – the opening Nespole unfurls deliciously and derives its undeniable forward momentum from a series of complementary synth and organ lines. Later, Shepherd does something similar on the gauzy Thin Air, this time using no more than ticking hi-hats and percussive synths for propulsion. While the record meanders a little around the midway point, this is head music: the aquatic grooves and gorgeous sonics will pull you under before you've even realised.

The real highlights come with the sparing use of a jazz drummer, particularly the stunning Silhouettes – a cosmic odyssey that ranks with his best work – and the closing Peroration Six. It's the darkest, most unsettling moment on the whole record, where for the only time Shepherd removes the shackles from himself and his accompanists and embraces the thrilling chaos of a live band. It's not dance music, but it's very special indeed.
Chris Jones

New Releases

Seal
7

Warner

★ ★ ★

Ain't love grand? Well, most of the time, anyway – at least as far as Seal is concerned. His ninth studio album sees him reuniting with producer Trevor Horn to marvellous effect. The varied tracklisting slips through soaring power balladry (Daylight Saving), orchestral pop with a Bacharach-esque glow (Every Time I'm With You), and brass-infused slinky soul numbers (Monascow), all of which are undeniably likeable; there's even a throwback to his Killer era with the electronic, industrial throb of Padded Cell.

Through it all, Seal wears his heart on his sleeve via his distinctive voice, still robust at 52. Whether he's singing about old heartache (The Big Love Has Gone) or newfound passion (Life on the Dancefloor), he's convincing. You could certainly call it a triumphant comeback.
Lauren Murphy

Various Artists

You’ve Been Sweating Wrong Your Whole Life
Godmode

★ ★ ★

The Godmode label played an important role in the Shamir narrative as he went from Las Vegas kid to Ratchet album maker. But there’s more to the Brooklyn label than Shamir as this compilation of EPs from half a dozen producers and noise-makers shows. Aside from the imprint, the other common currency the acts here share is a finely tuned sense of eclecticism.

Fitness, Malory, Hand of God, Soft Lit (whose EP, especially I Can't Help It and Ocean King, really shines), Yvette and Fasano duck and dive from grounded punky noise to trippy blue hours house jams and melancholic pop with all the trimmings. Another tie that binds is that all six acts had a hand, act or part to play in how Ratchet came together, though Shamir's own magic dust should not be under-estimated in that regard.
Jim Carroll

Kode9
Nothing

Hyperdub

★ ★ ★

As Hyperdub boss, Steve Goodman has been front and centre when it comes to plotting new routes for electronic music. Some of those mappings are to be found on Black Sun and Memories of the Future, his releases as Kode9 with the late Stephen “The Spaceape” Gordon. Goodman no longer has Gordon’s eerie, edgy lyrical tales to lean ON so Nothing is a much more minimal, downbeat and stark affair as a result.

Austere and detached, tracks like Notel and Nothing Lasts Forever set a haunting and chilling mood. The bass dominates with great efficiency, while Goodman works beats with meticulous timing. The sense of unease and menace is best demonstrated on Holo, where a slow, subtle melody adds charm and warmth to a stabbing, incessant minimal techno groove.
Jim Carroll

Ellie Goulding
Delirium

Polydor

★ ★ ★

Now that she is well and truly installed as a bona-fide pop star, Ellie Goulding could probably afford to throw a little experimentation into the mix. Instead, her third album continues the same thread of zippy, synth-addled electropop that made her name, with some of pop’s biggest producers (Max Martin, Greg Kurstin) on board. Echoes of the 1980s abound on Don’t Panic and Something in the Way You Move.

Don't Need Nobody and Devotion are a little more daring, while On My Mind – allegedly about Goulding's brief tryst with Ed Sheeran – is a standout. It's all a little predictable, but when it works, it works. Despite Goulding's lack of personality, it's difficult to see how fans would be disappointed by this polished collection.
Lauren Murphy

Natalie Merchant

Paradise is There: The New Tigerlily Recordings
Nonesuch

★ ★ ★

“Songs have new life breathed into them every time they are sung,” says Natalie Merchant. “Time has changed them as much as it has changed me.” That is the premise behind her rerecording of her 20-year-old debut album, Tigerlily. While a recording is a moment in time subject to the vagaries of popular culture, Tigerlily has lost little of its brooding power. And yet this new collection has value.

In 1995, Merchant was still young, keen to establish her own voice after 12 years with 10,000 Maniacs. The 2015 version is seasoned by life's vicissitudes, including divorce and motherhood. Some arrangements are laden with strings, others simplified, recognisable but different. The same goes for Merchant's voice, deeper, shaped by experience but still distinctive and beautiful. Fascinating for the fan, but not essential.
Joe Breen

Bill Ryder-Jones

West Kirby County Primary
Domino

★ ★ ★

Bill Ryder-Jones’s ambition has always preceded him – from his time as axeslinger in The Coral to working with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on his 2011 concept album If…. On his third studio album, that aspiration is audible in less tangible ways.

The lo-fi scuffle and murmured vocals of Daniel and Seabirds takes time to ignite, although the slouchy Catharine and Huskisson (Eels meets Supergrass) and the nifty pop dash of You Can't Hide a Light with the Dark kindle with more immediacy. The sluggish Satellites sums up his slapdash style, swerving wildly through both circuitous balladry and grungey guitar riffs. True, none of it is particularly pretty – but there's a strange allure to his meandering philosophies.
Lauren Murphy

Raury

All We Need
Columbia

★ ★ ★

Eleven months is a long time in pop. At the start of 2015, Atlanta singer and rapper Raury Tullis was on many music watchlists because of a brilliant ability to mix and match genres on his Indigo Child release. While that skill is in abundance on his debut album proper, the distinctive ideas and super-confident grandstanding of old seems a mite hackneyed here by comparison by what he know he's capable of doing.

When Tullis lets fly, he can still produce the goods such as the sweet folky textures of Kingdom Come or the tough, thumping bass on Trap Tears. Forbidden Knowledge with guest Big K.R.I.T is unfocused as if he can't quite work out the flow of the song within the album's ecosystem. While he's keen to cover a lot of ground, Tullis is not so sure-footed when he hits a pothole.
Jim Caroll

Marc Carroll

Love is All or Love Is Not at All
One Little Indian

★ ★ ★ ★

For too long, this reviewer has been overly concerned as to why the work of Dubliner Marc Carroll – unquestionably one of Ireland’s best, yet commercially unrewarded, songwriters – isn’t more widely known. It seems, though, that Carroll himself does not worry as much, so it’s fair to assume that his new album – his seventh solo record – may suffer the same fate as his earlier ones.

And yet the music inhabits a compelling space, and highlights Carroll's more politically oriented songcraft in tracks such as No Hallelujah Here, Ball and Chain and the title number, which features an inspiring poem by former Crass member Penny Rimbaud. These are Carroll's most empathetic songs to date – from obvious beauty (Catalina in the Distance) to subtle atmosphere (Oh, Death, Don't Yet Call Me Home), the man has done it again.
Tony Clayton-Lea

Read all this week's album reviews here