Alternative Album Chart: the best new indie and alternative albums this week
16 years without an album is a long time by anyone’s standards. While The Cure certainly aren’t your average band and are the global kings of gothic rock, with their big hair and smattered red lipstick iconic, even their status wasn’t enough to stop anxious questions about how their return would sound. However, the worries have now been firmly allayed, and their new album, Songs of a Lost World – despite taking the best part of 20 years to arrive – is a welcome chapter in their extensive tome.
While The Cure might have been quiet on the studio front for a long time, they’ve always been an outfit that has moved with the times, and this blended with Smith and the rest of the group’s self-awareness about their place in the world, has meant they have retained their status as the sovereigns of the gloomy aesthetic. Songs of a Lost World is the sound of today’s The Cure, and it’s excellent. Heady, gothic, and exquisite, it will soon quiet any doubters. The band have refreshed their sound by taking it to new realms, keeping their story going. I just hope it isn’t another 16 years until the next one.
Another absolutely tremendous album arrives this week in the form of Mount Eerie’s Night Palace. Just like The Cure’s record, it washes over the listener, taking them to someplace else, an intangible psychological environment. However, unlike Smith and his band, which kept it short to just eight tracks, this one has 26. While it might be a whopper, it’s a meditative journey that explores Phil Elverum’s many mental states. All it requires is your full attention, and it will take effect.
Elsewhere on the Alternative Album Chart, Crack Cloud member Bryce Cloghesy shows his chops outside of the collective as Military Genius on Scarred for Life, Austria’s Gardens refresh the overworn dream pop sound with their ironically named debut, Flaws, and Fionn Regan pulls at the heartstrings on O Avalanche.
The best new indie and alternative albums this week:
Songs of a Lost World – The Cure – [4]
“I’m outside in the dark, wondering how I got so old,” The Cure band leader Robert Smith sings on the closing track to Songs Of A Lost World. His usual gloomy conviction rings on, presenting a reminder that this is precisely where The Cure will always be—lurking, shadowy, in a haze of ominous questions without answers.
Smith has been the torchbearer architect of beautiful, doomy mystery since 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys, crafting the complexities of scorned romance and hollowed hearts in their richly delicate world. Every time, The Cure unveils voids that thrive on vulnerability and suffering while spotlighting the most beautiful experiences and feelings, blending beginnings and ends as rich and convoluted as the luscious middle.
With previous albums, this limbo feels limitless, compounded by yearning souls and broken hearts that embellish the delicious mystery of darkness and uncertainty. In Songs Of A Lost World, the exquisite guitar work and meticulously produced rhythmic cadences complement all the unspoken words, revealing a more immersive side to The Cure, where the haunt of a perturbed mind lingers in the subtleties. Ambience is a prominent force in modern music, and here itsvagueness is anything but background.
Night Palace – Mount Eerie – [4]
In the contemporary era, we’ve become obsessed with tight, compact forms of music, overproduced three-minute songs and 10-track albums that satisfy us emotionally, but done so in enough time that we can engage without losing focus by giving into the pull of text messages, billboards, and sirens outside the window. Night Palace, the latest album by experimental rock master Phil Elverum as Mount Eerie, is a sonic and spiritual rejection of modern musical standards, as he takes us on a long, winding meditation that is well worth your time.
At face value, you might look upon the 26 tracks on Night Palace, and think, ‘You must be joking?’ or ‘This must be some kind of sick prank, I can’t possibly listen to all that’. These reactions are absolutely typical of the fast-paced, instant-gratification spirit of the world we currently inhabit. The scope of art has been reduced to fit in with our time being squeezed more than ever, and our attention being divided by an array of man-made distractions, with most musicians falling in line with these newfangled spiritual norms, often reducing the substance of their work to fit in with listeners that are metamorphosing apropos the digital age.
Phil Elverum has long been the master of flowing journeys into the mind’s eye, and with Night Palace, a record of such substance that it takes a few listens to really make sense—mirroring the process of analysing his emotional currents that made it—he’s produced one of his best yet. All it takes is to turn off your surroundings. You could say it’s high art, not just music.
Scarred for Life – Military Genius – [4]
Military Genius, the project of Crack Cloud member Bryce Cloghesy, has proved his talent as a solo artist with his new album, Scarred For Life. While the arty post-punk collective consists of more members than your average band, Cloghesy is clearly just as capable as making music alone, channelling his personal experiences of life into his new record, which is a gorgeous and tender collection of tracks.
Informed by hazy Californian landscapes, which you can hear in the use of a wah-wah pedal, hypnotising guitar lines, and seductive saxophones, Cloghesy explores themes of reflection and fear but also looking towards the future. The musician is honest and personal, centring his lyrics without foregoing interesting instrumental accompaniments in the process.
Silky R&B rhythms, blended with infusions of Spanish-influenced guitar and retro-inspired jazz-folk, create a captivating atmosphere. While the songs retain mellow to medium tempos, Cloghesy experiments with different textures and instruments to keep the album engaging. As a result, Scarred For Life is a truly rewarding listen.
Flaws – Gardens – [3.5]
Dream-pop has an incredibly long and diverse sonic history, incorporating everybody from Cocteau Twins to Slowdive. In more recent years, however, the label has become indistinguishable from a wave of bland and unimaginatively gentle indie pop artists. In answer to this worrying trend, Austrian outfit Gardens have emerged from Vienna toting their own unique and original take on the dream-pop genre. Their debut album, Flaws, captures the spirit of that sound perfectly, representing a group whose quality is far beyond its years.
Upon an initial pass, Flaws might seem like a fairly standard, if spaced-out, indie dream-pop record. The sounds and lyrical compositions of the album all follow a pretty similar route, and the tracklisting flows without much disruption. However, if you delve a little deeper into the sounds contained in the band’s debut album, you begin to see the incredibly broad range of influences and styles adopted by the Austrian outfit. For instance, tracks like ‘Turning Tables’ feature wonderfully retro, 1950s-style guitar riffs befitting figures like Hank Marvin, although they are backed up by the distinctly modern dream-pop psychedelia of the rest of the group.
Inevitably, the vocal performances of lead singer Luca Celina Müller are a highlight throughout Flaws. Although their style of singing rarely changes, at least not drastically, across the album, those soothing tones act as a perfect companion as the listener journeys through the debut. What’s more, the vocals of Müller prove themselves to be equally suited to the more downbeat, mellow offerings of the album – songs like ‘Future’ – as well as some of the more energetic, brooding anthems like ‘Help’.
O Avalanche – Fionn Regan – [3.5]
To be creative, you need to be vulnerable. Even if what you’re making isn’t necessarily heart-wrenching or sad, there still has to be some element of vulnerability as you release your product into the world, ready for the public’s prying eyes. That feeling lies at the centre of each piece of music you listen to, art you gaze upon and film you watch. However, what you actually get as a consumer is a layered version of that vulnerability, one that can often take away from the dynamic nature of the arts. That’s not the case with Fionn Regan’s new album, though, O Avalanche.
Art isn’t always the most sacred thing. Even something that feels incredibly emotional has gone through layers of processes. Songs are written and re-written, laid down in a studio, produced, mastered, put through labels, sent for edits, dissected in press releases, condensed and defined before they’ve even reached the ears of a target audience. On this new Fionn Regan album, the heart of the song is left open for all to see, exposed and beating, present in every track and as connective as ever.
The album’s stripped-back nature, paired with reverbed vocals and hurried softly strummed guitar, makes for incredibly raw listening. It’s impossible to hear these tracks and not feel somewhat moved by them, as they are, in their very nature, made to resonate profoundly personally.
Blue Thunder – Trudy and the Romance – [3]
What makes an album great and not just good? It’s a fine line but an important one—one where making the cross-over often feels like an indescribable but obvious step. You don’t have to be a critic to feel it or understand it. A great album is electric; it’s moving, impactful, and visceral. A great album is a triumph. A good one is nice. Trudy and the Romance’s Blue Thunder is good. It’s plain, good, old indie.
The thing is, back in the 2010s, the music the band were putting out was great. I remember listening to tracks like ‘Is There A Place I Can Go’ or ‘Twist It, Shake It, Rock & Roll’ and getting that feeling you get when a release is something special. Making 1950s and ‘60s inspired music is nothing new, since the decades ended people have been trying to emulate it, but somehow Chesterfield born Oliver Taylor seemed able to capture the swinging Americana energy of rose-tinted nostalgia better than anything. He was making it feel exciting again at a time when vintage was stale.
But what was present back then was boldness. Taylor and his troupe were leaning all the way in. It felt like they were following their vision all the way to the furthest point, even down to the glamorous vintage illustrations of the artwork. But on Blue Thunder, that’s what’s missing: a boldness, an oomph, a step further.
