The Alternative Album Chart: The best new indie albums this week
Glastonbury Festival is so close to the horizon that I can almost feel the spray of a hurled beer (hopefully it’s beer) from here. With the cultural behemoth dominating the current discussion in the music world, indie releases are notably sparser than they have been in the last few weeks. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have at least a few gems to toss your way in this week’s chart.
Fittingly, Ben Howard is the act opening the festival proper this year, taking on the sun-up set of 11:30am – 12:30pm over on the Other Stage. So, he’s crammed in a release to grace us all with… and it just so happens to be perhaps the most perfect album released this year to ease the revellers into the swing of things under the Somerset sun.
Equally fitting is that Queens of the Stone Age will be one of the last acts heard on Sunday. They close things on the Other Stage playing from 21:45 – 23:15. After a rough few years for Josh Homme, his band have also squeezed in a record of rocking reconciliation. He once again dusts off his new funk strum pattern and pushes it to darker places than it has been before.
So, while there might not be an arsenal of releases away from those two biggies, what we have is a summer assortment of beauteous albums that make it perfectly clear that sunny afternoons and luscious tunes were made for each other. Without further ado, let’s look at the best indie records released this week in our latest alternative chart.
The best indie and alternative albums this week:
Is It? – Ben Howard – 4.5/5
There are albums that pine for you to pore over their postmodernist lyrics, others that beg you to be bewildered trying to breakdown their dazzling musicology, and a rarified kind that simply dig out the deck chair, blast out some bliss for you to bask in and ask for nothing in return other than the occasional contented utterance of, ‘Well, isn’t this nice?’ Ben Howard’s Is It? is certainly the latter, but what truly makes it a summer masterpiece is that in time you’ll likely come to realise it has elements of all three.
The album was recorded by Howard and his band during a ten-day creative splurge at the Le Manoir de Léon studios, nestled in the hilly bosom between Bordeaux and Biarritz in the south of France. It perfectly relays that vignette musically in a steady flow of seamless melodic joy, so if that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, then c’est la vie, but for everyone else, the soundtrack of your Summer 2023 has arrived. It reconciles his recent health struggles and soars to a place of gratitude beautifully.
Let There Be Music – Bonny Doon – 3.5/5
Let There Be Music is a title that implies happy-clappy music, and that is what Bonny Doon deliver. The Detroit indie band’s album is sickly sweet; alas, there is a place for that, especially in summer. Sesame Street-like with its musicology, this is pop music at its most classical, and it serves as a refreshing offering of refinement free from dissonance or any second guessing.
The band have spent the last few years supporting other artists in a long continual tour. “The experience raised the ceiling on our imagination,” they say. But I’d argue, more so than their imagination, it has also raised their confidence. They now know that they have what it takes to entertain an audience, and Let There Be Music shows that they are happy to do that without any pretence and a blast of booming joy.
Off Planet – Django Django – 3/5
Off Planet is the perfect summer record, and with its release date coinciding with the British heatwave, there couldn’t be a better time for Django Django to share their collection of sun-drenched tracks. Each EP contains multiple featured artists, from Self Esteem to Stealing Sheep and Yuuko Sings. After a prolonged period of pandemic-induced social isolation, it’s refreshing to hear the band embrace such widespread collaboration, and their joy to be working with other musicians (even if some of the tracks were recorded remotely) is evidently clear.
It is an ambitious album, one that sometimes extends itself a little too far. It might be easier to enjoy the sizeable album in its four parts, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have many incredible moments from each EP. Instead, if the band were to cut the album to a shorter length – because there’s undoubtedly enough stellar material to make one cohesive, albeit smaller, record – then they’d have one of the year’s most impressive projects thus far. There are many songs to love on Off Planet – you might just have to skip through a few tracks to find them all.
In Times New Roman – Queens of the Stone Age – 3/5
It’s been a full six years since American hard rockers Queens of the Stone Age released their last studio album, 2017’s Villains. In that time, band leader Josh Homme has been through quite a lot: a messy separation and custody battle with his wife, Brody Dalle, and a cancer diagnosis being two of the major hurdles he’s had to overcome. As Homme probably knows from his close friend Dave Grohl, there’s nothing more therapeutic than music, so that’s exactly how Homme attacked his problems.
A Queens of the Stone Age album is always going to sound like Queens of the Stone Age. That’s a given. But does anything here resemble the shit-kicking impact of Rated R, the captivating trip of Songs for the Deaf, or even the dancey reinvention thrill of Villains? Not nearly. It’s just a Queens of the Stone Age album, and that’s all. Whatever it takes to bring us all back to the desert, even if Homme himself might be moving farther and farther away.
Emotional Contracts – Deer Tick – 2.5/5
Rhode Island rockers Deer Tick are back with their first album in six years. Titled Emotional Contracts, after so long away, it wouldn’t be unfair to expect the band to have lost some of the energy that once made them one of the East Coast’s most distinctive bands in the late 2000s. Thankfully, that isn’t the case. A blend of indie rock and the Americana that the quartet have made their own, whilst the new opus isn’t the most boundary-pushing or innovative offering, Emotional Contracts promises a good time and proper songwriting, two strengths that don’t go amiss amid today’s widespread penchant for kaleidoscopic sonics and challenging topics.
In light of our current and very postmodern appetite for fluid, gender-ascending music, there are moments on Emotional Contracts that some listeners might describe as a little bland due to their clear artistic debt to some familiar and time-battered places. Extending this trail of thought, several song themes are at times a little cliché, with damp tales of running from love and if “she” could only see frontman John Joseph McCauley now. (Words: Arun Starkey)
