The Far Out Album Chart: April 14th, 2023 – The best new indie and alternative albums this week
It’s a week that saw the return of Metallica and raised the question ‘why are Metallica back?’ just as quickly. But while the old guard may have faltered, spring has fittingly hailed a bright future of new music to come. With stunning EPs from the evergreen Angel Olsen to first-rate songwriting from Fenne Lily, it might not have been the most congested of weeks in terms of new music releases, but there is cause for optimism from what did arrive.
In a wider sense, the releases are representative of music’s curious current disposition. Unexpected things are happening in the depths of this internet age: we’ve seen classical re-emerge to such an extent that even former robots from Daft Punk have ditched futurism and turned towards age-old orchestras. We’ve also seen indie circles fight-back against the mainstream with Bristol continuing to mount its folky assault fuelled by homegrown labels. This all makes for a wide array of releases this week.
With festival season quickly approaching, the releases are set to ramp up again towards the summer, but for now, this quiet patch allows us to drift into new fields. So, if you’re in the mood to break up your chorus-chocked playlists with something a bit more ambient, then why not give the North Americans a try?
Check out our full selections of gems and duds below in this week’s Far Out Albums chart.
The best (and the worst) new indie albums this week:
Forever Means (EP) – Angel Olsen – 4.5/5
After cathartically extolling her grief with 2022’s Big Time, Olsen is ready to share a new collection of tracks, Forever Means, which features four songs written during the Big Time sessions. However, their failure to appear on her sixth record was certainly not for lack of quality. Olsen’s new EP is a stunning bite-sized demonstration of her ability to pack tremendous emotional weight in a small space, whether that be through the quiver of her voice or an honest, hard-hitting lyric.
Forever Means demonstrates Olsen’s ability to master both softness and tenderness and harsher, high-powered moments. Whereas ‘Nothing’s Free’ is undoubtedly the highlight of the EP, every track is a reminder of Olsen’s steadfast ability to craft unforgettable slices of musical genius, channelled by openness and intimacy.
Big Picture – Fenne Lily – 4/5
Fenne Lily is finally ready to be happy on record and it is a glorious thing to behold. With the backing of her touring band, the Bristol-based songwriter has whisked up lullabies that welcome the sanguine days of summer to come with all the comforting love of a bundle of antihistamines. Sweet but never saccharine, these plucked ditties are as humbly day-brightening as a bouquet of daffodils.
Importantly for Lily, this new development does not abandon sincerity. She treads towards hope with a sense of innate trepidation that trembles the fragile refrains with beautiful depth and personality. Happiness isn’t easy, but she’s giving it a try, and that venture is a gift that she shares with you in quietly joyous melodies. Big Picture is an early summer gem.
Rat Saw God – Wednesday – 4/5
Country has no business mingling with beefed-up shoegaze, just as a rat has no business with God, but the two dichotomies certainly paint an interesting picture, and that is where Wednesday happily picnic with their third album. It’s a bonfire of styles bundled together and set ablaze with the dousing fuel of confidence and invention.
Heavier than their previous work, this scratchy sound dresses up vignettes of darkness with an added sense of drama. Throughout the record, the band veer from tales of the unexpected to snippets of settled relationship scenes and cutting angsty lines like, “Nothing will ever be as vivid as [the] darkest time of my life, Found out who I was, and it wasn’t pretty.”
Aspirin Sun – Emma Tricca – 4/5
After signing with Bella Union, Emma Tricca has backed her inventiveness to flourish as she packs her folk melodies with a smorgasbord of texture for Aspirin Sun. Over eight tracks, these songs welcome a sense of spiritual spring into your days, as things move on liltingly. It’s a record akin to that old Pierrot le Fou line: “Life may be sad, but it is always beautiful.”
Carefully constructed arrangements with wistful steel guitars and rolling drums result in a record with a textured sound that is happy to waver around a chocolate box of styles. There are psychedelic finales and humble returns to basics strewn throughout the eight tracks – which actually seem like a lot more, in the best possible way.
Néo-Romace – Alexandra Stréliski – 4/5
As our lives continue to get more and more hectic, modern classical’s place is rising to the fore. When pop structures grow too repetitive or demanding of your attention, slinking back into something beautifully flowing like Alexandra Stréliski’s Néo-Romance is an enthralling indulgence. These sumptuously orchestrated pieces delight the playground of our imagination.
Beyond that, Néo-Romance offers enough inventiveness to vitalise the music itself, but it never gets carried away and ventures into territories too avant-garde to maintain the central experience. The experience in question is one where the music flows in and out of your consciousness as it draws up corroboration from the far reaches of your mind. If you can’t afford therapy, then treat yourself to some Stréliski.
Plus Ultra – Chappaqua Wrestling – 3.5/5
Recently, a new generation of British bands has emerged, and Chappaqua Wrestling are another group deserving of attention. On Plus Ultra, the outfit balances the melancholic with the anthemic, which is all underpinned by optimism, demonstrating their ambitions to take on main stages at festivals with bright muscularity.
While Plus Ultra was recorded while Chappaqua Wrestling were an independent band, the project is a full-bodied guitar album which feels at home on a major label. It’s not an avant-garde record with the ability to redefine the music industry, but tracks like ‘Wayfinding’ and ‘Need You No More’ will make listeners sing along at the top of their lungs while basking in the summer sun.
Good Time/Hard Time – Teleman – 3.5/5
A spanner was thrown into the unique sound of Teleman when keyboardist Jonny Sanders quit the group in 2020. Their fourth studio album shows that they’ve bounced back with a swagger in their step. This new iteration is one fit to fill dancefloors as the band get poppy with their sound and edge ever closer to New Romanticism.
That hidden Duran Duran within the band is masked with an abstract edge. So, amid the toe-tapping, you can expect their frontman to chat to God, relationships to be analysed with an odd sense of voyeurism ala Woody Allen, and unexpected references to blue WKD. This makes for an album that is simultaneously decidedly odd and yet seamlessly easy on the ear and mind.
Long Cool World – North Americans – 3.5/5
Straddling the line between folk instrumental and ambient might sound like the long way to say ‘boring music’ to some people out there, but I’ll be damned if even the biggest naysayers aren’t lulled to a state of quiet reflection by the end of Long Cool World. This filagreed music could even rock a can of Red Bull to peaceful slumber.
North Americans – consisting of Patrick McDermott and Barry Walker – recorded their previous records in the dark depths of isolation, but this time they got together in person, and their tones tesselate all the better owing to that human connection. Think ‘driving through a light rain storm at night on the way to somewhere notably mellow’. Think ‘music that you shouldn’t operate heavy machinery while listening to’. Think ‘songs that will make you quietly weep over memories of that dead dog you never actually had’.
Recovery Effects – The Black Delta Movement – 3.5/5
Beginning with a riff that adds the same sort of immediate energy as Black Sabbath’s classic ‘War Pigs’, you are told from the get-go that The Black Delta Movement aren’t pussyfooting around like a tricky winger here. They’re a swashbuckling full-back with a punk haircut and an interest in big cats away from the field. Aside from that power and slightly manic swagger, there’s an array of genres at play in the opening couple of minutes alone.
It’s music that tells you to pop on those aviators, cruise down the motorway, treat yourself to that service station whopper and have yourself a cool-looking ball in some far-off metropolis like Lincoln. Alas, the zenith of the record is not the slick energy, but rather that rare sense of seeing it play out live in your mind’s eye that you rarely get in these darkened days of ‘bedroom beats’. The Black Delta Movement are a ray of boozy light.
Exotico – Temples – 3/5
Temples have crafted a world entirely their own, taking significant influences from each decade, ranging from 1960s garage rock and psychedelia to 1970s Italian horror soundtracks and 1980s synth-pop. Bassist Thomas Walmsley explains, “There are so many different influences across the songs, which goes back to having free rein in the studio and being as spontaneous as we could be.”
However, the album moves between incredibly solid slices of contemporary psychedelia and tepid indie-rock cuts drawn out over 16 songs. Exotico is a bold effort, with the band’s ambitious approach certainly paying off at times, yet it would be a much stronger record had it been reduced to a tracklisting of ten or twelve songs.
72 Seasons – Metallica – 2/5
The ageing process happens to us all, and Metallica are old. They’ve been old for at least a decade (or more, depending on who you ask), but their days as grizzled metal elder statesmen are official. So what’s the response when the world has written you off? By keeping your head down and getting harder, faster, longer, and more aggressive. After all, the worst thing a metal band can get is soft. The reflective epoch of the band hasn’t done them any favours here.
72 Seasons isn’t a concept album, which is good, because its central themes only barely seem to hold together. Sometimes Hetfield is talking about witches, sometimes he’s interrogating himself, and sometimes it’s completely unclear what he’s on about. Behind him, the other members break out a different variation of the same thing for every song. Metallica clearly thought that they could get by on speed and aggression because 72 Seasons proves that there’s nothing new under the sun for metal’s most popular band.
Mythologies – Thomas Bangalter – 1.5/5
Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter has ditched the helmet and ventured into classical. You would have thought his new overture with Romain Dumas and the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine would sport some sort of pioneering flourish somewhere along the line. As it happens, you wait and wait for a touch of robotics, but like an Amish kid at Christmas, it never arrives. What you’re left with is an uneventful swell of strings that codify one singular message: I, Thomas Bangalter, have decided to distance myself from my former oeuvre in such a way that you may well find frustrating, but I, ultimately, couldn’t give a funk; in fact, not giving a funk is just about my sole motivation for making this record.
There is a strange sense of detachment that runs throughout the album. The track title ‘L’Accouchement’ is French for childbirth, but this labour is one of the strangest on record—ominous yet uneventful. It’s hard to imagine what kind of creature this maudlin screech bore. It’s a song that underpins the entire album: dawdling, like giving birth to Satan, but the bastard is so slippery, he pops right out without the need for an epidural. Ultimately, this viola waterboarding is unpleasant by design, but that doesn’t make listening to it any better.
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