The album also makes for a great calling card for J. There's an appealing lightness and directness to the melodies, and tracks like Sola are not only upbeat but even quite frantic, while beguiling lyrics pop out at you in Oh and Parliament of Spiders. Recent Machine Translations albums have felt a little claustrophobic, resistant to opening up, but Oh feels like a weight lifted. Walker is that rare gem: across a 20-year career his music has ranged willy-nilly over genres and sounds while never losing his essence. Nonetheless, if flash and timeliness matter little to you, J.
It's also untimely: it eschews hip, cool electronics for a warm, organic sound.
Walker sings his elliptical lyrics in an unassuming, conversational tone. Machine Translations' music isn't flashy: J. Compounding the impact is the vibrant warmth of sound captured on this vinyl version of the release. In fact restraint is a hallmark throughout, with the songs all kept to less than five minutes, so the solos feel distilled, and pools of solo guitar emphasise the prevailing sparseness. Bassist Andrew Shaw and drummer Chris Vale share a flair for deepening the shadows, drama and tension in Wren's carefully sculpted compositions, without making them overblown. His guitar sound is slightly eerie, and its edge of distortion makes the darkness more gritty than romantic. Wren backs this up by writing and playing music that seems to loom at you out of a prevailing gloom. The cover painting suggests as much: a disturbing 18th-century image by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg called A Shipwreck off a Rocky Coast. Toby Wren and his colleagues have a purely musical feel for the lavishly dark and slightly sinister, too. The American trumpeter Michael Mantler married them when he memorably set some verse by Edward Gorey to music on his must-hear 1976 album The Hapless Child. Jazz and Gothic are hardly ready bed-mates. Whether you'll want Bono to hug it out is quite another matter. Kendrick Lamar puts a fire under their Irish butts on American Soul with a rib-rattling rap and they respond with a fat, slithering riff from The Edge while Bono hollers "You! Are! Rock and roll!" At the other end of the spectrum 13 (There Is A Light) is a heartfelt attempt to create their own Everybody Hurts. But they used to be leaders, not followers. And musically they've taken notice of Chris Martin & co's success with fist-pumping arena-pop, massed whoah-oh-ohs and sway-along choruses spouting self-empowerment themes. Song titles such as Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way and You're The Best Thing About Me sound like they could be embroidered onto throw pillows, or at least found on a Coldplay record. Where Innocence drew heavily on Bono's personal past, with Experience he wants to give the world a hug. No backfire-prone stunts to attract protest and ridicule this time. You probably remember U2's last album, Songs Of Innocence, less for the music than the fact it showed up in your iTunes uninvited one September day in 2014. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (Interscope/Universal) Miguel might have found his conscience, but he's lost his mojo along the way. Told You So, a bouncing R&B jam, is the closest approximation, but it mainly stands out for being more memorable than the Tame Impala-indebted psych fug of Harem, the derivative G-funk of Banana Clip, Pineapple Skies, the back-end breakdown of which can't save it from the repetitive platitudes, and a bland invitation to Come Through And Chill, featuring J.Cole, one of a handful of forgettable guests. There's nothing particularly wrong with Now, an earnest anti-Trump ballad, but it, like this record overall, doesn't come near the immediacy, originality and raw funk of his best work. The creamy-voiced guitar-wielding R&B renegade made good on his promising 2010 debut with 2012's aptly titled Kaleidoscope Dream and 2015's even more accomplished and varied Wildheart, but 2017 sees Miguel switch his enduring themes of sex and manhood for a whiffy blend of politics and optimism, and frankly, he's way better in the bedroom. "I was good then, but I'm better now," the artist born Miguel Jontel Pimentel sings on Skywalker, War & Leisure's hater-baiting lead single. Miguel finds his conscience but loses his mojo.
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