FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
Essential April Releases
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THERE are a selection of great albums…
IN THIS PHOTO: Dawn Richard releases her new album, Second Line: An Electro Revival, on 30th April
that are due next month that are worth further investigation. On 2nd April, Demi Lovato’s Dancing with the Devil… The Art of Starting Over is due. It is worth pre-ordering, as Lovato is one of the finest Pop artists of today:
“Demi Lovato’s new album, The Art of Starting Over…Dancing with the Devil features 19 songs (1 interlude, 2 previously released tracks “Anyone” and “What Other People Say”, plus 16 new studio tracks). This album acts as a companion piece to the recently announced ‘Dancing With The Devil’ YouTube documentary series”.
There is a lot of talk about a new Demi Lovato documentary that has just come out. Dancing with the Devil is out of the most honest music documentary in years – it is well worth a watch. In this interview with PAPER, we discover more about the documentary and Lovato’s upcoming seventh studio album:
“Toward the tail end of 2020, Demi Lovato got a haircut. Pop stars get a lot of haircuts (at the time of this writing, Billie Eilish has just thrilled fans by going blonde). This haircut was different.
Lovato, a 28-year-old megastar committed to regular feats of Olympic-level vocal pyrotechnics, went from flowing, Siren-like locks to a look that she felt reflected who she really was: a blonde spiky shag, buzzed at the sides. In her new documentary, Dancing With the Devil (airing in four episodes on YouTube starting March 23), viewers can see an ecstatic Lovato getting her head shaven. She describes it as a literal shedding of her past and a visual reflection of her queer identity, something she has recently, publicly, embraced.
"Going back over the past year, I thought my life was going to turn out a lot differently than it has," Lovato says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, hair now styled into a black pixie. "At one point I was engaged to a man, and now I'm very much not. And so I just wanted to allow myself the freedom to match my outside to what I feel like on the inside, and that's what I've done."
After a public engagement (and break up) to a cis male actor last year, Lovato is eager to embrace her queerness. "The queer label is fine because to me it's just this blanket statement of being different," she says. "That's what I can commit to. I feel like I'm too fluid to commit to a label."
Sexuality is just one of many deeply personal topics that Lovato approaches with unflinching candor in Dancing With the Devil. The documentary includes a series of harrowing, acutely painful revelations surrounding sexual assault, addiction and her recovery from a lifelong eating disorder. Lovato stares into the camera and shares everything, an act of steely courage and open generosity. She values extreme transparency (this is her second such YouTube documentary, after 2017's Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated), and practices a form of radical honesty in the public eye.
A new album, Dancing with the Devil... The Art of Starting Over, will be released on April 2, as a companion piece to the documentary. "Even though [the album] is not technically a soundtrack to the documentary, it kind of is," she says. "If you were to follow the track listing in order, it really goes to the way my life has played out over the last year."
The album starts out with power ballads chronicling Lovato's darkest days ("Anyone," "Dancing with the Devil," "ICU"), and then moves into her recovery. The lyrics are specific and autobiographical: she sings about working through her eating disorder on the surprisingly upbeat "Melon Cake" (she was only allowed watermelon covered in fat-free whipped cream on her birthdays for years); and about her biological father, who passed away in 2013 and with whom she had a complicated relationship, on "Butterfly."
The queer subtext of "Cool for the Summer" becomes text on "The Kind of Lover I Am," in which Lovato plainly states that it "doesn't matter if you're a woman or a man." The album takes on a folkier tone and showcases the Voice while still allowing for post-quarantine club bangers. There's "My GFs are My BFs," a classic female empowerment anthem featuring Saweetie, and "Met Him Last Night," a collaboration with Ariana Grande that highlights two of the most powerful voices in pop”.
Also out on 2nd April is Du Blonde’s Homecoming. The amazing Beth Jeans Houghton is joined by the likes of Shirley Manson, Ezra Furman on a much-anticipated album. I think it is going to be one of this year’s best-received albums. Rough Trade describe the album like this:
“Du Blonde is back with new album Homecoming and with it, her own record label, clothing brand and all-round art house Daemon T.V. Written, recorded and produced by Du Blonde (aka Beth Jeans Houghton), Homecoming is a refreshing taste of pop-grunge finery, featuring guests including Shirley Manson, Ezra Furman, Andy Bell (Ride/Oasis), The Farting Suffragettes, and members of Girl Ray and Tunng among others.
The album began as a few songs hashed out on a porch in LA in early 2020, and as Houghton’s desire to create something self-made and self-released merged with the then incoming pandemic. Admirers of Du Blonde’s previous two studio albums (2015’s Welcome Back to Milk and 2019’s Lung Bread for Daddy) might be surprised to find that Homecoming takes on the form of a pop record. The garage rock, grunge and metal guitar licks that have come to define Du Blonde are still there in spades, but as a whole the direction of the album is pop through and through. Houghton’s freak flag is still flying high however, a fact that’s no more apparent than on ‘Smoking Me Out’, a bizarre mash up of 80’s shock rock, metal and 60’s pop group harmonies. This defiant and energetic attitude can be heard throughout Homecoming, whether writing about her medication (30mg of citalopram, once a day), her queerness on 'I Can’t Help You There' (“I’ve been a queen, I’ve been a king, and still I don’t fit in”), to the joyous and manic explosion of 'Pull The Plug' (“say that I’m deranged, but I’ve been feeling more myself than ever”), Houghton is nothing if not herself, full force and unapologetic in her approach to writing, playing and recording her music”.
I think that most of the best albums from April arrive in the second half. The week ending 16th is especially busy. London Grammar’s Californian Soil is an album that I am very much looking forward to. Do go and pre-order a copy of the trio’s third studio album. Led by the amazing Hannah Reid, I think that they will hit a new stride on Californian Soil. 2017’s Truth Is a Beautiful Thing is a great album, but I think the songs on their new album is more personal and stirring. In a recent interview with NME, we learn more about the double standards and misogyny Reid has faced, in addition to why she has taken the reigns when it came to lyrics for album three:
“Over the course of a decade in London Grammar, the double standards constantly on show proved understandably exhausting for the vocalist. “If I’m strong-minded, I’m being really ‘difficult’ or I’m being a ‘bitch’,” she says, “whereas for the boys they’ve just got ‘integrity’ over what they do. It can be a really, really tiny thing – but if you have it every day, and it becomes a thousand moments, it can actually change who you are… You can’t let it go when it’s happening all the time.”
She adds: “I felt like I started to mould myself around certain men. I just felt like I had a different task to the boys. They could walk into a room and just be taken seriously as musicians straight away.”
When finishing the tour for the band’s second record at the end of 2017, something had to give. While Hannah is adamant that quitting London Grammar wasn’t on the cards, there were moments when she considered if it was all worth it.
“I did think that I wasn’t cut out for the industry,” she reflects today. “And I did say to Dan and Dot, ‘I don’t want this to end, but something does have to change because I just can’t keep doing my best work or going out on the road if I’m going to come back and feel this way.’”
But instead of quitting, Hannah pushed forward with work on album three, stepping up into a figurehead role in the band, taking on responsibility for most of the record’s visual aesthetic and bringing more of herself to the songwriting. There was no big conversation about this shift in dynamic between the trio, but work on ‘Californian Soil’ came alongside a natural gear change.
Her bandmates were happy to let her take the reins. “Lyrically, [‘Californian Soil’] is very much about Hannah’s experience as a woman, and we wanted that message to come through as loud as possible,” Dot tells NME on a separate Zoom call alongside Dan a few days later.
This shift in dynamic is strikingly evident on album three, a record in which Hannah refuses to hide, her songwriting and stories bursting out front and centre. “I was hiding my vulnerability away and hiding the message of songs away,” she says of the band’s past material. This time around, the increased focus on the meanings behind the songs makes for the band’s most honest and personal work yet”.
The Offspring’s Let the Bad Times Roll arrives on 16th April. The band have been going for decades! I remember when Americana came out in the 1990s and I wondered whether they would still be putting music out years later. Go and pre-order the band’s upcoming tenth studio album:
“The legendary So-Cal punk group The Offspring are back with their 10th album and first new offering since 2008. After releasing two standalone tracks in 2020 - the over-the-top cover of Joe Exotic's (of Tiger King infamy) "Hey Kitty Kitty" and a rendition of Darlene Love's classic "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" - the band is ready to plant their punk rock flag in the sand once again with their blistering new album Let the Bad Times Roll.
With the help of producer Bob Rock, Dexter Holland describes the album as "the most cathartic thing we've done. The messages might be dark, but at the end what's left is that communication is important, working through feelings is important and most of all, hope is important." Then let the bad times roll for now, in the hopes that good times lie ahead”.
I am looking forward to this album, as I have been following the band for years - and I am really excited to see what they have come up with for Let the Bad Times Roll. Maybe not as jocular and light as some of their earliest albums, it sounds like a new depth and meaning has come into the Offspring camp.
There are a few great albums out on 30th April I am keen to recommend. On 23rd April, Field Music’s Flat White Moon is due. I am a big fan of David and Peter Brewis. It seems like we are in for a real treat with their latest album. Do go and order a copy of an album that is shaping up to be really fascinating:
“We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about." says David Brewis, who has co-led the band Field Music with his brother Peter since 2004. It's a statement which seems particularly fitting to their latest album, Flat White Moon released via Memphis Industries.
Sporadic sessions for the album began in late 2019 at the pair's studio in Sunderland, slotted between rehearsals and touring. The initial recordings pushed a looser performance aspect to the fore, inspired by some of their very first musical loves; Free, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; old tapes and LPs pilfered from their parents' shelves. But a balance between performance and construction has always been an essential part of Field Music.
By March 2020, recording had already begun for most of the album's tracks and, with touring for Making A New World winding down, Peter and David were ready to plough on and finish the record.
The playfulness that’s evident in much of Flat White Moon's music became a way to offset the darkness and the sadness of many of the lyrics. Much of the album is plainly about loss and grief, and also about the guilt and isolation which comes with that.
Those personal upheavals are apparent on songs like Out of the Frame, where the loss of a loved one is felt more deeply because they can't be found in photographs and compounded by the suspicion that you caused their absence, or on When You Last Heard From a Linda, which details the confusion of being unable to penetrate a best friend's loneliness in the darkest of circumstances.
Some songs are more impressionistic. Orion From The Streets combines Studio Ghibli, a documentary about Cary Grant and an excess of wine to become a hallucinogenic treatise on memory and guilt.. Others, such as Not When You're In Love, are more descriptive. Here, the narrator guides us through slide- projected scenes, questioning the ideas and semantics of 'love' as well the reliability of his own memory.
For the most part, the album has fewer explicitly political themes than previous records, though there is No Pressure, about a political class who feel no obligation to take responsibility if they can finagle a narrative instead. And there's I'm The One Who Wants To Be With You which skirts its way around toxic masculinity through teenage renditions of soft-rock balladry.
On Flat White Moon Field Music take on the challenge of representing negative emotions in a way that doesn't dilute or obscure them but which can still uplift. The result is a generous record of
bounteous musical ideas, in many ways Field Music's most immediately gratifying to date”.
Moving to 30th April, there are several album that I want to push your way. You might not have heard of Ashley Munroe. Her new album, Rosegold, is beautiful. She is a phenomenal artist who I would urge people to check out; make sure you listen back to her past work. Rosegold is an album that you will want to pre-order:
“A reliable traditionalist with a penchant for bittersweet songs of heartbreak and loss, Ashley Monroe pulled a complete 180 for her spectacular new album, Rosegold, riding the joyful emotional wave that followed the birth of her son to create her most ecstatic, blissed-out collection yet. Written and recorded over the past two years, the record finds the Grammy - nominated Nashville star pushing her sound in bold new directions, drawing on everything from Kanye West and Kid Cudi to Beck and The Beach Boys as she layers lush vocal harmonies atop dreamy, synthesized soundscapes and sensual, intoxicating beats.
Monroe worked with a variety of producers on the album, letting the tracks dictate her direction rather than any arbitrary adherence to genre or tradition, and the result is a record as daring as it is rewarding, an ecstatic, revelatory meditation on happiness and gratitude that tosses expectation to the wind as it celebrates our endless capacity to love, and to be loved, even in the midst of chaos and tragedy. Born in Knoxville, TN, Monroe first began turning heads in Nashville as a teenager, when she arrived in town with a notebook full of mature, emotionally sophisticated songs that belied her young age. A jack-of-all-trades, she picked up work behind the scenes at first, singing on sessions at Jack White’s Third Man Studios and penning tunes that would appear on albums by the likes of Guy Clark, Carrie Underwood, Jason Aldean, and Miranda Lambert. Monroe and Lambert forged a close personal bond through their collaborations, and in 2011, they teamed up with fellow Nashville journey woman Angaleena Presley to launch the critically acclaimed trio Pistol Annies, which would go on to top the Country Album charts, crack the Top 5 on the Billboard 200, and earn a Grammy nomination for Best Country Album. Monroe’s solo output was equally lauded, with NPRhailing her work as “subtle and breathtaking” and Rolling Stone praising her writing as “riveting [and] sharp-witted”.
Dawn Richard’s Second Line: An Electro Revival is also out on 30th April. She is an artist I have been spending a lot of time with lately. I am including her in my Modern Heroines feature soon, as she is one of the finest artists in the world right now. Go and pre-order her new album, as I think it is her finest yet. I reckon the music she is putting out now is so strong and memorable. A nod of the head to Rough Trade, who provide some useful information:
“Much like the New Orleans–born artist who created it, Second Line is an unapologetic genre bender that pushes boundaries, expands possibilities, and shatters expectations. It’s more than just an album: Second Line is a cohesive sensory experience that questions traditional ideas of sound, production, and visual aesthetics as they relate to music. Its interlocking parts tell an epic story about the quest for artistic expression, with Dawn describing her project as “a movement to bring pioneering Black women in electronic music to the forefront.”
Second Line cuts to the chase with its opening suite of dancefloor bangers, immediately displaying Dawn’s mastery of layered production and melodic hooks. Second Line treats Louisiana Creole culture, New Orleans bounce, and Southern Swag as elemental, allowing Dawn to weave in and out of house, footwork, R&B, and more. As she says, “I am the genre.”
The story of Second Line centers on Dawn’s persona King Creole, assassin of stereotypes, a Black girl from the South at a crossroads in her artistic career. To move forward, she decides to look back, but where previous album New Breed took influence from her father, Second Line is illuminated by Dawn’s mother. Her proud repeated proclamation of “I’m a Creole Girl” introduces the ecstatic dancehall pop of “Jacuzzi,” and later, on the cinematic album centerpiece “Mornin | Streetlights,” she answers Dawn’s question of how many times she has been in love. Intimate conversations like this between the two are interlaced throughout Second Line, giving credence to how the protagonist came to be, and direction to build a lane forward.
It’s no surprise that King Creole’s story parallels Dawn Richard’s. As a founding member of Danity Kane, and later with Diddy’s Dirty Money, Dawn was able to explore the ins and outs of commercial pop music. As a solo artist, she opted to selfrelease her music. Over the span of five critically acclaimed full-length albums, Dawn has made the message clear that she will not bow down or bend to industry norms. All the while, she’s built her resume with enough extracurriculars to make your head spin: Cheerleader for the New Orleans Hornets? Check. Animator for Adult Swim? Check. Owner-operator of a vegan pop-up food truck? Check. Martial arts expert? Check! Second Line embodies the heritage of soul music and the roots of New Orleans, all surrounded by the influences of electronic futurism. “The definition of a Second Line in New Orleans is a celebration of someone’s homecoming,” says Dawn. “In death and in life, we celebrate the impact of a person’s legacy through dance and music. I’m celebrating the death of old views in the industry. The death of boxes and limits. I’m celebrating the homecoming of the Future. The homecoming to the new wave of artists. The emergence of all the King Creoles to come.” Dawn Richard is bold, confident, purposeful, and a King throughout Second Line. Are you ready to dance”.
Another album that I am looking forward to is Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis’ She Walks In Beauty. I have heard some of the music from the album, and it is so gorgeous and rich. This is an album that every music fan will want to get a hold of! Go and order the album now, as it is definitely going to score a lot of phenomenal reviews:
“A unique new album of poetry and music featuring Marianne Faithfull set to the music of Warren Ellis, and featuring Nick Cave, Brian Eno and Vincent Ségal. With She Walks in Beauty, Marianne Faithfull with composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis releases one of the most distinctive and singular albums of her long, extraordinary life and career. It was recorded just before and during the first Covid-19 lockdown – during which the singer herself became infected and almost died of the disease – with musical friends and family including not only composer Warren Ellis but Nick Cave, Brian Eno, cellist Vincent Ségal and producer-engineer Head.
She Walks in Beauty fulfils Faithfull’s long-held ambition to record an album of poetry with music. It’s a record that draws on her passion for the English Romantic poets, a passion she fostered in her A Level studies with one Mrs Simpson at St Joseph's Convent School in Reading. Drawing deep on the poetry of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Thomas Hood, Faithfull’s vocal performances set to Ellis’s subtle collages of sound draw out the heart, the quick, the vibrant living matter in all these great poems, making them fresh, renewing them with the complex, lived-in timbres of her voice, and set to a subtle palette of ambient musical settings. It’s both a radical departure and a return to her original inspirations as an artist and performer”.
There are two more albums that I want to bring in before wrapping things up. Brighton duo Royal Blood deliver their hotly-anticipated new album, Typhoons, on 30th April. It is one that you will want to get. If their eponymous debut was more influenced by artists like Queens of the Stone Age and The White Stripes, it seems like they heading in a new direction for Typhoons:
“Eagerly anticipated third album Typhoons. When Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher sat down to talk about making a new album, they knew what they wanted to achieve. It involved a conscious return to their roots, back when they had made music that was influenced by Daft Punk, Justice, and Philippe Zdar of Cassius. It also called for a similar back-to-basics approach to what had made their self-titled debut album so thrilling, visceral and original.
“We sort of stumbled on this sound, and it was immediately fun to play,” recalls Kerr. “That’s what sparked the creativity on the new album, the chasing of that feeling. It’s weird, though - if you think back to ‘Figure it Out’, it kind of contains the embryo of this album. We realised that we didn’t have to completely destroy what we’d created so far; we just had to shift it, change it. On paper, it’s a small reinvention. But when you hear it, it sounds so fresh”.
The final album from April you’ll want to save some pennies for is Teenage Fanclub’s Endless Arcade. A new album from the Glasgow band is always a very good thing! Be sure to pre-order an album that we very much all need right now:
“Even if we weren’t living through extraordinarily troubling times, there is nothing quite like a Teenage Fanclub album to assuage the mind, body and soul, and to reaffirm that all is not lost in this world. Endless Arcade follows the band’s ninth album Here, released in 2016. It's quintessential TFC: melodies are equal parts heartwarming and heartaching; guitars chime and distort; keyboard lines mesh and spiral; harmony-coated choruses burst out like sun on a stormy day”.
Those are the recommendations for this month. I am writing this on 25th April, so I know that some albums might be pushed back and others might be pulled forward – such is the unpredictable and erratic nature of releases and scheduled during the pandemic! You can see which other albums are coming out in April if you need some more suggestions. I did think that the McCartney III Imagined album was coming out on 16th April, though that looks like it is coming out in July. Regardless, the albums I have highlighted above should keep you busy and add some nice releases…
TO your record collection.