Vinyl Speaks

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Ruban Nielson makes a double album and the ambition suits him. Psychedelic, sprawling, genuinely strange in its second half. The first disc is immediately accessible; the second needs time and repays it.His voice remains one of the most idiosyncratic in guitar music. Nobody sounds like Unknown Mortal Orchestra.V is a reminder of why that matters, and why Auckland keeps…

The smell of a good hotel lobby is something I have never been able to adequately describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Clean linen, trace wood polish, a faint ghost of someone’s expensive perfume. Stockholm’s Lydmar Hotel, on the waterfront near the Royal Palace, smells like all of that plus what I can only call considered money — the scent of a building that has made good decisions. I…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon One of the best debut records of recent years. Jackson writes from a deeply personal place with a poet’s precision and a folk singer’s instinct for where silence should go.Dickhead Blues and Pawnshop are stunning. The production is spare to the point of tender. Here at the beginning of what should be a significant career.Pay attention now. 8.5/10   If the reviews are…

Comfort has been so thoroughly vilified in motivational circles that people feel guilty being comfortable. They think comfort means complacency. They think rest means laziness. They think satisfaction means settling. None of these are true. Comfort is necessary. Rest is necessary. Satisfaction is the evidence that something worked. The Right Amount The problem isn’t comfort. The problem is…

Energy. I keep hearing people talk about energy — their energy, other people’s energy, bad energy, high vibes, low vibes, energy alignment, energy vampires. And I think we’ve overcomplicated it. I think we had it right when we were describing animals. Wombat energy. That’s the thing. If you’ve spent any time around a wombat — or even watched a wombat video in good faith — you understand what I…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon A decade away and she comes back with something smaller, stranger, and more alive. Multitudes is a protest record and a grief record and a solo record, and all those things coexist without competing.The production is deliberately raw. In Lightning and Hiding Out in the Open are the kind of songs that remind you why artists earn the long run.Worth the wait. Worth more…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Styles finds his actual register here — indie-pop, soul, a little folk — and stops trying to be a rock star. Whatever he was doing before, this is the version that works.As It Was is unkillable and the album that surrounds it is better than the discourse gave it credit for. Late Night Talking could be a hit from any decade.Warm and self-aware. More than we had reason to…

Every problem looks exactly one size from the position you’re currently standing in. It looks like the whole field of view. It looks like everything. This is a feature of perspective, not a feature of the problem. Move. Physically, if you can. Even that helps. But also move in the more abstract sense: talk to someone who has nothing at stake, explain your problem to a child, write it in a letter…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Grande sheds the maximalism and goes for the intimate — smaller sounds, confessional lyrics, late-night pop that trusts the listener. A deliberate de-escalation from someone who didn’t need to do it.we can’t be friends is the obvious highlight but the boy is mine earns its runtime. More restrained than expected. The restraint is the point.Doesn’t always go where you want…

The welcome briefing for cruise ship performers includes emergency procedures, dining options, the approximate weight of the vessel, and — if the entertainment director is the thoughtful kind — a quiet word about the particular challenge of performing for an audience that has, at any given moment, twenty-six other options for how to spend the next forty-five minutes. I’ve done several Carnival…

Before a bone heals stronger, it breaks. Before a muscle grows, it tears. Before most people figure out who they actually are, something they built their identity on stops working. These facts are not a coincidence. Breaking is often the mechanism. Not the obstacle to progress — the mechanism of it. The Thing You Build After What you build after you’ve broken is always different from what you…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Their most divided release is also their most committed. Turner and co. lean all the way into orchestral cabaret-rock and refuse to look back. If you want Favourite Worst Nightmare, you’ll be disappointed. That’s on you.Body Paint and Mr Schwartz are doing something graceful. Turner’s voice has never been more controlled.More interesting than you remember. Give it…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Bridges makes the late-night soul record that sounds nothing like Coming Home and everything like the kind of album you make after you’ve figured yourself out. Mike Dean’s production suits him.Motorbike is the highlight but there’s not a weak track. Effortlessly cool in a way that usually takes effort to fake.A significant step forward. The best version of Leon Bridges…

Boarding. The boarding process was designed by someone who has never met humans. I don’t mean that as a criticism — it’s almost an achievement. To create a system that reliably produces a forty-person corridor standstill, using only numbers and announcements, is a kind of perverse genius. We all know our zone. We were told our zone. And yet, somehow, everyone is standing up. The Aeroplane…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Made Tamara Lindeman a name outside folk circles, and for good reason. The arrangements are jazzy and strange, the lyrics about ecological grief and personal collapse landing on top of each other in ways that shouldn’t work but do.Robber is one of the best songs she’s written. This is folk music that knows what time it is.Underheard, underrated. Fix both. 8.5/10   If the…

There is a type of person who sees something broken and immediately gets to work on it. This is a useful type of person and civilisation runs on them. However, they have a flaw: they apply the fix-it impulse to things that cannot be fixed, and in doing so, prevent themselves from doing the much harder work of replacement. Some systems cannot be repaired. Some processes, relationships, and…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Nine movements, 46 minutes, and the late great Pharoah Sanders playing saxophone over Sam Shepherd’s electronics while the LSO moves around them like light through water.This has no right to be this good. It sounds like peace — which is rarer in music than it should be.Pharoah’s last studio album. Essential doesn’t cover it. One of the more beautiful things made in…