Tony Stamp looks at an exhaustive new collection from UK rave legends Underworld, folk musician Laura Marling motherhood-infused latest and Soft Power by Fazerdaze.
Photo: Frances Carter
The long-awaited second album from Fazerdaze takes its name from a political technique, but invests it with new meaning. In the accompanying bio Amelia Murray talks about embracing a new sense of power without losing her softness, saying "these qualities are not binary or mutually exclusive".
Over the course of the LP you get a real sense of what she means, the mental realignment she's describing rendered sonically.
In making Soft Power, Murray visited Los Angeles three times to trial producers, looking to generate sounds that would fill the larger spaces she'd been performing.
In the end though, she recorded and produced most of it herself, and the amount of character present is testament to that being the right approach.
Soft Power pairs stadium ambition with bedroom sensibility, electric instruments with electronic ones, and frequently douses her voice in oceans of reverb.
Songs like 'Bigger' and 'Cherry Pie' represent the more anthemic side of things, but feel far more adventurous than anything from the LA song factory. 'In Blue' and 'A Thousand Years' lean into luxurious synth pop; big, bold, and generously melodic.
The scrappiest cut is called 'Purple_02', with sparse guitar stabs and a wonky lead hook.
Murray sings "I start to lose me within myself", and if you've read any interviews with Fazerdaze in the last few years you'll know what she means.
Soft Power is ambitious, unexpected, and confident enough to suggest she's found herself again.
Strawberry Hotel by Underworld
Photo: Bandcamp
Even by the standards of the 1990s, Underworld's 'Born Slippy.Nuxx' was an unexpected hit. Over seven minutes long, built around a hammering kick drum and free-associated vocals, its appearance in the film Trainspotting propelled it into the charts, (helped, I suspect, by the pillowy chords in its opening moments).
Their latest is an exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, trip through prior sounds, as well as admirable new experiments.
'Denver Luna' feels a bit like Karl Hyde and Rick Smith trying to emulate their biggest hit. As much as I enjoy the music, I have mixed thoughts about Hyde's stream-of-consciousness patter, which threatens to run out of steam here. 'And the Colour Red' is more successful: snippets of voice, and a bar-long synth riff that repeats, and repeats, but just gets more hypnotic.
Tracks like these feel like second nature to Underworld: sparse and sleek but infinitely head-nodable. The album does stray into experimentation though, including two disposable cuts that recycle earlier vocal takes.
I'm more intrigued by things like 'Ottavia', which features spoken word from Smith's daughter Esme Bronwen-Smith. She also co-produced 11 of the album's 15 tracks.
Additions like this, familial or otherwise, can be invaluable, and Underworld certainly feel inspired on Strawberry Hotel. Some of its swings don't quite hit, but I'm glad they're taking risks.
Patterns in Repeat by Laura Marling
Photo: Bandcamp
British folk musician Laura Marling's latest was made following the birth of her daughter, an event that's inseparable from the work: it's absent some of the studio sheen of early recordings, having been mostly made at her home, and is lyrically preoccupied with motherhood.
'Child of Mine' welcomes the listener into Marling's house with sounds of a baby cooing. That domestic setting is pierced occasionally with studio touches like strings, but the album stays hushed and gentle.
Apparently most songs were recorded with her baby on her knee, or at her feet.
Marling finished her masters degree in psychoanalysis before writing Patterns in Repeat, a subject she told Vogue is "completely antiquated, [and] ridiculous", but is good for songwriting because it's "about investigating the poetic nature of the unconscious".
That's evident here without even delving into lyrics: the way Marling's life bleeds into her art and vice versa is profound enough.
Tony Stamp reviews the latest album releases every week on The Sampler.
