Best New Albums (Feb. 24, 2023)

Philip Selway: Strange Dance
It’s always interesting to consider how artists position their music relative to other artists who’ve come before them. Case in point: when Radiohead drummer Phil Selway first set out to make his third solo effort Strange Dance, he “imagined a Carole King record if she’d invited electronic composer Daphne Oram to drum on it.” The truth is, Strange Dance doesn’t sound anything like that! And that turns out to be a good thing. If Carole King and Daphne Oram provided an initial sense of direction, Selway and his “dream team” of collaborators—multi-instrumentalist Quinta, cellist Laura Moody, electronic artist Hannah Peel, producer Marta Salogni, drummer Valentina Magaletti and Portishead’s Adrian Utley—arrived at a sound that’s difficult to describe in terms of familiar “RIYL” reference points. Though Selway is unabashed these days in writing from the perspective of a 55-year-old, he came up with the basic idea for several of these tunes on the guitar two decades ago. It’s hard to discern how much Selway’s melodic sensibilities come into play in his day job, but Strange Dance gives us a glimpse into Selway’s perspective when he saw himself as an aspiring singer/songwriter. The combination of old tunes with modern sounds gives Strange Dance an alluring touch of temporal ambiguity, even as we can hear Selway growing as a musician. Fresh off his recent work scoring the BBC Radio play Sea Longing, the films Let Me Go and Carmilla, and the Rambert Dance Company’s celebration of choreographer Merce Cunningham, Selway has crafted an oddly reassuring brand of melancholia that’s unique to him. —Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

shame: Food for Worms
For a band who arose from a scene filled with abstractions and strangeness in every song, Shame’s best quality is how straight they play it. On their new album, Food for Worms, Shame tries to obscure the awkward fact that for a post-punk band, they’re not the best at post-punk. But their washed-out rock songs are outstanding, finding new ground between their melancholic indie-rock tendencies and the undercurrent of angst that propels the songs forward. “Fingers of Steel” starts the album beautifully, anchored around a thumping piano and Steen’s snotty, empathic singing. “There’s a sun outside, but you don’t see it,” he sings, with the background vocals underlining the words “see it.” But the song really takes flight when the drums drop out for the chorus and atmosphere thrives solely on grandiose harmonies. The band manages to reach new heights on the closer, a winding, Glastonbury-sized anthem entitled “All the People.” Much of the song is buoyed by the moving instrumentation, as the lyrics lean towards being vague and silly. “All the people that you’re gonna meet / Don’t you throw it all away because you can’t love yourself” isn’t a particularly inspiring sentiment, but it’s the slightly untuned, scraping guitars combined with Steen’s lackadaisical vocals that makes the chorus touching. When simple drums and harmonies appear during the second verse, it transforms into a monumentally bittersweet song. But the band keeps pushing, sustaining momentum for nearly six minutes, finally arriving at the album’s single transcendent moment just as it ends: “When you’re smiling and you’re looking at me / A life without that is a life I cannot lead.” Placed at the end of an album that doesn’t fully cohere, “All the People” is the best song Shame has released yet. —Ethan Beck

The Necks: Travel
Entire genres of music have been built around repetition, but no other band can pack so much satisfaction into one musical idea quite like The Necks. Now past its 35th year, the Australian trio has arguably turned its brand of repetition into a genre of its own. Ostensibly a jazz outfit consisting of double bass, keyboards and drums, the band’s m.o. (both on record and in-person) has remained more or less the same since the beginning: come up with a musical theme from scratch and dwell on it for an hour via extended improvisation. Single-minded music all too often feels single-minded, like being stuck in the artist’s obsessive thought loop. The Necks, on the other hand, combine buildup and payoff to sublime effect. Where other likeminded acts strive for a semi-conscious hypnotic state that requires a kind of sensory deprivation on the listener’s part, The Necks approach transcendence from the opposite direction. Necks pieces tend to awaken the senses because the band covers so much ground within its self-imposed limits. On their 19th album Travel, The Necks change up their usual format by offering four pieces, each roughly in the 20-minute range and each taking up a complete LP side. In that regard, Travel follows the same presentation as 2017’s double album Unfold, but The Necks still sound as fresh as ever. Long defined by their uncanny ability to extract variety out of a single motif, The Necks benefit greatly from giving themselves more colors and contours to work with on Travel—a kind of ultimate statement on complementary elements from a group that epitomizes complementarism to its core. —Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

U.S. Girls: Bless This Mess
In 2020, U.S. Girls, Meg Remy’s electro-pop stage name, released Heavy Light, one of the year’s sweetest experimental records. It would garner an Alternative Album of the Year nomination at the Juno Awards in 2021 and set expectations high for whatever Remy’s next record would become. Fast-forward to 2023 and Remy has returned with Bless This Mess a sign-of-the-times project conducted in the wake of a still-going pandemic and Remy’s pregnancy in 2022. From the seething guitars of “Futures Bet” to the scaled-back, stringed balladry of the title track, Remy is uninterested in making the same record twice. Bless This Mess, the Toronto-based musician’s eighth studio album since 2008, is daring, diverse and enchanting. If Bless This Mess marks an apex for Remy, whose 2018 record In a Poem Unlimited remains one of the best electronic projects of the last decade, may it continue burning on in perpetuity. —Matt Mitchell

And don’t forget to check out … Adam Lambert: High Drama, Algiers: Shook, Braxton Cook: Who Are You When No One Is Watching?, Christian McBride: Prime, Death Valley Girls: Islands in the Sky, Dierks Bentley: Gravel & Gold, Godsmack: Lighting Up the Sky, Gorillaz: Cracker Island, Gunnar: Best Mistake, Heinali: Kyiv Eternal, John Lee Hooker: Burnin’, Logic: College Park, Miss Grit: Follow the Cyborg, Neutral Milk Hotel: The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel, Paul Kelly: People, Philip Selway: Strange Dance, The Church: The Hypnogogue, Tiësto: Drive