Album review: Country megastar Luke Combs spreads himself thin on Gettin’ Old
His forthcoming tour of Australian arenas sold out almost immediately, but the US singer-songwriter’s problem on fourth album Gettin’ Old isn’t too little too late: it’s too much, too early.
Album reviews for week of April 21 2023:
COUNTRY
Gettin’ Old
Luke Combs
Sony
Luke Combs doesn’t have the glitz and glamour of Taylor Swift, the rock star cool of The Weeknd, or the technicolour dreamcoats of Coldplay. If you saw any of them walking around backstage at a stadium, you’d know they were on next; if you saw Combs, you’d probably assume he works there. That is, until the North Carolina native lets his vocals soar and his big-swinging, southern-fried brand of modern country is projected right up to the cheap seats. Combs is a platinum-selling, chart-topping megastar of his genre – and unlike most of his peers, he’s achieved this feat without a snap track or trap beat in sight. Having said all of that: If you’re new here, fourth LP Gettin’ Old might not be the best entry point – not least of all because it’s a sister album to last year’s Growin’ Up, right down to both album covers syncing up to form one complete picture. To its credit, its best tracks reaffirm Combs’s affinity for place within his songwriting: a torn-up road, a revisited hometown, a dive bar with memories hidden within the walls. The tender See Me Now has him wishing his father was around to see his success, while Hannah Ford Road kicks the dirt with country-rock guitar twang and heartland nostalgia.
Elsewhere, the understated balladry of My Song Will Never Die reflects on his legacy being carried after his passing – knowing what he does onstage has the power to live on forever. So, what’s holding Gettin’ Old back? In short: itself. At 66 minutes, it’s nearly a half-hour longer than Growin’ Up – and that bloat drags the album when it should be driving the homestretch with ease. Case in point: a wildly unnecessary cover of Tracy Chapman’s classic Fast Car. One of the greatest songs of all time? Without question. A song anyone ever needs to hear again? Not necessarily – especially Combs’s version, which serves as the musical equivalent of a shot-for-shot remake. It adds absolutely nothing to proceedings, and the same can be said for much of the filler that takes up space on the album. Despite some strong showings and the world at his fingertips — including an eight-show tour of Australian arenas in August, for which every seat sold out almost immediately last year — Combs’s current problem isn’t too little too late: it’s too much, too early.
David James Young
INDIE FOLK-ROCK
Tines of Stars Unfurled
Tim Rogers and the Twin Set
Independent
You Am I? More like Who Am I? Australian rock’s elegantly grizzled bard for all seasons Tim Rogers is back with a different kind of concept album: a (rhymingly titled) sequel to 1999’s ARIA Award-winning, solo career-launching What Rhymes With Cars and Girls. Reportedly conceived in the throes of a panic attack, a thread of yearning self-examination but also a toe-tapping hoedown joie de vivre runs through its 11 songs, variously penned as replies, arguments, meditations and eviscerations of the original album’s offerings, with his well-documented battles with anxiety and alcohol recurring undercurrents. Standouts include its first single, Been So Good, Been So Far, where the groan of the squeezebox starts a wistful look back on lost love, and Twenty Two, a jaunty hymn to his daughter. Left My Heart contrasts the absurdities and epiphanies of 12-step meetings in West Hollywood and the Riverina. Surrender to Rogers’s hard-won homespun wisdom and the Twin Set’s singing fiddles and countrified guitars as he goes back to his future.
Jason Gagliardi
JAZZ/EXPERIMENTAL
Travel
The Necks
Northern Spy
A document of The Necks’ recent habit of kickstarting its studio time with 20-minute improvisation sessions, this double album features four pieces of around that length. Each represents a marked shift in vibe, with the Sydney-formed trio — bassist Lloyd Swanton, pianist Chris Abrahams and drummer Tony Buck — subtly flexing the shared intuition stemming from playing together for 35-plus years. Opener Signal is the most accessible and melodic, with a supple bass groove and meandering piano notes giving way to low-key whorls of organ. Forming is more ominous and overcast, while Imprinting foregrounds unruly percussive tics. Most dramatic of all is Bloodstream, which sets out with cathedral-like organ and soon introduces a sustained, cyclical drum roll that evokes darkening storm clouds. By its end, it’s in the territory of hothouse psychedelia as much as left-field jazz. These marathons of minimalism probably won’t score The Necks any new fans, but they certainly showcase its penchant for an enthralling ebb and flow of spontaneous ideas.
Doug Wallen
BAROQUE POP
The Songs of Bacharach & Costello
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach
Sony
This exhaustive four-disc compilation bittersweetly marks the first posthumous Bacharach release, reflecting on his unique collaboration with unlikely crooner Elvis Costello. Up first is a remaster of their sole LP Painted From Memory, which sounds as warm and timeless as it did upon release. The long-distance yearning of Toledo and the plaintive piano balladry of I Still Have That Other Girl are among the greatest works of either career. The second disc collates mostly unreleased material, going to show that these songwriters forgot better songs than most ever conceive: see the pained I Looked Away as empirical evidence. Live cuts then take up the set’s second half, with Costello reverently performing their shared works and several Bacharach classics. His rendition of I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, for one, may be the definitive take. For fans of either artist – or better yet, both – there are myriad gems to be uncovered here.
David James Young
CLASSICAL
Women of Note Vol. 5
Various Artists
ABC Classics
The fifth volume of this series is a departure from its predecessors. Prior releases mixed generations of Australian female composers, but this one concentrates almost exclusively on younger artists; three of the seven composers were born after 1990. There are similarities between all pieces: a focus on melodic beauty creates a stream of soft-edged euphony, with only occasional flashes of the ”strength, elegance and passion” promised by the PR materials. The stars are the performers, especially the Flinders Quartet in their stirring playing of music by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon and Ella Macens. Only in the final work, which celebrates the Lebanese heritage of Elizabeth Younan, is there a sense of a rhythmic spirit and swirl of traditional dance. The indispensable Ensemble Offspring is as persuasive as ever, and the recording quality is excellent; likewise Natalie Shea’s fulsome liner notes. A future volume of percussion music by the legion of Australia’s female composers from various generations would be valuable and welcome.
Vincent Plush
Album reviews for week of April 14 2023:
POP/ELECTRONIC
Memento Mori
Depeche Mode
Columbia/Sony
An unmistakeable sense of mourning permeates Depeche Mode’s 15th album. Named after a Latin phrase serving as a reminder of mortality, Memento Mori is the British act’s first record without keyboardist Andrew Fletcher, who died suddenly last year. Left to carry on are fellow co-founders David Gahan and Martin Gore, who embark on a fifth decade together with loss firmly at the fore. The theme is a natural fit for vocalist Gahan – and not for the first time. His elegant brooding has always guided the inky, shapeshifting contours of the act’s electronics-centred sound, often singing lyrics finely attuned to the void. Included here are four songs co-written with The Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler, but the results remain pure Depeche Mode. This is an almost romantically bleak outing, and by the time of the closing Speak to Me – another undisguised call for connection across some separating membrane – the elegiac mood has opened enough to allow what could double as a classic torch song. It’s not just Gahan’s creaseless baritone that defines Depeche Mode, but also Gore’s sizeable songwriting contributions and delicate tendrils of guitar and keyboard.
Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Foals), the core pair play to their strengths here, carving out a sustained sense of space in which to explore their shared grief. Album opener My Cosmos Is Mine does that especially well, evoking the lightless enormity of a sensory deprivation tank via gossamer synth washes and charred, near-industrial beats before a monk-like chanted bridge that finishes with the phrase “No final breaths / No senseless death.” Themes of moving on continue in Soul With Me and Before We Drown, as well as on Wagging Tongue, a leavening anomaly thanks to how its bright circuitry of melodies revel in synth-pop purity. Even if Memento Mori doesn’t set out with the sheer force of will as Depeche Mode’s best work of the 1980s and ‘90s, there’s a subtle knowingness to these songs that comes off well. As Ford’s string arrangement pleasantly unmoors Don’t Say You Love Me – and Gahan entwines love and death yet again in the lyrics – the singer opens with a verse about the givers and receivers of death before almost winking at us with his part in the equation: “And I’ll be the drama, of course.”
Doug Wallen
HIP-HOP
Savour
Urthboy
Elefant Traks
So much of Urthboy’s life and career has been devoted to two things: community and collaboration. From his early releases with mates in the late ’90s, to founding beloved outfit The Herd and running the tight-knit label Elefant Traks, the artist born Tim Levinson has dedicated a fair chunk of his working life to lifting up those around him. It’s fitting then that Savour, his excellent seventh solo album, rings with that love and connection: to his city, to his fellow artists, to those he loves, to music itself. The collaborations here shine the brightest: Lose Sleep, featuring Ngaiire, is a reflective love song, while Stars With The Jam with Project Peters is a tender tale of father-son love at the footy. Urthboy’s effortless and elastic flow is as solid as ever, powered by a clear edge of nostalgia and pathos. Maybe that’s because he might be entering the last act of his solo career – Urthboy has flagged his current tour will be his last major run of shows. If so, how very lucky we have been to have him.
Jules LeFevre
FOLK
The Wedding Above in Glencree
Daoiri Farrell
Independent
The finest Irish male folk singer-storyteller this side of Christy Moore and Paul Brady continues to flourish as a recording artist. Daoiri Farrell’s stunning voice is an instrument in its own right, ornate and expressive with sustain and octave leaps to match those of Eire’s uilleann pipes that feature on several tracks here. An accomplished bouzouki player, the Dubliner uses all of his disciplines to optimal effect in a fourth solo release that he asserts combines the rawness of his debut, the impact of his second and the beauty of No.3. Farrell receives exemplary support from a stellar cast of compatriots on a gamut of acoustic instruments, and Nashville dobro maestro Jerry Douglas on a haunting cover of a country-tinged Canadian song. Elsewhere are impeccable interpretations of traditional songs relating to Irish history — several delivered a cappella — as well as lighthearted animal tales and mesmerising instrumentals.
Tony Hillier
Album reviews for week of April 7 2023:
ALT- POP
Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
Lana Del Rey
Interscope
The release of Lana Del Rey’s ninth album in just over 10 years is astounding for a number of reasons, chief among them that many music industry pundits didn’t have odds on her career surviving past her first. Since releasing the darkly glamorous Video Games in 2011, the artist born Elizabeth Grant has managed the almost impossible trick of turning naysayers into acolytes, slowly and deliberately transforming herself from a flavour of the moment ingenue into an indelible part of the fabric of American pop music. Much of this is down to her songwriting, which has only widened in scope and sharpened in execution in the past five records after 2019’s Norman F..king Rockwell became an instant high watermark of poetry and classic rock. Del Rey’s newest record, much like the two or three before it, makes no apologies for sprawling, freewheeling songs that celebrate and interrogate what it means to be a woman in contemporary America.
Where it falls down is in the repetition of these ideas – sonically, thanks to an enduring working partnership with producer Jack Antonoff; lyrically, in reference to her own past work – that can start to drag over its 16 tracks. Del Rey proves her mettle best on songs that shift her sepia viewfinder slightly left of centre. Here, that’s most obviously apparent in the lead-off single A&W, which yanks the rug out from a sweeping piano ballad with an almost industrial hip-hop coda. Elsewhere, the singer-songwriter’s collaborations with Father John Misty (on the superb Let the Light In) and Jon Batiste yield fruit, as does the hilarious Peppers with Tommy Genesis, a Spanish pop meets ‘90s indie tune that’s brimming with sass. However, these moments are mostly subsumed by swirling, post-midnight ballads that sound similar to each other, and those on other records that have preceded them. For the first time since her mid-career renaissance, Del Rey seems content to add extra sheet music to her American gothic songbook rather than rewrite it, which is fair enough given her prodigious output. But the result is a record that, while arresting, doesn’t feel essential. No doubt on album No.10, she’ll prove us all wrong again.
Jonathan Seidler
INDIE ROCK
Cuts & Bruises
Inhaler
Polydor
At a time where “nepo baby” has entered the cultural lexicon, it’s a curious juncture for Ireland’s Inhaler to make its return; frontman Elijah Hewson’s dad is best known as U2 leader Bono. Still, on its second album, the four-piece is intent to prove its staying power – and, to its credit, Inhaler largely succeeds. Though nothing heard here quite sparks an unforgettable fire the way the title track of predecessor It Won’t Always Be Like This did, Cuts & Bruises is still an intriguing effort, attempting to subvert what’s expected. This allows for some light experimentation, with clear touchstones: Just To Keep You Satisfied channels the electricity of Garbage’s mid-90s hit Stupid Girl, while the bustling Perfect Storm is the band’s shot at heart-thumping rock a la Gang Of Youths. Inhaler isn’t for everyone – you might listen to this entire album and still not have found what you’re looking for. That said, if you’re after bright pop-rock with an edge, then you too might be elevated by Cuts & Bruises.
David James Young
ELECTRONIC
Optical Delusion
Orbital
London Recordings
The 1980s UK acid house and rave scene is where brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll cut their teeth, and on the strength of Orbital’s 10th album, age and time has yet to weary the duo. Optical Delusion uses our increasingly scattered world as inspiration for pounding techno beats, stuttering effects and bass-driven grooves infused with, as long-term fans would expect, both subtle and more overt sociopolitical commentary. Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song) sets the scene, as a cyclical rhythm melds with the Ring O’Roses nursery rhyme – the origins of which date back to the Black Death – for a swirling opener. Dirty Rat sees Sleaford Mods’s Jason Williamson spit an epic, politicised rant on top of some appropriately dirty bass. Day One stands out for its techno leanings and Dina Ipavic’s haunting vocal, and there are instrumental highlights, too. For a pair of brothers now well into their 50s, Orbital remains impressively plugged in to the pulse of modern electronica.
Tim McNamara
Album reviews for week of March 31 2023:
ROCK
The Hypnogogue
The Church
Communicating Vessels
Water. An essence of the Church. You might prefer associations such as dreamy, astral or interior, but they all connect to a seductive fluidity that is the Sydney-born rock band’s psychedelic trademark. When I hit a Church song I love, I want to swim in it for hours. When I strike a song I don’t like, it feels as if it might drown me. Now 68, singer and songwriter Steve Kilbey is last man standing from the original group after 43 years in action, steadily refitting its line-up, angering older fans. I’ve meanwhile wondered if he is part of a strange Australian tradition: musicians who reject success through perversity, misanthropy, woundedness. Capable of great beauty, Kilbey wilfully coils into dirges of malice and ice. It’s mind-bending to realise The Hypnogogue is the band’s 26th album. But here comes the ripening fruit, a refreshed unit loyal to his inner vision. Drummer and producer Tim Powles has actually been with Kilbey since 1994; guitarist Ian Haug (from Powderfinger) since 2013; fellow guitarist Ash Naylor from Even and US multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Cain enrolled in 2020.
Darrell Thorp, a mixer for Radiohead, Beck and Paul McCartney, has not hurt The Hypnogogue’s sound either. Kilbey describes it as his first “prog rock” concept album; its narrative concerns a broken-down songwriter in 2054 who encounters a machine that can pull music from your subconscious. You’d be hard-pressed to find this sci-fi story beyond lyrical shards of artificial intelligence, druggy somnambulance and survival in the wake of uncertain love. Even so, something akin to watching Ghost in a Shell does linger. Sonically, it’s archetypal Church, perhaps the most consistently listenable album they have ever made, with nods to Pink Floyd (ecstatic and alienating Wall-like guitar sounds), the Beatles (Second Bridge’s faint echoes of Strawberry Fields) and Bowie (the Ziggy Stardust futurism). As usual, Kilbey’s baritone sounds infinitely cool, a poetic pop hypnotist obsessed with occult intuitions that this world is an outline for another. It’s not the future he’s exploring; it’s his teenage spirit reincarnating. In the single C’est La Vie, Kilbey the elder accepts a warning: “Watch out tiger, you’re on the skids”. Riding the tides of time, he’s discovered this boy’s life is forever beginning.
Mark Mordue
INDIE ROCK
This Stupid World
Yo La Tengo
Matador
For almost 40 years, New Jersey trio Yo La Tengo has been crafting indie rock that blends gentle poignancy with bristling volatility. That remains true here, with opener Sinatra Drive Breakdown contrasting guitarist Ira Kaplan’s hushed vocals with crusty guitar distortion and a rugged rhythmic pulse. But this being Yo La Tengo, there’s always a mood shift around the corner. Soon bassist James McNew is inventorying his assorted yoyo tricks over a lively groove on Tonight’s Episode and drummer Georgia Hubley is lamenting a scene in which “no camera moves” and “no laugh track laughs” on the low-lit ballad Aselestine. The album requires more dedication near the end, with the dirge-like title track and rippling closer Miles Away both exceeding seven minutes at a slower pace. But longtime fans will relish the band’s gorgeous sonic signatures, peppered with lyrical nods to life’s fleeting nature. A low-key air of resignation runs throughout, though always graced with a playful twist.
Doug Wallen
JAZZ
Fun Times Ahead
James Ryan
Independent
This lovely album from a quartet led by Sydney saxophonist James Ryan ticks so many boxes I already consider it one of the albums of the year. It’s easier to say what it’s not than what it is. It’s not a high energy trip where players are preoccupied with their technical ability; nor is it an exploration of complicated time signatures which can mystify the unsuspecting listener. Not that the group lacks technical brilliance. Clayton Doley (organ), Tim Rollinson (guitar) and Andrew Dickeson (drums) are not exactly bereft of talent. What distinguishes this album is the musicians’ nonchalance, an indispensable quality in any great jazz album. Six beautiful originals by Ryan in straight-ahead time-feels are played in such a way that an exquisite laid-back mood is captured throughout. No-one is trying too hard, no-one is upsetting the mood, and the music simply rolls out naturally. The result is a compelling suite that resonates with unusual maturity and genuine jazz feeling.
Eric Myers