“Swear I’ve got a sign written on my back,” storms Jade Bird on Candidate, a raw-edged rock bruiser about being a dickhead-magnet. With her second album, the English singer (who attended the Brit School and is now based in the US) is concerned with confounding first impressions made by 2019’s Jade Bird, an arresting debut of Americana-tinged pop rock driven by remarkable songcraft and that sweetly serrated force-10 voice.
And yet for all the avowed influences here – Blur! Oasis! the Bee Gees! Iggy Pop! PJ Harvey! – it’s to her credit that it still sounds very much like Jade Bird, though notably rockier. There’s a heaviness of guitar and intent that suits her well, from the dirty, chunky riffs and raw howl of Open Up the Heavens to the Sladey stomp of Honeymoon. Her softer shades are just as beguiling: Punchline leans in to the expansive class of Nashville’s session musicians (the album was recorded at the storied RCA studios), a rich country-rock short story flashing images such as “a wedding band, thrown out the window of a black sedan”, while Red White and Blue is a delicately killer acoustic ballad.
A couple more songs with the punch of Candidate or last year’s Headstart, here relegated to a bonus track, and a couple less mid-paced numbers among its 14 tracks would have made Different Kinds of Light unstoppable, but it’s a sure step forward by an impressive songwriting talent.
