Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell
It’s still only January, and I’m already preposterously excited about the albums set for release this year – among the most thrilling of which stands this, The Best Record Sufjan Stevens Has Ever Made, also known as Carrie & Lowell. As yet, there’s only this little trailer playing the title track available online, but I promise the album’s 11 songs are exquisite; it’s less like Age of Adz in its poise and demeanour, more Seven Swans or Illinoise, with contributions from Sean Carey, Thomas Bartlett, Laura Veirs, Casey Foubert, Nedelle Torrisi and Ben Lester. Stevens named the record after his mother and stepfather and says its songs are about “life and death, love and loss, and the artist’s struggle to make sense of the beauty and ugliness of love.” Certainly it feels like his most personal work to date – it sounds intimate and vulnerable, but with a strength too, as if these are stories long-waited to be told.
Laura Marling – False Hope
Each time Laura Marling releases a new album, I feel amazed afresh at the ferocity of her talent. This year brings Short Movie, her fifth album and first self-produced record, from which False Hope is the first single. With much of this album, Marling sounds darker and stewier than before, reflecting a period of difficulty and confusion in which she questioned the life she was living and whether or not she wished to continue making music. There’s a constant tussle in these songs between strength and fragility, fierce independence and a desire to belong, a wondering of where she fits in and what makes her content: “Is it still OK that I don’t know how to be alone?” she asks at the song’s opening. “Is it still OK that I don’t know how to be at all?”
Matthew E White – Rock & Roll is Cold
As my colleague Alexis Petridis recently reported, Matthew E White and his colleagues at Spacebomb studios in Richmond, Virginia are currently producing some of America’s most delicious and enticing music, not least White’s own second album, Fresh Blood, the follow-up to 2012’s wonderful Big Inner. The first single is this mirthful little number in which White, backed most sumptuously by full choir, brass, soft-shuffling drums and lolloping piano line, observes that “Rock and roll, it don’t have no soul/ Everybody knows that rock and roll is cold,” while sounding rich and warm-blooded and thoroughly soul-stirring. It makes for a merry introduction to what is one of the finest albums of the year.
Flo Morrissey – Pages of Gold
British singer-songwriter Flo Morrissey is only 20, but her voice carries a kind of time-weathered Karen Dalton quality, evident even in her earliest demos, and subsequently enhanced by producer Noah Georgeson, who has worked with Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Cate Le Bon – all of whom make easy musical bedfellows. Her most recent single, Pages of Gold, is more pop-tinged than anything she has released to date, but still delightfully wistful, as if Jackson C Frank had set his sights on the Top 40.
Joe Peter Davoile – Nineteen Ninety One
I confess, it was my Dad who introduced me to Joe Peter Davoile – an artist he stumbled upon one evening on Soundcloud and noted has a pleasing similarity to King Krule. Certainly, there’s a similar sense of isolation to his work, in the lonely tone to Davoile’s guitar, and in the smudging way he sings. These are perfect late-night, solitary songs, beautiful and a little lost-sounding. Again, we’re going to have a scuffle over the term Americana, and Davoile certainly doesn’t sit readily under that title, but like Flo Morrissey above, he strikes me as a young artist rethinking what it means to be a folk singer, and I’d really love his work to be heard and enjoyed.
