Unloved
★★★★
Polychrome
HEAVENLY. CD/DL/LP
Hollywood dream team’s miraculous girl-group updates just got weirder.
There may be suspicion of Unloved’s movie-biz backstory: Belfast DJ-turned- Steven Soderbergh movie soundtracker David Holmes meets scoring ace Keefus Ciancia on set; they cast Ciancia’s other half Jade Vincent as a mature Ronnie Spector, backed by a 21st-century Wrecking Crew. It’s otherwise hard to fathom why the trio’s extravagantly orchestrated pop symphonies haven’t been more rapturously fêted. Where last year’s The Pink Album took a panoramic sweep through every shade of romantic fatalism and compulsion, Polychrome, culled from the same sessions, is darker and stranger still, at times more rock’n’roll than most currently active (I Did It rumbles like vintage Suicide), at others beatless, off-centre, haunting (Only For You). The pick is I Just Stop, boasting Vincent’s finest performance, aching with mid-life neuroses, threatening to burst into Dusty Springfield’s You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, before exploding into some other sumptuous dimension. Unloved really are out on their own.