FILTER ALBUMS

Angelica Rockne: in full bloom.

★★★★

The Rose Society

LOOSE/FLUFF & GRAVY. CD/DL/LP

Baroque Americana from the orchards of Corralitos, Santa Cruz.

PORTLAND, OREGON’s Fluff & Gravy label has proved a quietly excellent pipeline for Americana this past couple of years and, after picking up Margo Cilker’s terrific

Pohorylle for UK release in 2021, Loose have grabbed another gem from them here. Rockne comes from northern California and, on her second album, generally lets things unravel at a stately pace. All stealth, organ simmer and discreet programmed strings, The Undoing is a kind of countr y-tinged torch song, while the exceptional Protection, Prayers And Vigilance adds blurr y electric guitar, and a hitherto restrained psychedelic dimension, to the slowburn. There’s a touch of Emmylou Harris to Rockne’s gravitas and trills, and also something less rootsy, more ethereal and soulful. A bigger budget might have amped up the grandeur, fleshed out the fine songs with authentic string sections, but it might also have lost some of the otherness that makes The Rose Society a real find.

John Mulvey

Nabihah Iqbal

Kory Thibeault

★★★

Dreamer

NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP

London singer’s reflective second is a deep fantasia of shoegaze and dream-pop.

Nabihah Iqbal is quite the polymath. Since 2017 debut Weighing Of The Heart, she’s collaborated with Zhang Ding and Wolfgang Tillmans, but also lost its follow-up to studio burglars, starting Dreamer afresh in Pakistan, writing on acoustic guitar and harmonium. Not that you can tell. Most of its layered, ornate creations and moody conjurings emerge from a deep shoegaze rabbit hole redolent of Slowdive and Lush, their chiming guitars, plush bass lines, shimmering loops and waves of fat ’80s synths coursing with undefined melancholy. And while the jaunty leads of This World Couldn’t See Us click into New Order-ish grooves, Iqbal’s battered diaristic revelations on Sweet Emotion and Closer Lover embrace pop as escapism with emotional heft.

Andy Cowan

Mega Bog

★★★★

End Of Everything

MEXICAN SUMMER. CD/DL/LP

A new phase in life and music; co-produced with Big Thief’s James Krivchenia.

Erin Birgy says the painting on the cover of her seventh album as Mega Bog symbolises the opposite poles of “hopelessness and power.” Similarly bold, the first of Birgy’s albums written on keyboards rather than guitar forsakes her previous musical impressionism to embrace dramatic synth-pop with a soul edge. Now based between Athens (Greece) and Los Angeles, Mega Bog’s most linear album so far is co-produced by Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, who also plays drums. Despite the directness, Birgy’s voice remains malleable – swooping, conversational, whispering, declamatory. The lyrics are seemingly about the reframing of her life after embracing sobriety. It closes with the downbeat title track, perhaps a goodbye to the past. End Of Everything’s surface gloss barely conceals a raw intensity.

Kieron Tyler

Gia Margaret

★★★★

Romantic Piano

JAGJAGUWAR. DL/LP

Exploring what Germans call waldeinsamkeit – contented aloneness in the forest.

Chicago native and classically trained pianist Gia Margaret’s deepening bond with ambient, mostly instrumental composition was part-born of pragmatism after illness while touring 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer left her unable to sing. Here tapping Erik Satie and lesser-known pianistic influences, including Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, she weaves birdsong, cicada chirrups, scrunchy footsteps and backwards-recorded instrument swells into her impressionistic piano sketches, creating a comfortingly creaky, often delicate mood that’s occasionally laced with a not unpleasant melancholy. Adept with found-sound collage (Ways Of Seeing; 2017) and more traditional-sounding classical composition (A Stretch), Margaret’s touch is especially deft on Juno, a kind of ambient fermata which evokes the slow elongation of a tap-drip before it drops. It’s playful of Romantic Piano’s title to feint at Richard Clayderman, but this is searching, quietly profound stuff.

James McNair