REVELATIONS
TOMBERLIN
The elegantly understated songwriter on learning to let go
TOMBERLIN
I Don’t Know Who Needs To Hear This… SADDLECREEK
7/10
Softly sung second from selfeffacing songwriter
MICHELLE YOON
As the title suggests, Brooklyn-based Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s second long-player seems to semi-consciously urge you to move along – nothing to hear here. Yet it creates its own slowburning allure on repeated listens. Her brittly plaintive but undersung tones and barely-there accompaniment do their best not to cause a commotion for much of “Easy” before a sweetly hymnal, piano-led chorus comes in, and then you notice the wistful pedal steel echoing on the horizon of “Born Again Runner” and the distant synthesiser and sparse piano tiptoeing around the slowly soulful elegy “Memory”. Consider her cover blown.
JOHNNY SHARP
WARPAINT
Radiate Like This HEIRLOOMS/VIRGIN
7/10
LA band return with lighter, looser sounds of summer
Emily Kokal, Jenny Lee Lindberg, Stella Mozgawa and Theresa Wayman have been busy since their 2016 third album, Heads Up, deep in side projects, solo albums and new families. Thankfully, the undertow of Warpaint has pulled them back, revealing a lighter, looser and sexier sound. Radiate Like This embraces a sunny – even, on “Send Nudes”, silly – side while retaining that dark, liquid, echoing guitar and those deep, twining harmonies. Leaning lightly into their love of R&B on the likes of “Proof” and “Stevie”, and relaxing into expansive, stonedin-the-sunshine grooves on pulsing lead single “Champion” and “Like Sweetness”, it’s a perfect goth summer record.