Nourished By Time
The Passionate Ones
Baltimore singer/songwriter and producer Marcus Brown’s alias suggests a musical style has gradually evolved across a decades-old catalogue. In fact, Brown has released just two albums. Their chosen name refers instead to many years spent in less creatively fulfilling roles – including shifts in a health food store – prior to releasing their debut.
The Passionate Ones confirms the promise of 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, which was written in Brown’s parents’ basement. It pulls influences as disparate as Prince, Cocteau Twins, Dean Blunt and Arthur Russell into characteristically hazy yet more purposeful focus, while dialling down the bliss-pop and cranking up the club vibes. Thoughtful and soaked in emotion, its 12 songs address everything from love and disillusionment to the grind of labour, with Brown’s tender voice and idiosyncratic production providing the glue that holds it all together.
Highlights include the summery, synth-dazzled ‘Idiot In The Park’, the kaleidoscopic piano-house number ‘9 2 5’, and ‘Jojo’, where a guest rap from UK kindred spirit Tony Bontana plays off Brown’s soul-funk yearning.
Label: XL Recordings
Hand Habits
Blue Reminder
Listeners familiar with Meg Duffy’s early albums as Hand Habits might be surprised by the opening track on their latest release.
‘More Today’ is a meaty, ’90s indie-rock number driven by big, booming beats, which moves with a steady, countrified swing that recalls Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’. It’s a very different sound to the bare-boned, intimate feel heard on previous records. Just as unexpected is Duffy’s voice: here, it sounds confident and full, rather than murmuring.
These differences carry across the rest of Blue Reminder, which advances Duffy’s artistry as an individual and their status as a band leader. It was recorded mostly live, with a large cast of players including Anna Butterss and Joshua Johnson of LA’s experimental jazz quintet SML.
Far less insular in nature than previous LPs, this set sounds more like the product of collaborative fulfillment and newfound joy: “I can’t deny that a lot of these are ostensibly love songs,” they have said, and ‘Bluebird Of Happiness’ is testament to this. Romantic partnership aside, this album is about commitment, whether to someone else, a principle or (maybe most importantly) one’s authentic self.
Label: Fat Possum
Water From Your Eyes
It’s A Beautiful Place
Together, NYC’s Nate Amos (production) and Rachel Brown (vocals) make music with an almost aggressive disregard for genre boundaries, but the end result is almost as intimate and relatable as its elements are incompatible. The pair had been recording in Amos’s bedroom for seven years before their album Everyone's Crushed broke through in 2023 and set them on a path to widespread cultish acclaim.
Their follow up draws on themes of “time, dinosaurs and space”, according to Amos, who describes their eclectic fusion of styles as an acknowledgment that “everything’s just a tiny blip”. The fragmentary nature of It’s A Beautiful Place, with its relentless shifts of focus and apparent randomness, mirrors the speed at which our cultural and political landscapes are now shifting. Its distortion is intentional, the reflection true.
Generally, these songs are easier to digest than those on Everyone's Crushed (‘Life Signs’ could pass as a ’90s math-rock number), but the duo certainly haven't gone soft. Most striking are ‘Spaceship’, where Brown’s sweet, dreamy voice provides the foil for wildly varying beat patterns and bass lines, and ‘Playing Classics’, which twins deadpan vocals with tin-can percussion and perky, piano-house motifs.
Label: Matador
CMAT
Euro-Country
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson shot into the spotlight in 2021 via ‘I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!’, a big-lunged and lonesome country-pop number charged with girl power and written in 20 minutes. It’s one of several songs that turned her into a star in her native Ireland. She’s since toured the UK, released two albums, and been nominated for Brit and Ivor Novello awards as well as the Mercury Prize.
Euro-Country is CMAT’s third album, but it sounds more like her fifth, so dynamically impactful, structurally confident and lyrically insightful are its songs. Her voice is thrillingly powerful, with echoes of Stevie Nicks and Kate Bush, yet it shows plenty of emotional and tonal nuance. Her sharp humour comes across too, both in ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, where she vents her dislike of the celebrity chef and his convenience-food range, and the sardonic ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’, a riposte to on-line criticism of her physical appearance.
Label: AWAL
