Celeste and Arlo Parks deliver on the hype with debut albums

CELESTE — NOT YOUR MUSE

2020 was earmarked as the year Celeste would achieve pop domination — and then came the small matter of a global pandemic. Claiming BBC Music’s Sound of 2020 and the Brits Rising Star award prior to the March lockdown, the release of her highly anticipated debut album Not Your Muse was placed on the backburner indefinitely.

Now, nearly a year on, the empowered 12-track offering has well and truly stepped up to the plate. A delightful pop-jazz crossover overflowing with sultry vocals and a sprinkling of soulful heartbreak, it’s a release that enthralls from the enchanting opening chords of Ideal Woman to the closing sentiments of Some Goodbyes Come With Hellos.

Not Your Muse oozes the distinctive smoky tones we’ve grown to know and love from the British-Jamaican songstress, pairing delightfully understated melodies with pop sensibilities that both lure and intrigue in equal measure.

Tracks like A Kiss and The Promise are no exception, showcasing Celeste’s vocals at their finest. And while many will likely recall the dancing highs of A Little Love from the John Lewis/Waitrose Christmas advert, it’s the assured sentiment of Stop This Flame that really beguiles, with recent single Love Is Back marking Celeste out as a contemporary soul artist with longevity. 8/10 (Review by Danielle de Wolfe)

ARLO PARKS — COLLAPSED IN SUNBEAMS

What do you do when the weight of expectation is on your shoulders? Singer and poet Arlo Parks, from west London, dealt with this exact question as she crafted her debut album. Like Celeste, who also releases her debut this week, the 20-year-old was an artist to whom 2020 should have belonged.

Instead, she got the coronavirus pandemic. But Collapsed In Sunbeams is more than worth the wait. It’s an album that pivots between sweet natured ruminations on love and life, and darkly poetic pieces about depression and domestic strife.

It functions as a tightly wound series of vignettes and wry observations about the people and places around her. Parks can evoke a whole world in a sentence, like with the opening of Caroline (“I was waiting for the bus one day / and watched a fight between an artsy couple escalate”).

These 12 tracks draw on a scramble of influences — from trip-hoppers Portishead and folkies Grizzly Bear to Frank Ocean and Sufjan Stevens — only possible in the internet age. Collapsed In Sunbeams is steeped through with Parks’ own identity — she is openly bisexual and has Nigerian, Chadian and French heritage. It’s an album that proves two things — that Parks is an old soul and that she has plenty more left to say. 9/10 (Review by Alex Green)

WORLD GOES ROUND — WORLD GOES ROUND

Supergroups may not generally enjoy a great reputation, but in some cases can produce special results. World Goes Round are a little different, being made up of a group of songwriters and musicians behind hits from the likes of Queen, Supertramp, John Denver, Chaka Khan, Kenny Rogers, Donna Summer and more.

In 1989 singers Frank Musker and Elizabeth Lamers, multi-instrumentalist Jeff Hull and guitarist Marty Walsh got together to record an album that never saw the light of day, until now. Producer Tommy Vicari recently remastered the songs after an old cassette of the recordings emerged, but he retains the glistening production of the time.

As you would expect, it is a distillation of everything that made the 80s such a unique decade — both good and bad. The track Round The World signals a Live Aid-worthy chorus that is light on depth but high on drama.

Meanwhile, Please Please channels the same yearning energy as Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror, released only a year before in 1988. While these songs are not going to convert 80s naysayers, they do offer a rollicking trip back in time. 6/10 (Review by Alex Green)

STEVEN WILSON — THE FUTURE BITES

The Future Bites serves both as a prescient reminder of the pitfalls of capitalism and the healing capabilities of music. It’s an especially uncomfortable listen given lockdown has only accelerated our dependency on screens, social media and clickbait content.

But listen we must, because Wilson’s message — one moment earnest liked on 12 Things I Lost, the next scathing like on lead single Personal Shopper — is essential right now. Wilson, 53, takes a different tack than on his five previous solo albums and 10 with his former band, progressive rockers Porcupine Tree.

His constantly evolving, mutant rock, which now owes more to Prince than Radiohead, looks to the future with disdain and confusion. Ultimately this a record about mankind’s blindness in the face of beauty. Wilson — described by one newspaper as “the most successful British artist you’ve never heard of” — puts it perfectly in the song Self: “Self sees a billion stars, but still can only self-regard”. 8/10 (Review by Alex Green)

GOAT GIRL — ON ALL FOURS

Goat Girl emerged in south London five years ago, becoming a fixture on the capital’s live circuit and releasing a well-received debut album in 2018. Three years later, the quartet’s second album expands their post-punk sound, adding rhythm and repetition, using layered vocals, washes of synths and analogue drum machines.

These tracks are sparse and more spacious, with lyrics ranging from ecological peril and social injustices to struggles with mental health in Anxiety Fills, Closing In and P.T.S.Tea. Opener Pest is slow, acoustic, but with a burning anger, single Badibaba is built on layered vocals, and insistent keyboards, while Jazz (In The Supermarket) adds discordant trumpets and viola before the instrumental ending.

The insistent synths in tracks such as Where Do We Go? hint at bands such as Broadcast and Stereolab, with the looser, fluid polyrhythmic songs bringing to mind This Is The Kit. Closer A-Men, with the refrain, “I never thought it would change / I never thought it would stay the same” is about the importance of breaking out your comfort zone. Goat Girl have certainly achieved that with On All Fours, at times mysterious and unsettling, but, despite its unsettling themes, ultimately life-affirming. 8/10 (Review by Matthew George).