Music reviews: Arctic Monkeys, Eleanor Friedberger, Thandi Ntuli and more

SOUTH AFRICAN Thandi Ntuli

EXILED (thandintuli.bandcamp.com)

★★★★½

The self-imposed 1960s exile of such major South African artists as Hugh Masekela, Dudu Pukwana, Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim allowed the world to discover a distinctive Afro-jazz scene. This blended improvisational audacity with traditional spirituality and an array of folk and pop sounds from numerous cultures thrown together in the apartheid-created urban townships. Now a new musical golden age is emerging in Johannesburg, as the city experiences unprecedented urban renewal and an explosion of creative energy. Pianist Thandi Ntuli's Exiled is an album of exuberance, profundity and beauty. Her compositions include the meditative The Void (which features an eloquent spoken word piece about the fate of boys whose fathers abuse women), the Ethiopian-influenced Abyssinia, the Afro-pop Rainbow and the rich, evocative Freefall. All are complex, fresh and entirely convincing. The band has some of Joburg's most compelling players, including bassist Benjamin Jephta, saxophonist Mthunzi Mvubu (from Shabaka and the Ancestors), trumpeter Marcus Wyatt and drummer Sphelelo Mazibuko. An exhilarating introduction to a community of artists who are making music history. EUGENE ULMAN

ROCK Arctic Monkeys

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TRANQUILITY BASE HOTEL & CASINO (Domino/EMI)

★★★★☆

"I just wanted to be one of The Strokes," sings Alex Turner in the opening line of the first track, Star Treatment. The Arctic Monkeys no longer sound much like The Strokes' guitar rock, however. Instead Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino sounds like the elevator music you might hear on a moon colony: distinctly more relaxed, with more crooning and vintage keyboards. Where the Arctic Monkeys' previous album AM saw Turner restrict his torrents of lyrical ideas for the sake of the melody, Tranquility Base creates melodies out of the verbiage. This allows Turner to spread his lyrical wings, and marvellously so: on Batphone he sings about how he is selling a fragrance brand called "Integrity". The album's lyrics are littered with the detritus of life in the era of social media: "emergency battery pack just in time for my weekly chat with God on videocall", as he sings on American Sports. Between Turner's soulful crooning, the reverb-laden balladry and the knowing lyrics, it feels a bit like a British-accented Father John Misty, while still being distinctly Arctic Monkeys. "It's a rave review, four stars out of five," goes one chorus – pretty accurately, as it turns out. TIM BYRON

ALTERNATIVE/INDIE Middle Kids

LOST FRIENDS (Domino/EMI)

★★★★☆

Middle Kids have been tantalising fans for the past two years with singles such as Edge of Town and Mistake that brimmed with relatable lyrics and catchy choruses. So it is no surprise that the band's debut album sports much the same glee, via blasts of indie rock, elegiac piano ballads and pop-like anthems. The 12 songs open with Bought It, which showcases the strong vocal range of front-woman Hannah Joy, underpinned by a gentle hum of acoustic guitar. The album picks up pace with the driving sound of On My Knees, a song about unity, that is backed by a punchy, percussive beat. Then the instruments are stripped back for Hole, a short yet powerful piece that begins with the calmness of repetitive piano chords, Joy's legato vocals and subtle, elongated strings, and then gradually builds to an emotional release which sharply fades back into silence. Alongside the much anticipated unreleased tunes such as Lost Friends and Please are the much loved singles that brought the trio to the surface. While Edge of Town is not new, its lonely wail of steel guitar, bouncing drum rhythm and lyrics about the mess of indecision fits perfectly on the debut album. SIMONE JANA

JAZZ Steve Barry Quartet

BLUEPRINTS & VIGNETTES (Earshift)

★★★★☆

Music has a way of smoothing its own path. Given the chance, our brains readily accommodate complexity that comes via the ears, so the unfolding of even quite convoluted material can swiftly assume an air of inevitability. Of course relentless complexity may ultimately test powers of concentration, but pianist/composer Steve Barry is too savvy for that – and not, I suspect, because he is anticipating his listeners' attention spans. It is more that his own interests are diverse, and so, besides carving some challenging notated figures for his collaborators, he allows the music to unravel into pools of free improvisation in which mood and interaction predominate over any predetermined concepts. The album becomes a dialogue between the concrete and the abstract, and not always with the composed elements fulfilling the former role and the improvised the latter. Perhaps that is partly what makes it so gripping – that and the fact that Jeremy Rose (alto saxophone, bass clarinet), Max Alducca (bass) and Dave Goodman (drums) are attuned to Barry's ever-more distinctive and often diaphanous ideas, and these ideas allow all four players to flourish as improvisers. JOHN SHAND

ROOTS ROCK Brendan Gallagher

SHORT & SWEET (brendangallaghermusic.com)

★★★½☆

One of the more interesting problems experienced by multi-talented musicians – and Brendan Gallagher, by his own admission, is a "singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, performer, producer, composer, author, singer/guitarist with Karma County" – is that they are difficult to pigeonhole in an industry that constantly aspires to pigeonholing. Thus Short & Sweet, Gallagher's fourth solo album, can best be described as a bit of this and a bit of that. There's a cool jazzy feel about songs like Cracks and Full Moon Man; lazy, laid-back blues on The Ballad of Yellow Fridge Road; a delicious instrumental reading of Gualtiero Malgoni's Guarda Che Luna; an up-tempo rock number with seductive harmonies, In Love, Fell; some classy, faux-10cc-sounding ironic pop on We're In It For The Money; even a nod to Paul Kelly-like intimacy on My Headland; and a funky, Latino re-reading of Blur's Out of Time. The recording of the album was unusual. The musical backdrop created by the Magnolia Orchestra – Aldo Betto (guitar), Giacomo Da Ros (bass) and Youssef Ait Bouazza (drums) – was recorded in Italy while Gallagher laid down his own contribution (and mixed the album) in Sydney. BRUCE ELDER

ALTERNATIVE POP Eleanor Friedberger

REBOUND (Frenchkiss/The Orchard)

★★★☆☆

She was always seen as the stabilising influence in Brooklyn-via-Chicago sister-brother duo The Fiery Furnaces. But that's only because Eleanor Friedberger's brother Matt was a multi-instrumentalist with a wilful nature and the opposite of writer's block. Putting the band on ice in 2011, Eleanor went solo, retaining her intense lyrics and off-kilter phrasing, while experimenting with different pop styles. Her fourth album marks a shift from the folky patina of 2016's New View. It was inspired by moving to Athens for a while to connect with her family's Greek heritage. You can hear part of her travelogue in It's Hard, which choogles along behind a clucking oriental guitar sound as she sings about a nightclub that opens at 3am and is full of smoke, despite the "no smoking" signs. There are echoes of Stereolab's Krautrock-spiked electronica here, along with the sparkly pop-rock of The Preatures. Friedberger is seldom linear in her writing, which can be intriguing ("Two hundred and fifty-three octaves below middle C") and sometimes downright confounding ("I played croquet…it was croquet"). The result is an album that seems happy to cast eccentric solo shapes in a dark corner of the dancefloor. BARRY DIVOLA

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