Grace Petrie
Build Something Better
(The Robot Needs Home Collective)
★★★★

FOLLOWING 2021’s Connectivity, which dialled down the leftist broadsides to focus on matters of the heart, Build Something Better feels like a return to normal service for Grace Petrie. 

Start Again is a classic call to arms from the Leicester-based folksinger. “I remember ’17, for a minute there we cracked the screen,” she recalls about Jeremy Corbyn’s astonishing election performance. There’s plenty of righteous passion: from The House Always Wins to Fixer Upper, with its references to 2016’s ”far-right fake news fucked up universe,” the climate crisis and The Mountain Goats. And there are some tender love songs too.

Indie-folk unit shifter Frank Turner produces, giving the songs a bigger sound – check out the Turnerish rock drums that kick off Cynicism Free. 

Your personal soundtrack to kicking the Tories out, and radically shifting the country to the left (here’s hoping).

The Rhythm Method
Peachy
(Moshi Moshi)
★★★★

FOUR years after their brilliant debut, London’s The Rhythm Method – Joey Bradbury and Rowan Martin – are back with their special brand of British indie pop music. 

Using a proper studio for the first time, with Bill Ryder-Jones producing and Aoife Power assisting on vocals, there is a noticeable maturing of their sound and lyrical content. 

Tapping into the rich seam of classic British songwriting, frontman Bradbury’s rhymes have always been chockful of in-jokes. They are still present and very funny (“Shakespeare’s overrated, Bach is a bore,” he quips on Curse) but there is much more sincere emotion on display. Nightmare’s opening line “From the bottom of your heart, it was over from the start” hits particularly hard, while Please Don’t Die is a devastating, weighty track. 

Hopefully Peachy will bring the super talented duo the bigger audience they deserve. 

Grandaddy
Blu Wav
(Dangerbird)
★★★

WITH the 2000 concept album The Sophtware Slump, Grandaddy began to be talked about as the American Radiohead. This was a simplification, of course, though it’s worth checking out the record’s lead single, He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot, an epic three-part meditation on technology and society.

After reuniting in 2012, the band – led by Californian musician Jason Lytle – now returns with their sixth album, with more music on the way, apparently.

Carefully produced, it’s full of their vintage sound – indie Americana twinned with Lytle’s fragile, lonesome vocals, with added pedal steel guitar and several country-style ballads.

The contemplative Cabin In My Mind, a wonderfully melancholic song that brings to mind their 2000s contemporaries My Morning Jacket, is one of many highlights in a set that manages to be both lo-fi and immense at the same time.