Robert Forster
Strawberries
(Tapete)
★★★★

ROBERT FORSTER is a class act, a connoisseur of popular music.

Now 67 years old, the Australian singer-songwriter, one time core member of legendary band The Go-Betweens, has released another brilliant album.

Like his previous work, the set is full of astute lines and his gloriously arch delivery of them.

The intimate epic Breakfast On The Train anchors the record. Over eight minutes of strummed acoustic guitar and subdued accompaniment Forster tells the story of a sexual encounter inspired by a rail journey in Scotland (“They made love, quickly once / They made love, slowly twice”). Both droll and deeply affecting, it’s up there with his best songs like 2005’s Darlinghurst Nights. Elsewhere, the title track is an amusing duet with his wife Karin Bäumler that seems to be about … someone eating all of the strawberries.

A delicious musical feast.

Self Esteem
A Complicated Woman
(Polydor)
★★★★★

SINCE her 2019 solo debut Rotherham-born Rebecca Lucy Taylor — AKA Self Esteem – has made a name for herself as a chart-topping pop musician who has something to say.

Taking on the patriarchy, her drinking history and toxic relationships, A Complicated Woman reaches for the Big Time, with stadium-sized choruses sung by enormous choirs over emotive strings (Elbow’s mega anthem One Day Like This is cited as an inspiration).

The stripped-back tracks are great too. Mother is a cutting take down of an ex propelled by dancefloor beats (“I am not your mother … there is other literature outside of The Catcher In The Rye”) while 69 finds Taylor giving her thoughts on various sexual positions.

Fusing Madonna’s pop chops with the droll indie sensibility and lyrical delivery of Dry Cleaning, this has monster hit written all over it.

Arve Henriksen
Arcanum
(ECM)
★★★

THOUGH Norwegian Arve Henriksen and the rest of the Scandinavian musicians here – Trygve Seim (saxophone), Anders Jormin (double bass) and Markku Ounaskar (drums, percussion) – are all well-known members of the ECM rooster, this is the first time they’ve played together as a quartet.

Recorded in Copenhagan, it’s certainly an interesting, often challenging set of instrumental European jazz. Henriksen’s trumpet work seems to be a little more conventional than usual (he is renowned for getting an otherworldly muted sound from the instrument). Trofast is close to being catchy, while Folkesong kind of swings, in its own experimental, halting kind of way. Jorman apparently wrote Elegy on the first day of the war in Ukraine.

Cool and atmospheric it may be but the free jazz-style playing (there’s a cover of Ornette Coleman’s What Reason Could I Give) is not easy listening.