Kassi Valazza
From Newman Street
(Loose)
★★★★

HAVING established herself as an important figure in the music scene in Portland, Oregon, last year Kassi Valazza moved to New Orleans.

This cross-country relocation seems to be central to her third album — with the singer-songwriter writing half the songs in each city.

Taking country music as her base, Valazza heads out on the road, often sounding a helluva lot like Joni Mitchell on her own blacktop voyage Herjira. There are also shades of British singer-songwriter Laura Marling and Joan Baez. This, of course, is no bad thing, and tracks like Your Heart’s A Tin Box and Shadow Of Lately have a fantastic momentum and mood. The best bits of the standout Market Street Saviour could be an outtake from Mitchell’s Blue.

Geographically and personally restless, From Newman Street is chockful with classic-sounding songwriting and a top-class band.

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke
Tall Tales
(Warp)
★★★★

“I’M going mad under lockdown, have you got any music you can send me?” Apparently it was an email from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to Australian-based electronic musician and producer Mark Pritchard that led to their first album together.

While Yorke is associated with glitchy electronica — think post-2000 Radiohead, his solo debut The Eraser and new band The Smile — Pritchard’s varied soundscapes takes him into fresh waters. There are lots of retro synths, with flashes of Brad Fiedel’s ominous soundtrack to the original Terminator movie on several cuts, and sometimes Yorke doesn’t even sound like Yorke.

With the set’s mood shifting between melancholic and dread, Back In The Game is a pandemic fever dream (“They are banging pots and pans”), while the (relatively) chilled out The Men Who Dance In Stag’s Heads is inspired by The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers.

Friendship
Caveman Wakes Up
(Merge)
★★★★

SINCE Friendship’s marvellous 2022 album Love The Stranger, frontman Dan Wriggins has graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Poetry, published a collection of verse and gone through a break-up.

No doubt all of these experiences fed in to the Philadelphia band’s fifth album of downbeat Americana. Musically heavier and perhaps lyrically more anguished than its predecessor, Caveman Wakes Up nevertheless showcases what makes Friendship so great — Wriggins’s wry, probing lyrics and his indie baritone, putting him alongside greats like the late David Berman and Kurt Wagner.

“I thought I was wise / I thought I knew about love”, he sings on Free Association, while Love Vape’s line “If you don’t know how to end it you can just fade out” feels like it could refer to some of the songs on the album, or even life itself.