Say what you like about British Sea Power, you can’t fault their industry. Since their last studio album, 2013’s lukewarm Machineries of Joy, the band have kept busy with various suitably charming projects: soundtracking a 2014 documentary film about the globalisation of Bhutan; refashioning their back catalogue for perhaps the third time on Sea of Brass; touring an exhaustive box set edition of their near-perfect debut. None of this is surprising for a band who have lived in thrall to antiquity, though such revisions inevitably invite the listener to compare the glory days to the modern era, a period that might uncharitably be called Austerity British Sea Power. Now back with a decadently-titled new record, Let the Dancers Inherit the Party, it may be time to loosen our belts a little.
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Shooting night scenes like a police photographer, Lydia Ainsworth works in the palette that she knows best: pitch black, pallor white, autopsy violet. It was scoring her friend Matthew Lessner’s 2011 film The Woods, nominally about “hipsters who move to the woods to start a utopian society,” that the NYU and McGill University student was asked to sing over her dark creations; following years immersed in atonal classical experiments, the possibility that she could be one of the pop stars she adored as a child held an appealing possibility. Better yet, as a classically trained cellist who once composed a Philip Glass-inspired score for a 50-piece orchestra, she was uniquely placed to merge both worlds. On Darling of the Afterglow, Ainsworth’s second album, one of those worlds has begun to fade from her work.
For the great pessimist Schopenhauer, the will to life was an aberration, a balled fist from humanity’s lowest reach that existed to be overcome. Society was a futile project, he argued, because our baser instincts would always win. “Will to Life”, the second track from Tall Ships’ long-awaited second album Impressions, does not endorse this view, though frontman Ric Phethean does namecheck the German philosopher in the press release. “It’s about battling the darkness and sadness we feel throughout our lives through companionship,” he explains, and the extent to which you consider this statement profound insight or bland pontification will likely inform your enjoyment of the record.
On “How Can I”, from Laura Marling’s 2015 paean to life as a Los Angeles transplant Short Movie, the singer-songwriter issued a battle cry of sorts. “I put up my fists now,” she sang, “until I get what’s mine.” Still a somewhat timid presence on stage, the 27-year-old now commands the respect she deserves, and that record felt fuller, harder and bolder under her direction. Now on album number six, Semper Femina feels like a deliberate softening.
“I wish it had happened a little quicker and earlier, but you know…” Matthew Woodley breaks into laughter. We’ve been discussing his band, Plants and Animals, and their relative newcomer status in the UK and Europe. “Well, here we are.” And where is that? Upstairs in The Fleece, technically, but I suspect he’s referring to the fact that, after the best part of a decade and a half, the band are finally accruing a decent following this side of the Atlantic.
If you don’t follow my album reviews with the same religious zeal that Paul Nuttall followed Liverpool’s 1989 FA Cup run, you may not be aware that I am 
For any other artist, an album comprising 50 explicitly autobiographical songs for each year of their life would be seen as the height of narcissism, a swollen vanity project for the benefit of no one but the author. Fortunately, Stephen Merritt is quite unlike any other artist, and his latest conceptual sprawl provides a fascinating glimpse into the personal, political, and cultural epochs that shaped the half-century of American life he’s lived through. But more than that, The Magnetic Fields man’s storytelling of the events that take place across 50 Song Memoir never seeks to delineate between history and pop culture, fact and emotion, tragedy and farce. Like Morrissey just before him (and, by proxy, Wilde), Merritt cares far too much about life to take it seriously.
Matthew Neale 