FEATURE:
An Early Temperature Check
IN THIS PHOTO: Arlo Parks’ debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, was released earlier this year to huge critical acclaim/PHOTO CREDIT: @arloparks
Early Mercury Prize Nominees Predictions
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MAYBE it is a bit early…
to start predicting which artists will be nominated for a Hyundai Mercury Prize later in the year. If you are new to the ceremony and which albums are eligible, here is some guidance from the Mercury Prize website:
“The Hyundai Mercury Prize promotes the best of UK music and the artists who produce it. This is done through the celebration of the 12 ‘Albums of the Year’, recognising artistic achievement across a range of contemporary music genres.
It is the music equivalent to the Booker Prize for literature and the Turner Prize for art.
The main objectives of the Prize are to recognise and celebrate artistic achievement, provide a snapshot of the year in music and to help introduce new albums from a range of music genres to a wider audience.
General
1.1 All forms of contemporary music from Great Britain and Ireland are eligible for the Mercury Prize.
1.2 Albums only qualify for entry.
1.3 The album must have a digital release date between Saturday 20 July 2019 and Friday 17 July 2020 inclusive (although entries must be received by 20 May 2020). Entries received after 20 May 2020 will not be considered for the 2020 Mercury Prize”.
It is quite timely bringing up the Mercury Prize as, last week, it was announced the BRIT Awards and Mercury Prize would change its eligibility criteria. Rina Sawayama was not shortlisted for a Mercury Prize last year for her debut album, SAWAYAMA. She has brought about important change for the Mercury Prize and BRIT Awards. This BBC article reveals more:
“A pop star who was told she was "not British enough" to enter The Brits and the Mercury Prize has won a reversal in the awards' eligibility rules.
Rina Sawayama was told she could not compete for the prizes last year, because she was not a British citizen.
The singer, who has lived in the UK for 26 years, has now won the right to compete, after meeting award bosses.
IN THIS PHOTO: Michael Kiwanuka with the Hyundai Mercury Prize 2020 Album of the Year at the Langham Hotel on 24th September, 2020 in London (he won for his third album, KIWANUKA)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for the Hyundai Mercury Prize
Under new rules, artists who have been resident in the UK for more than five years qualify for the main prizes.
Sawayama holds indefinite leave to remain in the UK, but retains a Japanese passport to maintain ties with her family, including her father, who live in her country of birth.
As Japan does not allow dual citizenship, she cannot have a British passport. That led to her critically-acclaimed debut album, also called Sawayama, being ruled ineligible for last year's Mercury Prize.
"It was just heartbreaking," she told BBC News.
"I think a lot of immigrants feel this way - where they assimilate and they become part of the British culture... and to be told that we're not even eligible to be nominated is very othering”.
I am looking ahead to the Mercury Prize, as I know it will be held and we will be able to get the artists and audience together! A lot of fabulous albums will arrive between now and when the middle of July (when the cut-off point is). I am not going to do these in chronological order but, taking albums that were released after the cut-off last year in July to now, there are some albums that I think are contenders for the Mercury Prize. I am going to revise this feature in June - but I want to make some early predictions now…
IN THIS IMAGE: The cover for slowhai’s latest album, TYRON
Slowthai’s TYRON is one of this year’ s biggest albums. I think it is a strong contender for a shortlist inclusion. Here is what NME wrote in their review:
“Because, yes, there is a cloud hanging over ‘TYRON’. Every interview preceding its release has found Slowthai sifting through the fall-out from his appearance at NME Awards in early 2020. You know the story by now: he was named Hero of the Year at the London bash, seemed a little worse for wear, made grubby remarks to comedian Katherine Ryan and got into an altercation after an audience member shouted that he was a “misogynist” (Ryan later said on Twitter that “he didn’t make me uncomfortable” and told Slowthai, “I knew you were joking”).
The rapper, who nonetheless apologised to Ryan, told VICE last September that he saw the ensuing social media firebomb as in-keeping with the classism that he’d faced throughout his career: “A lot of the people who were so quick to speak badly of me were people who, the whole time I’ve been doing well, have stereotyped me. ‘It’s a matter of time ‘til he does something’, you know?” With the album’s muted second half, he chips away at the caricature to reveal a timeworn but true self-portrait.
On the woozy, acoustic guitar-led ‘push’, he shares a vivid image from a simpler time: “Meet me at the back of the bus / Beep-beep with my hat and my gloves.” Groovy album highlight ‘focus’, with its booming beat, plaintive piano and chopped-up backing vocals, aches with the admission: “No-one I can lean on so I’m limping with a walking stick”. Yet on the same track he also remembers what really matters: “I miss my brothers; I miss my fam as well / Everybody else can go and fuck themselves”.
Arlo Parks’ debut studio album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, is a remarkable work from one of the greatest artists in the country. I love her album and music, and I feel that Collapsed in Sunbeams is guaranteed a place at the Mercury Prize table! I would be shocked if it were omitted. Critics were hugely impressed by Parks’ debut. This is what The Guardian remarked:
“The lyrics, meanwhile, tackle distinctly 21st-century anxieties. An lot of pop in recent years has attempted to deal with body image, mental-health issues or problems with sexual identity; so much so that you don’t have to be a terrible cynic to make out the sound of boxes being ticked. That isn’t the case here: Parks writes with a diaristic tone that suggests lived experience rather than a self-conscious desire to tackle the burning issues of the day. She has a great turn of phrase – “wearing suffering like a spot of bling”; “the air was fragrant and heavy with our silence”, “shards of glass live in this feeling” – and a desire to be, as she puts it, “both universal and hyper-specific”.
If you were minded to nitpick, you might suggest that she’s rather better at the latter than the former, that the broad brushstrokes lean a little on self-help platitudes of the “you gotta trust how you feel inside” variety. Her real skill lies in observing small, telling details: the depressed friend whose overload of makeup leaves her looking “like Robert Smith”; the “artsy couple” she watches arguing in the street on Caroline, “strawberry cheeks flushed with defeated rage”; or in the sudden switch to a blunt, colloquial tone. “You know when college starts again you’ll manage,” she counsels a friend struggling to live at home on For Violet. “I wish your parents had been kinder to you,” she tells an ex whose struggle with her sexuality scuppers their relationship”.
Mogwai scored a number-one this week with As the Love Continues. It is a terrific album from the Glasgow band (and it is their tenth studio album), and I feel that the positive reviews and strength of the album means it is more than worthy of being on the Mercury Prize shortlist. I want to bring in The Quietus’ view of Mogawi’s stunning new record:
“The record is underpinned by the simplistic, lax drum grooves, rock beats played at medium tempos without much variation, taking the pulse of psych or dance music and transposing it to a washy post-rock haze. This gives a lot of space for them to try some weird sounds and variations: electronic bleeps on ‘Here We, Here We, Here We Go Forever’ or the sweeping strings of ‘Midnight Flit’ stir up a whole spectrum of emotions using totally different palettes, anchored by the common pulse. At the edge of all of these, the sound is sometimes a little distorted, wobbly or unclear. They’ve employed a little noise rock before on vintage tracks like ‘I Love you, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School’, but previously always as an assault; now it’s become a little flourish.
This lands them with a record that’s impressively cohesive and outright weird at times, flirting with all the styles the’ve worked with over the years. The temptation for Mogwai has been to make smoother, calmer music recently, more in line with their soundtrack work. This record seems to fly in the face of that. But they’ve clearly learned a lot from their moody soundscapes, even if they break from the ambience by employing the cut and thrust of their earlier rock work, retaining momentum, lending urgency to these ideas and texture”.
Released in August 2020, Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song is a fabulous album that should be included in this year’s Mercury shortlist. I adore the Welsh Electronic artist’s latest album. This is what The Guardian noted when they sat down with the album:
“Delayed to show “solidarity” with record shops threatened by Covid, Kelly Lee Owens’s second album finds the banging techno DJ venturing further into the realm of electronic pop. The digitals are still on point. Arpeggi’s creepy retro-futurism recalls Boards of Canada and earlier electronic experiments in Germany in the 1970s.
But when Owens was on tour with Four Tet, Kieran Hebden urged her to stop hiding her singing voice under a bushel. Now some actual songs – such as the resolute, sad banger On, or L.I.N.E. (Love Is Not Enough) – find the Welsh musician in full coo. The sweetness is deceptive: L.I.N.E. weighs up the compromises people make in relationships; solitude, she concludes, beats warping your essence.
Owens’s is not the only voice elevating this album: Welsh legend John Cale contributes to the brooding Corner of My Sky. Alongside relationship breakdown and the death of her grandmother (the coolly arpeggiating Jeanette), climate apocalypse gets a workout too. The writing of Melt! predates the news that the Greenland ice sheet lost 1m tonnes of ice per minute last year, but its union of ominous digital bubbling and thumping dancefloor nous makes for a deadly and timely tune”.
In October last year, Róisín Murphy launched her fifth studio album, Róisín Machine. There are a couple of Irish acts I am highlighting for Mercury consideration this year – the prize has not included that many Irish artists through the years. The energy, innovation and passion through Róisín Machine makes it a sure-fire award-worthy album! This is an album that received so much love across the board. I want to borrow from a positive review in Pitchfork:
““Incapable” is brittle, its Eurodisco rhythm sharpened into snaps and claps. Murphy unloads a history of emotional distance. She knows all about that warm Moroder/Summer swoon: “I get that there’s a sensation/Though I don’t know what it means.” She can’t feel love. “I should try and play my part,” she reproves herself, but alas, all she’s ever felt is a feverish chill. And this is what it sounds like, percussion prickling like goosebumps, when your damage hardens into a visage. She falls through a trapdoor into full disco fever. “Narcissus” marries Greek myth and a dance beat better than Xanadu ever did: Its pools of rippling strings evaporate into prance music for chatterbox Echo and selfie-obsessed Narcissus, characters familiar to anyone who’s ever waited in line for a nightclub powder room.
Disco fuels another gem: “Murphy’s Law,” a shimmering ode to a lack of self-control that she sings in a register as deep as the groove. The song is not a cover of Cheri’s insouciant 1982 boogie standard of the same name, and it is also not “Bad Girls,” though it definitely shares some DNA, but it is as good as either of them. The nerve! And one more: “Jealousy,” shorn of more than half its original 12" length, starts in thrall to that destructive emotion and stays there. “Jealousy!” she chants, as if demanding her own humanity, while the track surmounts a second great buildup, bookending “Simulation” as if to say the real drama is always human. After all the triumphs and tragedies of trying to connect to herself and other people in the dark, she finds a role she was born to play: succinct dancefloor truth-teller, a character smart enough to see the worst about herself and clever enough to make it irresistible. Róisín Murphy aims her tracks at the stars. With Róisín Machine, she’s become one”.
I am going to omit (unintentionally) a few great British and Irish albums that will be among the runners when the Mercury Prize shortlist is named in the summer. I assume that it will be similar to last year, in the sense that albums need to be submitted by May and the eligibility date runs from July last year to the middle of this July. Debut albums make the Mercury Prize more varied and interesting. I think that new artists deserve the award more than most. Beabadoobee’s Fake It Flowers is a great album that should be nominated. The twenty-year-old was born in the Philippines (and is based in London), so she should be eligible for inclusion after Rina Sawayama’s campaign. NME were glowing when they reviewed Fake It Flowers:
“Opener ‘Care’ has a dreamy start but that lasts scarcely 20 seconds before a jackhammer of a chorus clatters in. That force similarly decimates ‘Dye It Red’, ‘Worth It’ and, most notably, ‘Charlie Brown’, where the ferocity of Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ explodes with Bea’s own unbridled rage – it’s fierce enough to leave Snoopy a shaking, snivelling mess.
To her credit, she’s unafraid to embrace the cliche of being born in the wrong generation. Last year, Bea told NME quite bluntly that she “wants to live in the ‘90s” – and why the hell not? The orchestral overtones to the Smashing Pumpkins-sized ‘Sorry’ hark back to a time when rock bands were unafraid of spaffing production budgets, while the grunge-pop chorus of ‘Together’ is Elastica-sized chorus for a new generation. To pillage the past for inspiration is not uncommon, but few enjoy their joyride as much as Bea does.
The sonic evolution is bolstered by lyricism that traces her ability to communicate emotions bluntly – largely about the ups and downs of romance. Spiteful ripostes run through ‘Further Away’ (“They say the moon’s far away but your brain’s further”), but the make-up on ‘Horen Sarrison’ is sweet in a way that only young love can be, as the lush sounds of Blur’s ‘The Universal’ swell in the background; “You are the smell of pavement after the rain / You are the last empty seat on a train”. On ‘Charlie Brown’ she confronts the periods of self-harm that she endured, towering above but never forgetting those days”.
Even though there is just under five months’ worth of albums to come that could be included in the Mercury Prize’s shortlist, there have been plenty released since July that have caught my eye. SAULT were not nominated for UNTITLED (Black Is). That was released in June last year. Maybe it was not put forward for consideration by their label; it was a big omission. They followed that up with UNTITLED (Rise). Not a lot is known about the band as they do not do much press; people do not know who they are. They are, we know, a British band (so they should be eligible). The Guardian highlighted how amazing UNTITLED (Rise) is:
“Straight away you realise you’re in the presence of something special. The first three songs function as brilliantly constructed dance tracks and keep messing with the listener’s emotions. Strong features beats spiked with explosions of dubby echo, an intricate mesh of Nile Rodgers-ish guitar and a terrific breakdown inspired by Brazilian batucada percussion. You could take its lyrics as straightforward paeans to dancefloor transcendence – “we’re moving forward tonight … we want better tonight” – but, as a later, noticeably more caustic track puts it, you know they ain’t, particularly in the light of what follows. Fearless is supremely funky, but the flurries of disco strings don’t communicate excitement so much as anxiety, the words shifting from defiance to something more troubled: “And it hurts on the inside.”
I Just Want to Dance, meanwhile, really is a paean to dancefloor transcendence, but it never allows you to forget what the song’s protagonist might be attempting to escape: the sound is claustrophobic and clattering, the words demanding “why do my people always die?”. There’s a great, jarring moment where the whole thing skids to a halt – like someone hitting the stop button on a turntable – before grinding back to life, the beat temporarily, disorientatingly out of time.
From its fierce opening salvo to its deceptively mellow conclusion – the sweetness of Little Boy’s piano-led melody, vocal delivery and children’s choir countered by the righteous anger in its lyrics – Untitled (Rise) hardly yields highlights because the quality never wavers: whoever’s involved, it feels like they’ve been galvanised to the top of their game. It manages to be as lyrically unflinching as the music is compelling – not the easiest balance to achieve, as acres of terrible protest songs historically attest. You’d call it the album of the year if its predecessor wasn’t just as good”.
The Cribs released their wonderful eighth studio album, Night Network, back in November. Solo artists have won the Mercury Prize most over the past five years, though Wolf Alice did win in 2018 for Visions of a Life. They might be releasing another album this year, so they may well be on the shortlist once more! Wakefield’s The Cribs are high in my mind when it comes to albums that will be shortlisted for a Mercury Prize this year. CLASH had this to say when they reviewed Night Network:
“In many ways, eighth album ‘Night Network’ – their first since the finalisation of their management divorce – is a love letter to their fans, an unrelenting series of indie rock bangers built to be heard live, loud, and in your face. Curiously, though, it opens with the coy, palatial doo-wop harmonies of ‘Goodbye’, a song that doubles as a two fingered salute to their ex-management team, and a riposte to music industry machinations.
‘Running Into You’ is the point where the album truly begins, with its shuddering chords and yearning vocals. ‘Screaming Into Suburbia’ is practically a mission statement writ anew, while ‘Never Thought I’d Feel Again’ is consumed by the release, the sheer relief they must have felt going back into the studio again.
It’s a head-long rush of supreme indie rock, unashamedly adding pop elements to their underground heroes. As the ride progresses you’ll pick out Motown stompers and slick 70s pop moves, while ‘Under The Bus Station Clock’ has a touch of soul to it. ‘In The Neon Night’ feels like a Beatles homage in place, while ‘She’s My Style’ could even be a B-side to the ‘Men’s Needs…’ era.
The sound of a band resurgent, ‘Night Network’ will have you falling in love with The Cribs all over again. Tapping into their core sounds and core values, it finds the band emerging from their legal troubles triumphant, relishing the vitality of being able to make music together, in the same room, at the same time. An invigorating experience as punk as it is poetic, it’s a fantastic ride from start to finish”.
Working Men’s Club’s eponymous debut album is another that I think is a shoo-in for a shortlist nod. It would be great to see the young band honoured for their debut. This is what Loud and Quiet wrote in their review of Working Men’s Club:
“Syd Minsky-Sargeant, Working Men’s Club’s bracingly outspoken teenage frontman, will not entertain the idea that his outfit are a Manchester band, despite forming there at music college. You wonder whether he’s protesting too much; the spectres of The Fall and of peak New Order hang heavy over this ten-track debut on Heavenly, regardless of the fact that the band cut their teeth in Calder Valley community hubs like Hebden Bridge’s Trades Club and Todmorden’s Golden Lion. There is, in fairness, now a stronger connection with Sheffield, with Ross Orton handling production duties and Moonlandingz guitarist Mairead O’Connor part of a new four-piece lineup that confirms Minsky-Sargeant as the group’s lynchpin.
Working Men’s Club is an album born of personal and political tumult, and it speaks to the singularity of their leader’s musical vision that it feels so cohesive, given the clashes of egos between himself and former members of the band and also taking into account that his lyrics wander – sharply, specifically furious one minute (‘Cook a Coffee’ takes scathing aim at the BBC’s Andrew Neil) and frustratingly unoriginal the next (‘Be My Guest’’s “Let me out, let me scream out!” is teenage angst 101). The record is scored through with a brooding urgency that breathes new life into well-worn influences, particularly on early single ‘Teeth’ and the foreboding post-punk maelstrom of ‘A.A.A.A.’. There’s subtle variation to the central palette of dark synths and clanging guitars; both opener ‘Valleys’ and ‘John Cooper Clarke’ flirt with doomy disco, whilst ‘Outside’ and closer ‘Angel’ hint at stylistic restlessness – slower in pace, broader in scope.
Working Men’s Club is nothing we haven’t heard before, but the sheer force of Minsky-Sargeant’s conviction makes it difficult to resist”.
There are half a dozen other albums I want to list/nominate as potential inclusions in the Mercury Prize shortlist. Fontaines D.C. were nominated last year for their debut, Dogrel (they lost out to Michael Kiwanuka’s KIWANKUA). I feel their sophomore album, A Hero's Death (released last July), might get them a second nod in as many years. Maybe not quite as brilliant as their debut, I still think A Hero’s Death is deserving of serious recognition! One of the many five-star reviews for the album came from The Guardian:
“That sense of freedom is what gives the album its range: it can be scary and bewildering to do whatever you want, but fulfilling, too. There’s an admiring nod to “freaks who dare live life not as a climbing stair”, and a brilliantly economical (self?) portrait of a man resisting his public perception: “Snowman coal’d / Pigeonholed / Cooed to death / Pilgrim soul.” Sometimes the freedom is evoked wordlessly: the snotty joy in the way Chatten lets vowels roll round his throat in Living in America, almost gargling them. Their influences are perhaps living in America, too: you can variously detect the pallor of early Interpol, the swagger of early Strokes, vocal harmonies from doo-wop or the Beach Boys, and, on I Was Not Born, an update of I’m Waiting for the Man.
Where the band really pull themselves together is the title track, their best song yet. Steadily chucking out pearls of wisdom like basketballs at an arcade, Chatten is now a dad, uncle, brother, teacher and pal rolled into one, the sort of man that all boys and girls need throughout their lives. His mantra, “life ain’t always empty”, is the bedrock of this exceptional album: sometimes empty, yes, but not always. With poetry suffusing both lyrics and music, Fontaines DC capture being young in all its excitement and challenges, its confidence and despair: those years where it feels like you’re trying to find a foothold with your hands. It’s not easy, but then what great album, or life, ever is?”.
Bringing it back to new albums and, earlier this month, Ghetts released the sublime Conflict of Interest. The incredible MC and Grime artist is a veteran of the game, but I think he has released his finest work with Conflict of Interest. Rap and Grime are not genres that have fared overly-well regarding Mercury Prize wins. I feel that might be threatened later this year. The Forty-Five had their say regarding one of 2021’s biggest albums:
“His versatility in tone and topic extends to the music: rich instrumentation swoops in to lift the genre’s usual minimalism. Piano, bass guitar, strings, and horns sit happily among grime surroundings, and complement Ghetts’ cinematic writing. Yet the understated tracks hold the greatest power. ‘Hop Out’ pairs starker beats with a moving and conflicted recollection of schoolboy car theft. The cold urban rush of ‘Proud Family’ counters warm lyricism about fatherhood, ghostly guests linger on the spectral backing of ‘Autobiography’, and answerphone messages on ‘Dead To Me’ frame the lost contact of a once-close friend. All the while, despite its Dickensian scope, Ghetts’ writing stays sharp and sophisticated: “I ain’t phoned to say a change gon’ come, that’s what Sam sung.”
‘Conflict Of Interest’ is Ghetts’ wee small hours moment as much as it is his major label bigtime. Either way, he keeps his cool: the record’s expansive soundscape and storytelling deserve several long listens, yet its fresh outlook hints at an exciting future for grime. Fame and nostalgia pose no threat to an artist able to embrace conflicting identities. “You see when I feel cornered, all I do is think of before / I drive back to the house I struggled in,” he says, and Ghetto, Ghetts, and Justin are all in the car together, riding in harmony”.
I think we will see more bands on the 2021 shortlist compared to recent years. I am not sure what will happen between now and July; there will be a lot of tremendous British and Irish albums that could change my views! I do think that Shame’s second studio album, Drunk Tank Pink, will be in with a shot of shortlisting. Released back in January, the South London band are deserving of one of the biggest music awards in the British calendar. NME were keen to have their say:
“Shame’s debut was defined by the dark humour and snark that formed the very spine of the record. That tone is dialled back somewhat on ‘Drunk Tank Pink’, but there are still some laughs to be had. “This is the last time, Acid Dad!” roars the frontman on the chorus of ‘Water In The Well’, a song with a B-52s groove that references the band’s trip to rural Scotland for peace and quiet, when they were unexpectedly presented with a techno party led by producer Makeness’ dad.
This is massive leap on from ‘Songs Of Praise’ – ‘Drunk Tank Pink’ is more ambitious and more accomplished than its predecessor, showcasing a band brimming both with ideas and the confidence to pull them off.
As with the pink room Steen wrote much of the record in sounds, there’s an oddly comforting claustrophobia here. ‘Great Dog’ – the shortest song on the album and a frenetic, scuzzy punk rollicker – is underpinned by a needling guitar drone that’s uncomfortable and urgent, almost made inaudible by the wall of sound around it. ‘Harsh Degrees’ batters the eardrums in a similar manner, sounding like it’s on the brink of collapse as Eddie Green and Sean Coyle-Smith’s guitars do discordant battle with each other”.
The penultimate album I want to mention is Sleaford Mods’e eleventh studio album, Spare Ribs. Showing no dip in quality after all these years, Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have, perhaps, released their greatest album. Rolling Stone remarked the following when reviewing Spare Ribs:
“Spare Ribs, the Mods’ 11th LP since they formed in 2007, is a veritable a la carte menu of outrages. Sick of hipsters who fetishize the blue-collar existence? Check out “Nudge It,” which kicks off with Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers growling “Gimme, gimme,” then descends into a clattering evisceration of “fucking class tourists.” Tired of crooked, elitist politicians who only care about their pockets? Pop on “Short Cummings,” a sneeringly obscene takedown of Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the prime minister of the United Kingdom. On the verge of murdering your entire family in a lockdown-induced haze? You’ve got “Top Room,” which “talks about the daily ordeals of dealing with lockdown at home, having everybody at home every day,” according to Williamson. It also contains the lyric “I think I want something to come out of my phone that ain’t there,” which is an all-too-accurate take on social media malaise.
Written partly during lockdown, the record features some of the least-annoying songs about the pandemic recorded since the initial outbreak in 2019. And that’s heavy praise, considering some of the truly treacle-shellacked tracks that oozed into the zeitgeist last year. In addition to “Top Room,” there’s also “Glimpses,” which touches on how the world stood still when the pandemic first hit (“The air’s got space and glow in clouds now”), and “Out There,” which homes in on the bleak, empty bizarreness of early quarantine days. “You kind of half expect Tom Cruise to be running around the corner at any point,” Williamson said of the deserted streets and the dystopian quality of the era. That track also aims the finger at conservatives who seem to always blame foreigners for their myriad problems. “Although [Covid] obviously came from a foreign country, I think it’s a bit deeper than that,” Williamson said. “But there seemed to be this view that immigrants were bringing it over, which is just stupid.”
Cue up this acerbic romp through society’s various and sundry ills the next time you feel the towering tidal wave of universal anger descending — which will be, likely, in about five minutes”.
Normally, when it comes to the Mercury Prize, you have a selection of mainstream acts, new artists and a range of genres. There is always a Jazz inclusion and albums that people consider to be ‘outsiders’. I have not really named any so far…and it may be the case that obvious examples come to light later in the year regarding genres like Jazz and those that do not normally earn a Mercury Prize win. In terms of an album that is deserving of inclusion on the shortlist but might be an outside bet is Anna B Savage’s A Common Turn. Released back in January, this is a fantastic album from the London artist. CLASH made some interesting observations when they reviewed the acclaimed A Common Turn:
“Over the last five years, Savage has built things up from the ground again to rekindle her passion for music and for herself. “I started to like myself again,” she explains in a press release, and ‘A Common Turn’ openly explores this vulnerable five-year period with authenticity and poise. The overarching theme of birds poetically binds her myriad of experiences together, revealing highs and lows, arduous journeys but also bright, joy enriching colours – just like birds.
‘Corncrakes’ channels Laura Marling style acoustic guitars with Savage’s melancholic lament on her experiences with self-doubt: “I don’t know if this is even real / I don’t feel things as keenly as I used to.” The most impressively produced track on the album ‘Dead Pursuits’ carries this theme of self-doubt to Savage’s own creative process as an artist. Dynamics are then utilised intuitively in ‘Baby Grand’ to convey a motif based around a relationship – its accompanying music video allows for an even more poignant experience.
Savage fuses her classical upbringing with electronic elements in the boldly experimental track ‘Two’ before ‘A Common Tern’ – which also boasts an impressive accompanying video – marks one of the most important moments of the album. It explores Savage escaping toxicity, both with her partner and the toxic relationship she’d built with herself, which coincides with a sighting of the titular common tern that offered a form of grace and freedom from her struggle.
Internal experiences with sexual pleasure are recounted in vivid detail in ‘Chelsea Hotel #3’. The album’s final two tracks ‘Hotel’ and ‘One’ allow William Doyle’s production inputs to come to the fore, rounding off proceedings with nods to Phoebe Bridgers and Anna Calvi.
This is a gem of an album. Personal, honest and highly emotive, it tackles big questions; but most of all, it dares to be vulnerable. ‘A Common Turn’ is undoubtedly one of the most notable releases of 2021 so far, marking a very impressive and well-earned return to music for Anna B Savage”.
It is a way until we get to the Mercury Prize deadline and we learn which dozen albums have been shortlisted. I have mooted some possibilities. I think a few of them at least are definitely going to be included among the riders. There is over four months’ worth of albums to come, so things are going to change. Looking at albums due between now and July, and I think there are some that could be included in a future Mercury Prize shortlist prediction feature: Jane Weaver’s Flock, Royal Blood’s Typhoons, Squid’s Bright Green Field, and Wolf Alice’s Blue Weekend among them! I wanted to look forward to a music award show that will look very different this year compared to last year. I will be curious to see who is shortlisted in the summer as the Mercury Prize inclusions always throw up…
IN THIS PHOTO: Anna B Savage
SURPRISES and twists.