Yusuf Azak - Turn on the Long Wire (****)Yusuf Azak is a singer-songwriter without peer, thanks to a voice that proudly earns the epithet ‘acquired taste’. With each encounter, either in a live setting or on past EPs, his peculiar gasping sigh grows more fondly familiar and less curious, to the point where Turn on the Long Wire can be instantly enjoyed, without the initial moment of adjustment previously required.
Of course, if this debut album is your first Azak experience, his odd cadence and wheezy timbre might still surprise, but the songs herein are the finest, most accessible tracks he has thus far committed to tape. Strings are used more extensively than in the past, augmenting intricate guitar-work and fleshing out his gentle sound, while structurally, Azak’s grown incrementally more conventional, with verses and choruses where once there was mist. But such refinements are always to his credit, pointing Azak towards a peerlessness of a different sort.Out 15th November
Shugo Tokumaru - Port Entropy (****)Live, Shugo Tokumaru plies his trade with little more than an acoustic guitar and an effects pedal or two. It’s near impossible to imagine Port Entropy as the product of such modest labour; rather, it evokes some manner of elaborate clockwork contraption – a mechanical contrivance of finely-tuned percussion and alchemic music-box delights.
Turning Port Entropy’s crank animates pistons and cogs, causing beautiful harmonies to skip through tubes and pipes, delivering melodies that blend child-like whimsy with intricate musicianship, eccentric invention with dreamy nostalgia. While Tokumaru is evidently fond of the sixties Brit sound – Drive-Thru closely echoes The Kinks’ Picture Book – he successfully stakes out new ground. Tracking Elevator and Rum Hee offer two particularly transformational examples of his fourth album’s considerable charms, the latter managing to trump Jónsi in the day-glo elf-pop stakes. As the cogs settle with Malerina’s enchanting finale, Port Entropy begs to be wound afresh.Out 6th December
Twin Shadow - Forget (****)
Like post-dawn melancholia after a glittering soiree, Forget is alternately bittersweet and euphoric. The debut album from Twin Shadow (AKA George Lewis Jr.) shimmers and struts with disco-flair one moment (on the funk-tinged Shooting Holes) before turning solemn and intimate the next. There are echoes of both The Associates’ brooding aesthetic and Saturdays = Youth’s nostalgic sparkle, but an ear for invention and the immaculate production of Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor ensure this is never a retro masquerade.
A clarity of vision cuts through the various stylistic detours; Forget might possess hints of yesteryear, but it never surrenders its steady sense of self. Whether sighing hushed come-ons (“as if it wasn’t enough just to hear you speak/they had to give you lips like that” Lewis Jr. purrs on Tyrant Destroyed), or howling denials of love on indelible first single Slow, Forget quietly but assuredly announces a singular new talent.Out 15th November
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