By Barry Divola, Kish Lal, John Shand, Bronwyn Thompson, Bernard Zuel and Barney Zwartz
POP Sigrid
SUCKER PUNCH (Island)
Sigrid explores vocoders, skyrocketing melodies and EDM beats.Credit: Francesca Allen
★★★★☆
Don't Kill My Vibe introduced the world to Norwegian prodigy Sigrid, the EP's 2017 success not only capturing fans' imagination, but snaring her a BBC Sound of Music Award the following year. Sucker Punch, the 22-year-old's long-awaited debut album, is a masterclass in effervescent pop. The luscious production emanates warmth, and features the clever use of vocoders, skyrocketing melodies and EDM beats. The frenzied energy of Strangers and the title track challenges Sigrid to sprint alongside the modulating bass-lines, and threatens to spin out of control, but never does. She avoids the pitfalls of artificial pop music, successfully toeing the line between stadium-sized sound and vulnerability, as was exemplified in the career-sparking Don't Kill My Vibe. Possessing confidence beyond her years, yet emboldened by youthful abandon, the rising star holds nothing back. Sigrid explores a multitude of emotions over 12 tracks: from romantic melancholy (Don't Feel Like Crying, Dynamite), dizzying glee (Level Up), and playful exuberance (Mine Right Now). Sucker Punch exudes authenticity unparalleled by some of pop's juggernauts, but it ultimately succeeds because it is a bona fide pop record. KISH LAL
CLASSICAL Leif Ove Andsnes
CHOPIN BALLADES (Sony)
★★★★☆
Andsnes has mostly avoided Chopin in the studio for the past quarter century. What can he bring to the four ballades, this most intense, romantic and melancholy music, also among the most recorded in the piano repertoire? First and foremost, he brings an unassuming. highly attractive poetry, with none of the drawn-out sighs, lingered-over phrases, prolonged rubati or exaggerated gestures to which some pianists fall prey. He also avoids the other extreme of highlighting the pianistic brilliance routinely demanded by this music. Andsnes divides each ballade from the next by a carefully balanced nocturne, an excellent idea. His sense of architecture may sometimes dominate the quicksilver mood changes, but Andsnes is acutely aware of transitions – in fact he regards all four ballades as extended transitions. This is commanding pianisim of the utmost delicacy, skill and sensitivity of touch. The last ballade (in F minor, Op 52) provides the most beautiful and expressive playing, leaving the listener oblivious to the formidable challenges. The great romantic composer Robert Schumann recognised the unique character of Chopin's piano music as "cannons buried in flowers". BARNEY ZWARTZ
INDIE-POP The Japanese House
GOOD AT FALLING (Dirty Hit)
★★★★☆
It's been a long wait for fans of the UK's Amber Bain (aka the Japanese House), whose four EPs over as many years promised great things to come. They can now breathe easily, Bain's debut album proving every bit as stunning as the early signs suggested. Employing the kind of glitch-pop production that has pushed Auto-Tune into the indie-pop world – think the Postal Service, Styrofoam, Lali Puna – Bain has masterfully developed a sound that's simultaneously direct and ethereal. There's also a relationship breakdown at the core of Good At Falling, which lends it a resonating vulnerability: the standout We Talk All the Time chronicles a sad but inevitable split, while the dream-poptastic Lilo is a subtle highlight, Bain marrying melancholy and joy seamlessly from verse to chorus and back. She even gets more personal, name-checking her ex – singer-songwriter Marika Hackman – in the almost reverential Marika is Sleeping. While song-writing rules Good at Falling, it's enhanced by the production courtesy of Bain and BJ Burton (Low, Bon Iver). Yet despite its production gloss and electronica sheen, the set's organic warmth and emotional heart shines brightest. BRONWYN THOMPSON
JAZZ Tim Haldeman
OPEN WATER AS A CHILD (Woolgathering)
★★★★½
If ever an opening line was going to transfix you, "I followed whiskey into the country of Legionella" should do it. The Kerouac-influenced poem Open Water is graffitied through this album in three instalments, written and delivered by John Goode, whose voice is a scythe slicing straight into your central nervous system, against Tim Haldeman's discrete piano. When he stops speaking the band surges into the breach, and is just as instantly compelling. The collective energy and sound has a serrated edge, partly thanks to Jordan Schug's cello, and partly to bassist Ben Willis and drummer Jonathan Taylor generating a ferocity that winds back the clock to the 1960s. Even when they settle into a gentler groove, you feel the tension, like an attack dog striving to break its leash. Haldeman, who plays flute or, more often, searing tenor when not accompanying Goode, favours transparent textures, emotional enigmas and high stakes, with the cello and tenor joined by (alto (Dan Bennett) and trumpet (Justin Walter). He also keeps the surprises coming, so the funereal As Good as Gone gives way to the sprightly, Caribbean-inflected Take This Drifter, which builds back towards the opener's maelstrom. JOHN SHAND
POP Robert Forster
INFERNO (EMI)
★★★½☆
On his seventh solo album Robert Forster is, as ever, an observer: a storyteller once-removed, yet also someone with the heart to see in – beyond the headline or the punchline. He is the kind of storyteller able tell the true yarn of a young Northern NSW couple who looked to flee their town, racing away to … well, only "four miles" away, while bringing compassion and understanding to their 40-year tale. "Life had turned a page," he sings, over a lightly moving Pacific island rhythm and almost as light instrumentation. And that sums up Inferno: a record of restraint to the point of understatement – and sometimes, to a song's detriment, beyond that point – where the right feeling is as important as le mot juste. In its gentlest, best moments, the album makes languid almost luscious, without excess. When it is not as successful, oddly enough in both the opening and closing tracks, it is because the melodies take more of a meander than a purposeful walk, and the characters don't really grip. They both cry out for a tightening of direction, or for the compelling heart shown in the rest of the album. BERNARD ZUEL
ROCK Weezer
WEEZER (THE BLACK ALBUM) (Crush/Warner)
★★☆☆☆
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Weezer were the bee's knees for their first two albums, then their smarm eclipsed their smarts. In January they released The Teal Album, a smirky, unnecessary collection of covers built on the back of their success in helping to turn Toto's Africa into last year's musical meme. Their latest in a line of self-titled, parenthetically colour-coded discs returns to originals – sort of. Can't Knock The Hustle reeks of Offspring circa Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) and Smash Mouth circa just about anything they ever did – which is not good news for anyone. On podcast Song Exploder, Rivers Cuomo revealed he often nicks chord progressions from well-known songs. If that's the case, Too Many Thoughts In My Head could have come from DNA scrapings of the Smiths' Bigmouth Strikes Again, although the lyric "Stayed up reading Mary Poppins, overwhelmed by Netflix options" is not exactly vintage Morrissey. Cuomo is no dummy – you can hear echoes of the Zombies (High As A Kite) and T. Rex (The Prince Who Wanted Everything) – so it's strange that he seems intent on employing modern pop and hip-hop cliches for little purpose apart from trolling. BARRY DIVOLA