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Blondshell – Violins
★★★★☆
The artist known as Blondshell sounds fired up. Just over a year after releasing her second album, If You Asked for a Picture, the LA musician born Sabrina Tietelbaum returns with Violins which, contrary to the name, is not some sudden pivot to classical swells of strings. Instead, it’s a fully-fledged rock record, where her formerly plain-speaking lyricism has evolved into something considerably more abstract – while still leaning on her favoured, reverb-drenched Nineties alt-rock sound.
Album standout “Heart Has to Work Out” is led by an angular riff, stomping drums and electric guitar squalls that hang broodily over the track like thunderclouds. It’s a bloody, unsparing dissection of the complexities of female friendship: the rivalry, the tension, the unspoken feelings. “You give me paws, you get me scaring strangers,” Teitelbaum sings, “You got me criticising, you make this feel like labour.”
Her laconic delivery pairs beautifully with poetic songwriting that springs forth with striking imagery: “Hands are fireproof, wooden table/ Literary heroine breaking through a stable,” she sings over the thrashy loud-quiet-loud dynamic of closer “Für Elise”. Violent undercurrents churn through songs like “Stone Fruit”, capturing a love so fierce it feels like something darker: “I care to stick to you like a clot/ Wanna hear your history until you don’t wanna talk.”
She’s strangely tender on “New Age Trojan Horse”, an anthemic, Eighties-leaning track that John Cusack might have played from his boombox. As the title suggests, though, its theme creeps up on you, excoriating performative male behaviour that masks misogynist tendencies. Tietelbaum namechecks Leonard Cohen’s posthumous collection of poetry and non-fiction writings, The Flame, on the slow-burning “Sea Legs”. Like Cohen’s work, Violins weaves together questions of melancholy, humour, romance and life’s meaning. It pulls you in, beautifully.
Gurriers – Nobody’s Coming to Save You
★★★★☆
“Nobody’s coming to save you,” goes the gasping refrain for the title track on Gurriers’ ferocious second album. You’re unsure whether singer Dan Hoff is barking at you or himself; backed by a cacophony of serrated guitar lines, his voice goes from a raucous holler to a muttering, self-loathing sneer. Even when he’s railing against social apathy, though (“getting ready for the weekend/ while they flee a war”), it never feels like the Dublin band are hurling blame. Instead, this album wants to inspire, to empower. “Hope is there if we feel it,” Hoff urges. “Don’t wait for someone else to seek it.”
A taut 10 tracks, Nobody’s Coming… bristles with ambition. Guitarists Ben O’Neill and Mark MacCormack go toe-to-toe, trading waspish, buzzy riffs and dangerous licks from either side of drummer Pierce Callaghan’s muscle-bound rhythms. Hoff is a terrific frontman, knowing precisely when to unleash his carnal, punk ferocity (“Nothing Happens Twice”) and when to switch to a silkier, deadlier tone (between the choruses on “Shades”). His twin influences, Damon Albarn and Nick Cave, are evident; the record oscillates brilliantly between “Song 2” exhilaration and Bad Seeds curiosity. And as huge as those guitars are, the message cuts through all the same.
