Globelamp
The Orange Glow
(Wichita Recordings)
4/5

A FORMER member of Los Angeles indie band Foxygen, Elizabeth Le Fey’s new album, under the moniker Globelamp, is very special indeed.
Written in response to the death of her best friend and a painful break-up, Le Fey escapes to an enchanted fairy-tale world through the medium of psychedelic folk.
Her magical songs and evident eccentricity will inevitably draw comparisons to fellow US singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, though Le Fay’s muscular, dense and often angry music is very much its own thing.
The Negative is part nursery rhyme, part prog-rock musical, while on Controversial/Confrontational (“Men cannot be trusted”), her voice reaches Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Elsewhere she does dark grunge rock on Piece of the Pie and an off-kilter piano ballad and choir on the doomed lovers-listing San Francisco.
An extraordinary artistic accomplishment, The Orange Glow inhabits a different planet to most contemporary records.

The Felice Brothers
Life In The Dark
(Yep Roc)
4/5

THE LATEST album from the Catskill Mountains-based folk revivalists is a ramshackle, joyous affair.
As with all their previous work — except the electronica-influenced 2011 Celebration, Florida — there is a huge debt to the “old, weird America” mined by Bob Dylan and The Band in the late 1960s.
Aerosol Ball kicks off with a surreal tour of US cities and consumer products, while Plunder is a flat-out blues rocker which echoes Frankie’s Gun, the group’s most famous singalong.
There are also welcome hints of a working-class consciousness in some of frontman Ian Felice’s lyrics, as on the swooning, Joe Hill-citing Jack at the Asylum and on ballad Triumph ’73: “Ain’t gonna join the Marine Corps/Ain’t gonna fight no rich man’s war/ There’s too many boys gone down that way before.”
No surprises, then, just The Felice Brothers in all their rowdy, passionate glory.
Bloody brilliant.

Ben Chatwin
Heat & Entropy
(Ba Da Bing Records)
3/5

PREVIOUSLY working under the name Talvihorros, Ben Chatwin’s new album is an ornate and ambient collection of thoughtful compositions.
According to the Scottish musician and producer, the music was inspired by the tension between the natural and the electronic, technological worlds, particularly during walks under the Forth rail bridge.
The album begins with a dulcitone and is filled with experimental, largely instrumental, electronica. The synths on Standing Waves weave a futuristic and somewhat moody atmosphere, while Euclidean Plane apparently includes something called a three-stringed didley-bow and creates whale-like sounds by rubbing a £1 coin on electric guitar strings.
If intrinsically plotted, computer-derived music is your thing the album will hit the spot. Others will likely experience it as a record of mildly diverting and sleepy background music — pleasant enough but with little to offer beyond this.