Album reviews: George Ezra is catchy and carefree; Sinéad O’Brien delivers impressive debut
George Ezra and Limerick's Sinead O'Brien have just released new albums.
★★★★☆
How do you follow a mega-hit such as Shotgun, the smiley-faced chugger with which George Ezra conquered pop in 2018? Ezra’s solution is to not really try. Instead, his third album, Gold Rush Kid, finds the Hertfordshire songwriter crooning about his quarter-life crisis (Green Green Grass) and suggesting, over the title track’s tranquil guitars, that his success has been a one grand act of musical larceny (“Gold rush kid, robbing the bank/ Making a run for it and learning to dance”).
His voice has seemingly deepened in the four years in which he’s been out of the studio. But though it sometimes sounds as if he’s warbling from the bottom of a well, aficionados will nonetheless enjoy the mix spry melodies and self-interrogating lyrics.
Ezra delivers an agreeable Ed Sheeran impersonation on the conversational Manila, with assistance from Joel Potts of Coldplay contemporaries Athlete, returning as his foil and collaborator.
And if the project has a centrepiece it is Dance All Over Me. Here, allied to a grooving keyboard Ezra uncork his inner Chris Martin. “Dance, dance, dance – let it be, be, be,” he sings as the tune achieves take off.
It’s no Shotgun underneath the hot sun. Still, it is catchy and carefree and George Ezra fans will adore it and the rest of Gold Rush Kid.
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★★★★☆
Sinéad O’Brien’s first album is produced by Fontaines DC wingman Dan Carey. And there are undeniable parallels between O’Brien’s bristling punk poetry and the Dubliner’s literary-hued rock. But the Limerick artist has a vision distinctively own and Time Bend and Break the Bower swirls with mystery and is in places compellingly ferocious.
“Take me to taste,The secrets of the saints,” she exclaims mischievously and enigmatically on Holy Country, against a sharply-etched rumble of guitar and drums from bandmates Julian Hanson and Oscar Robertson. The import of these invocations is not immediately obvious. Instead you are asked you to lean in and bring your own context. This is a puzzle box bound for the mosh-pit.
O’Brien’s songwriting thrives on the tension between her lush and evocatively wordplay and the stripped back music. Often the driving factor is the sheer force of her personality, which burns throughly brightly on Girlkind, where dark, stormy riffs are paired with vocals that build and build, like a call to prayer or the incantations of an exorcist.
She recently shared the bill with Liam Gallagher on Later With Jools Holland and a sense of anticipation precedes her album. It’s certainly been a journey for the singer, who worked for years in the fashion industry. But she has made the most of the time afforded to her and Time Bend and Break the Bower is a fully-realised artistic vision and an overdue riposte to the tired old cliche of Irish music as an eternal repository of mewling male self-pity. Diving headlong into the slipstream between poetry and pop O’Brien has delivered a debut to cherish.
