Albums ahoy!

What ghastly times. “Dystopian” doesn't even cover it. Existential anxieties notwithstanding, I've been burying myself in new music. That might sound trite, but it's my release, my escape chamber in normal times, let alone when there’s a genocidal maniac bombing an otherwise peace-loving democracy into the Middle Ages. I know it seems wrong, with that context, to divert your attention to entertainment, but given the topic that dominates every conversation, every minute of television airtime, every Tweet, some relief has to be found.

First up, then, has been a diversion of unbridled guitar rock. That will be the Soho Dukes, a combo formed in the Surrey/Sussex borderlands and whose debut album, Bar Fights & Tuppenny Uprights, was recorded in Woking, the commuter-belt town best known for raising Paul Weller, the Pizza Express used in a dubious alibi, and where HG Wells’ Martians  landed first in War Of The Worlds before tearing up the place, a chilling foreshadow of events taking place right now in eastern Europe. 

From the outset, the Dukes’ don’t set out to be overly sophisticated, and that’s what works so entertainingly well. Having seen them live, in a small suburban pub where the enjoyably raucous boogie goes down well with a pint, their debut album takes the brakes off. There’s a sumptuous production to it, one that belies its suburban foundations. In fact, it’s a sound that would - I’m genuinely convinced - find a natural home on American rock radio and in truckstop jukeboxes. None more so than opening track Angel Walk, with its superbly polished sax break, and 5,000 Channels, Weekend Millionaire and Murdertown, with the kind of slick shifts of rhythm and lead guitar that wouldn’t be out of place in the canon of any classic rock outfit from the last 50 years. 

There is the odd misstep, such as the comically theatrical Bovver Boys, on which lead singer Johnny Barracuda strays into punkish cod-Cockney, but as Bar Fights & Tuppenny Uprights progresses, the ears warm to a superbly sophisticated sequence of grown-up guitar rock. For an act that, on paper is - and I hope they won’t mind me saying this - ostensibly a bar band, their recorded debut not only projects polished competence but also the sheer joy of playing this kind of music. Name your band - AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, the Chilli Peppers, even Guns N’ Roses (Barracuda does bear an uncanny vocal similarity to Axl Rose...) - and you get some sense of where the Dukes are pitched musically, but moreover, it’s the degree of professional production and arrangement that makes the album work so well. The Dukes are not new - they’ve been gigging around southern London since the ’90s, honing their stage craft - but in the process, they’ve fine-tuned their songwriting, too, and the net effect of this album underlines it. COVID may have prolonged its production, but it’s been wholeheartedly worth the extra time and effort.

The Soho Dukes play London’s legendary Troubadour on Saturday 7 May - details at SohoDukes.com

Seven years in the making and an incredible 18 years after their last outing, which saw a tentative reunion (or was it reconciliation?) between Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, Tears For Fears have returned with an album that provides the soothing tincture these ears needed as the world winces at the actual shooting war taking place in Europe. And, as an album title, The Tipping Point couldn't have any greater irony, given that the album was released the day after Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. But in spite of that unfortunate timing, the record itself is a consummate pleasurefest, especially for those of my vintage. 

TFF were part of my teenage soundtrack, from the synthpop gloom of Pale Shelter and Mad World to the hits-a-go-go of the Songs From The Big Chair era. What I hadn't always appreciated, until I spoke to Steven Wilson about his surround sound remixes of that blockbuster album and its follow-up, The Seeds Of Love, was just how much Orzabal and Smith had a shared DNA with the progressive rock giants I grew up listening to. It’s what has always made their songwriting multi-layered: considered - epic even, in places (think of a song as topographically expansive as Woman In Chains, for example). 

Like the Soho Dukes’ effort in my previous review, protracted time may have helped Orzabal and Smith create a better product, one of assured songwriting, luscious studio work and perfectly balanced arrangements. That doesn’t mean an overly-slick throwback to the ’80s, but an album of exemplary songcraft. There’s a reflective maturity to it, too - not just the inevitable passing of time, but also Orzabal’s own widowerhood as he came to terms with the tragic 2017 death of his wife Caroline. There are other themes: “We felt the world was very much at a tipping point,” Smith recently told the BBC. “The rise of the right wing, Trump being elected, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, the climate crisis…”. Inevitably, though, the primary source of the album is Orzabal and Smith finding their own relationship again. 

Opening with the understated, Americana-tinged No Small Thing, the nine tracks that follow span the textural range of Tears For Fears records past (with lyrics informed by Orzabal’s mental struggles in mourning). This isn’t, though, a mournful album in sprit - even if the title track’s words are dark, direct references to death, the song’s bouncing rhythm drawing comparison to the similar uplift of Everybody Wants To Rule The World. “The ‘tipping point’ in the title track is a little bit more private and a bit morbid,” Orzabal revealed to the BBC. “The narrator is in a hospital ward looking at someone they've loved for a long time, knowing that they're going to die, watching their breath, looking at them and just wondering at what point are they going to pass from life into death.” Please Be Happy is equally as direct, addressing the alcohol abuse that tragically led to Caroline’s descent into premature dementia, while My Demons - with its semi-intentional Depeche Mode hooks - addresses surveillance society, though it, too could be a bleak appraisal of watching someone succumb to weakness. Gloomy as the lyrical premise of these songs might sound, the actual music itself paints a brighter background, one that ensures the album, from start to finish, is more than just comfort food, but one that warrants repeated listening to unlock the myriad layers encased within. 

The pre-publicity for Johnny Marr’s fourth de facto solo album goes back so far, it seems like I’ve had the release of Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 in my calendar for months. In fact, the Mancunian jangler has been  drip-feeding extracts from this ambitious double album since late last year, not that anyone’s appetites needed whetting. 

His previous solo release, Call The Comet was a triumphant exercise in guitar-based, electronic-enhanced indie rock by one of the masters of the art. Even now, I’ll never claim to be a massive fan of The Smiths, but the bits I did like were the result of Marr’s singular guitar playing. It’s a reputation that has quite rightly rendered him the last true British guitar hero. He might not share the blues-rock heritage of veteran axe-swingers like Clapton, Beck, Page and Gilmour, but Marr has what every teenage guitarist yearns for (and never achieves) - a signature sound. That has populated some of my favourite records of the last 40 years, namely The The’s Mind Bomb and Dusk, the 7 Worlds Collide supergroup project, and Electronic’s debut, not to mention a vast catalogue of guest appearances on everything from albums by Roxy Music and Tom Jones to Hans Zimmer’s No Time To Die soundtrack.

Marr is a musician’s musician, and despite the stratospheric adulation he commands - justifiably - lets the music do the talking. Thus, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 represents a whopping hour-and-ten-minutes of mind-blowing electro-rock, cantering between guitar-stomping fare like Night And Day and the epic closer Human, and a more industrial wall of sound, such as The Speed Of Love. There is groove on Tenement Time and the relative bright pop of Counter Clock World. But it is to the most ‘Marr-esque’ songs, like Sensory Street and The Whirl, that bring the energy out of the Mancunian’s spirit most strongly. With such an expansive CV covering four decades, it seems weird to think of Marr as just hitting his stride with his solo career, but Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 is an epic product in every sense, and utterly enjoyable for it.