Albums of the week: Maroon 5, Stereophonics and Kelsea Ballerini

The best new releases 

Maroon 5: Red Pill Blues

***

Maroon 5 are the ultimate singles band. Heard in moderation, Adam Levine’s falsetto can be a beautiful thing: Moves Like Jagger and Sugar are essentially musical catnip. Yet despite the five Grammy Awards and 20 million records sold worldwide, there has never been a strong sense of a musical identity.

Perhaps for this reason, the LA band’s latest album sees them team up with a host of music’s most wanted. There’s Julia Michaels on the fun but forgettable electropop of Help Me Out, and A$AP Rocky providing a rap cameo on the piano-led Whiskey that couldn’t sound more phoned in if it was actually a voicemail. As ever, there are some great singles: the synthy grooves of Best 4 U, the Kendrick Lamar-featuring Don’t Wanna Know. But the overall impression is one of a band best enjoyed in microdoses.

(Polydor)

by Rick Pearson

Stereophonics: Scream Above the Sounds

***

Sandwiched between solo releases by the Gallagher brothers, Stereophonics are the other enduring Brit-rock contenders. Despite a reputation for stolid songwriting, Kelly Jones still springs a few surprises on their 10th album. The Welsh band aren’t averse to the odd saxophone flourish, while the spirit of synth-heavy 2005 chart-topper Dakota lives on with the vocoder effect and wiry guitars on Taken a Tumble.

Lyrically, the band remain prone to clunkiness: the record’s title is taken from Jones’s description of childbirth on All in One Night. He’s at his most mawkish on Before Anyone Knew Our Name, though perhaps that’s unavoidable seeing as it’s a tribute to original drummer Stuart Cable, who died in 2010. Yet there’s also a newfound maturity here — you wouldn’t begrudge them a seventh No 1 album.

(Parlophone)

by Andre Paine

Kelsea Ballerini: Unapologetically

***

If you're someone who wishes Taylor Swift would step away from the edgy electronic pop stuff and gossip-stirring lyrics and pick up her guitar again, Tennessee’s Kelsea Ballerini is a decent fallback. A gold-selling Grammy nominee in her homeland, she has a nice line in romance-puncturing on I Hate Love Songs: “I hate Shakespeare and Gosling and cakes with white frosting.”

On this second album the mood is generally more downbeat than on her first, with more break-up sadness on Get Over Yourself and Roses. She offers the briefest nod towards modern pop on Miss Me More, with its digitised vocals and powerful chorus. Otherwise this is all highly polished country fare, nothing new but done perfectly well.

(Sony)

by David Smyth

Courtney Pine: Black Notes from the Deep

*****

When Courtney Pine released his debut album, Journey to the Urge Within, in 1987, he changed the course of British jazz. Thirty years on, he’s still mixing things up, still setting the bar high. Here he dusts off his tenor sax and teams up with another British institution, vocalist Omar Lye-Fook, on an album that moves from grooving duets to gorgeous ballads with elegant, intelligent flair.

Standouts include a fresh take on Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly and the modal Rivers of Blood, at once meditative and fiercely defiant. The pianist Robert Mitchell, himself a national treasure, features among a wish-list quartet, and Pine’s exquisite eclectism shines throughout. As classy as it gets. He plays London Bridge Theatre on November 13 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

(Freestyle)

By Jane Cornwell

Kries: Selo Na Okuke/Village Tracks

****

In existence for more than a decade, Kries are Croatia’s most interesting contemporary folk band. Led by the strikingly tall singer Mojmir Novakovic, Kries take traditional tunes and give them an exhilarating modern edge, with influences from Radiohead, Velvet Underground and others. Prominent in the instrumental line-up are the powerful drums of Ivan Levacic, the flutes and bagpipes of Andor Vegh and the fiddles of Ivo Letunic.

Songs like Oj Lado Lado and Dodole are raw in their incantatory power with call-and-response vocals, while the delicate Sestrica Pavlova, with its plangent winds and irregular rhythms, encapsulates Croatia’s pivotal position between east and west. The nine songs, recorded in a theatre in Dubrovnik, are an excellent introduction to the band’s repertoire.

(Riverboat Records)

by Simon Broughton

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