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Shania Twain deals in pop clichés, Robert Forster faces family tragedy – the week’s best albums

Shania Twain sounds like a remorseless aerobics instructor on her new album - Louie Banks
Shania Twain sounds like a remorseless aerobics instructor on her new album - Louie Banks

Shania Twain, Queen of Me ★★★☆☆

You would be hard-pressed to find a more relentlessly upbeat song than the opening track on Shania Twain’s sixth album, Queen of Me. Even the title, Giddy Up!, suggests sprightly action is in store, albeit perhaps of an equine kind corresponding with the veteran country pop superstar’s appearance on the cover, skimpily attired astride a black horse. The actual song sounds more like a bucking bronco released onto a sprung dancefloor.

Created with David Stewart, a Scottish pop producer who has previously worked with South Korean boyband BTS, Giddy Up! is a corny line dance beefed up with modern production techniques, like Billy Ray Cyrus put through a K-pop blender, featuring lots of shouty vocal punctuation and a rousing “la-la-la” choral and synth singalong. Frankly it exhausts me just listening to it, but the 57-year-old Twain is out there, giving it everything, like some bossy, high-kicking, heel-clicking, aerobic instructor keeping her fitness class on their toes: “Up giddy-giddy up, giddy-giddy up!”

Twain is the woman with the bionic voice. She rose to superstardom in the 90s by crossing country musical tropes with slick pop rock, scoring such worldwide smash hits as You’re Still the One and Man! I Feel Like a Woman!. The biggest selling female country star of all time, Twain was forced into premature retirement in 2004, suffering vocal dysphonia as a result of Lyme disease. Following surgical vocal cord implants in 2011, she had to relearn to sing, eventually making a strong comeback in 2017 with fifth album Now, which effectively reheated her original sound with added autotune on mature songs addressing the troubles of her past.

The follow up, though, attempts something a little more precarious, reframing a vintage star through a modern pop prism. The multiple producers and co-writers listed have worked with the likes of One Direction, Little Mix and Justin Bieber between them, which might explain why Queen of Me is full of the digital plasticity of maximalist chart pop. The songs themselves (all co-written by Twain) are instantly catchy, witty and perfectly formed, which has been a mark of her career.

She has a well-honed country ear for sharp couplets encapsulating emotional situations, but her subject matter of first kisses (Last Day of Summer) and assertive girl power (Not Just a Girl) seems glib, dealing in pop clichés rather than digging into more interesting life experience. On the RnB bounce of Pretty Liar, Twain prances around a duplicitous lover with the nursery rhyme taunt that his “pants are on fire / You’re such a f***ing liar.” Ironically, the jolly song lacks the ring of Twain’s own truth.

In her 90s glory days, Twain effectively created a blueprint for the rise of Taylor Swift. Yet an over eagerness to keep up to date has resulted in making Twain sound less mature than her successor. On Queen of Me, Twain comes across as Swift’s over eager auntie, charging onto the dancefloor, determined to prove she still has the moves to cut it with the kids. Neil McCormick

Raye, My 21st Century Blues ★★★★★

London-born Raye will have her work cut out for her trying to top this constellation of hits. The 25-year-old's agile, sultry vocals glimmer over throbbing, propulsive dance beats as she slinks through dramatic lyrical narratives.

Making good on the addictive beat and sexy, soulful balladry of Escapism (with 070 Shake), this album feels like a hard-won victory and a f**k you to label restrictions. Hard Out Here is a slow-grind, RnB banger that harks to the empowered sexiness of FKA Twigs. It is a stiletto-heeled stab into the seemingly impenetrable heart of white male privilege. “I'm about to have these grown men crying,” she sings.

Raye's is a versatile, acrobatic soprano often enlivened with a shiver of falsetto. Layers of her gorgeous harmonies build into a wave over a metallic, relentless clack of tech percussion, never more so than the bittersweet duet with Mahalia, Five Star Hotels. Somewhere between the rave club, exploratory electro, RnB, bluesy jazz and soul, Raye has carved her own space and while it's a familiar cocktail, she owns it entirely. This is the soundtrack to a woman kicking free of the restrictive crush of her first record label Polydor, which she claims wouldn't let her release a debut album after seven years.

Euphoric Sad Songs, released in 2020, shot Raye’s single Secrets into the UK Top 10 in 2021. She'd been releasing EPs, collaborating with dance and pop acts and touring for the previous six years, though: she was born for this. With friends like Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama, David Guetta, Mabel and an upcoming tour with Kali Uchis, Raye has pulled through the darkest period of her career to date, fuelled rather than destroyed by Polydor's ignorance.

Like FKA Twigs’s Caprisongs, Beyoncé's Renaissance, and SZA’s SOS, Raye’s My 21st Century Blues deserves to be listened to from start to finish, then again, and again. Cat Woods

The Waeve - Steve Gullick
The Waeve - Steve Gullick

The Waeve, The Waeve ★★★★☆

With Blur gearing up for a reunion this summer, taking on two megagigs at Wembley Stadium, guitarist Graham Coxon here finds time to squeeze in one last extra-curricular venture before rehearsals commence. During his ’00s bust-up with Damon Albarn, Coxon pursued a prolific and generally above-par solo career, which petered out once he rejoined, leaving space only for occasional soundtrack work.

In The Waeve, he teams up with his brand-new life partner and mother of his third child, Rose Elinor Dougall, whom he met after a solo acoustic gig following his second divorce in late 2020. Once a member of neo-60s girl-group The Pipettes, Dougall herself has beaten a variable solo path, trying on both New Order-y synth-pop and folky traditionalism for size, and guesting with admiring luminaries Mark Ronson and Baxter Dury.

Vocally at least, the pair seem ideally matched, plausibly inhabiting this debut album’s central narrative of injured lovers tossed helplessly into each other’s arms, beneath new-found starry skies. “It’s enough that you’re here in the universe,” they croon together on the smoochy Over and Over, while in the amusingly ratty mockney chorus of Can I Call You, they howl, “I’m tired of being in love, I’m sick of being in pain – can’t you just kiss me, then kiss me again?”

Where many duet albums founded on real-life romance are indigestibly gooey, this one avoids that pitfall thanks to the sense of darkness and foreboding in the music, which was partly inspired by torrid British folk-rockers like John and Beverly Martyn, and Bert Jansch, and acquires further depth via edgy orchestration from the Elysian Quartet. Dougall’s synth textures bring yet another layer of unease, while Coxon frequently dusts off an unforeseen instrument from his armoury, the saxophone, to parp moodily, or provide a blaring, Roxy Music-style upswing.

By the concluding You’re All I Want to Know, however, they’re “living in a summer dream, it’s too late to turn back now”. The songs are sufficiently sophisticated and winning that The Waeve keeps sweeping the listener along on its intoxicating journey. Andrew Perry

Robert Forster, The Candle and the Flame ★★★★☆

As one half of 80s Australian indie-pop group, The Go-Betweens, Forster has never tasted the success critics fervently predicted for him. Initially flamboyant yet literate and acutely observed, Forster’s songs were always strikingly direct compared to the moody complexity of those written by his partner, Grant McLennan. As he unflinchingly detailed in his 2016 memoir, Grant and I, the band’s first incarnation fell apart in despair at their own commercial failure in 1989, while the second ended in 2006 in deeper tragedy, as McLennan passed away aged 48 amid problems with alcoholism and depression.

Forster all too humbly paints himself as a modest talent next to his late foil’s melodic genius, yet this eighth solo outing is packed as ever with minimal, carefully chiselled, acoustic-thrumming arrangements, topped by extraordinary lyric writing.

In this instance, The Candle and the Flame was sparked by horrendous adversity, as he and his wife of 32 years, Karin Bäumler, sought to busy themselves with something constructive at home in Brisbane, in the wake of her diagnosis with ovarian cancer.

The opening song, She’s a Fighter, rousingly urges Bäumler to triumph over the invasive condition. The second, Tender Years, also honours their story together (“her beauty has not withered from her entrance in Chapter One”, etc), but soon Forster broaches more universal subject matters – the memories triggered by a concert ticket stub found in a jacket pocket (There’s a Reason to Live), the pathways we habitually travel (The Roads) and the non-linear eccentricity in our temporal perception (I Don’t Do Drugs, I Do Time).

At the last on When I was a Young Man, our hero, now 65, breezily reflects on his early career, his idols (including Television’s Tom Verlaine, who died last weekend), and how he ended up “unsung, unheralded and undone”. Throughout, though, this is a record all about not giving in, about the strength of the human spirit, and its unflagging warmth leaves you willing Bäumler on to recovery, and the Forster household to the happiness they deserve. Andrew Perry