Tracks of the week reviewed: Florence + the Machine, LUMP and Janelle Monáe

The Ninth Wave
Swallow Me

The Ninth Wave are goths from Glasgow. That’s all you really need to know about them. There is no “sound of now” for the undead. Every part of their slavish homage to melty candelabras and the Mission could just as well have been made by White Rose Movement in 2005, or Romance in 2011. Yet here they are, yelling a hot racket of portent into your house from their Bauhaus, and it’s the most undeniably alive thing we’ve heard all month.

LUMP
Curse of the Contemporary

Once, people sang about going to San Francisco with a flower in their hair. Now, Laura Marling wants you to know it’s bloody boring in California: “I’m sure I’m not the first to warn ya”, she adds. Lately, Marling has had a quarter-life crisis, moving to LA and becoming a yoga teacher. This collaboration with Mike Lindsay of Tunng, in which she shucks off loads of her old self-consciousness, suggests it was an Eat Pray Love journey of discovery worth any amount of kombucha poisoning.

Florence + the Machine
Sky Full of Song

Sorry, but there’s been a bit of a bunch-up in this week’s singles on earthy late-00s singers returning with tracks eulogising west-coast America. Of the two, this is the more annoying. Partly because Flo’s gone full George Ezra, with one of those sparse mid-tempo soul blasters that work so well on Radio 2 but suck so hard at concerts. It yearns to burn, but all I can think of is her sitting by the pool at the Standard in New York, going “God, this would make such great poetry.”

Ben Khan
2000 Angels

This feels more like a delicious curtain-opener than the finished article. Rich in anticipation, medium in delivery. “Feel it in my belly,” Mr K trails off, nicking the sharp electro-glam hooks of Sam Sparro, before burying them under sheets of wonky Vangelis futurism. Would make ideal opening credits to a camp Blade Runner remake in which Harrison Ford has to use his gaydar to figure out who in his clapped-out techno utopia is straight.

Janelle Monáe ft Grimes
Pynk

A mimsy ode to the mimsy, Pynk sees Janelle Monáe at her prim stage school worst (rather than her trim R&B best), chucking out a load of gynaecological free associations she must imagine will win her plaudits from the people who make empowerment clickbait like “This diagram totally changes how we view the clitoris and it’s awesome”.