Dan Bodan
Soft
(DFA)
4 stars

CANADIAN-BORN, Berlin-based Dan Bodan’s debut album is a staggeringly good set of torch songs.

The 1950s heyday of the genre is clearly a touchstone. He covers the jazz standard For Heaven’s Sake but it’s very much an ultra-modern romantic ennui that the singer-songwriter has so expertly painted.

Smooth, sometimes discordant, electronic beats range across each tale of tortured heartbreak, with late night melancholic soundscapes echoing Frank Ocean’s metropolitan Channel Orange or Glasgow synth-crooners The Blue Nile.

Bodan cites the austere grandiosity of James Blake and Anthony and the Johnsons as key influences but Soft’s intense, deeply romantic high-class chamber-pop is very much its own love-ravaged, desperate masterpiece.

This is Bodan’s first album, making his achievement all the more impressive, and it raises the bar for all his musical contemporaries. Exceptional.

Githead
Waiting for a Sign
(On Swim)
3 stars

THE FOURTH longplayer from Githead — Colin Newman from Wire, alongside electronic guru Scanner and members of  post-punk band Minimal Compact — echoes the best of the last 35 years of British indie music.

The droning, psychedelic rock of Not Coming Down kicks things off, while the sonically linear To Somewhere borrows heavily from electronic giants like Kraftwerk and New Order. Moving one step back, the clattering What If? is underpinned by the kind of unhinged, industrial mood that Joy Division made their own.

Bringing the Sea to the City takes things down a notch, its hypnotic, chiming guitars circling around whispered vocals reminiscent of The Lightning Seeds.

Waiting for a Sign won’t smash any sales records or set the world of popular music on fire but it’s an accomplished, surprisingly poppy set of songs that will sound instantly familiar to many.

Mysteries
New Age Music Is Here
(Felte)
3 stars

APPARENTLY, a few months ago Felte records received an anonymous demo accompanied by a photo of three people with their faces covered.

The result is New Age Music Is Here — an attempt, presumably, to get listeners to focus on the music rather than the people who created it.

Mixed in Chicago, this drum-heavy album has a broadly futuristic, ominous feel and the result is a guitar-electronica mash-up which is currently so popular.

Depeche Mode are an obvious touchstone but Stateless Wonder’s static and beeps also echo Radiohead while Knight Takes Rook sounds like Wild Beasts.

For those looking for clues to who the band is, the vocals definitely sound British — a slightly posher Guy Garvey, perhaps.

It’s certainly an interesting concept but for me the record never quite lives up to the promise of its manufactured mystery.