MAITA
Best Wishes
(Kill Rock Stars)
★★★

US FOUR-PIECE MAITA take their name from their gifted lead singer and songwriter Maria Maita-Keppeler.

Their debut record, a set of indie rock songs, won’t set the world on fire but it will no doubt speak powerfully to those who are tuned into the emotional trials and tribulations related by Maita-Keppeler.

The power pop Can’t Blame A Kid concerns the long-lasting impacts of childhood cruelty dished out by other children, while Japanese Waitress is a darkish ballad about Maita-Keppeler’s personal experience of being a women and server in the US today.

Accompanied by rolling piano and drums, on I’m Afraid Of Everything her vocals sound a lot like Laura Marling circa I Speak Because I Can.

A promising first album, though there is a niggling sense of a songwriter still searching for her own unique voice.

Biffy Clyro
A Celebration of Endings
(14th Floor Records)
★★★★

HAVING released an MTV Unplugged record in 2018 followed by a film soundtrack, Scottish alternative-rock band Biffy Clyro are back doing what they do best on their eighth studio album.

They make one helluva of a racket with their colossal guitar riffs and emo-inflected lyrics, though  as lead singer Simon Neil explains, the album's title is about “seeing the joy of things changing, rather than the sadness.”
 
There are Queenesque stylistic flourishes in the piano and strings on The Champ but it's when they crank up the amps to Led Zeppelin levels that things really come together.

With its “hey, hey,  hey” lyrics, Tiny Indoor Fireworks is a ready-made stadium anthem, while Space is a huge ballad in the same vein as crowd favourite Many Of Horror.

A righteous, electrifying set to shock you out of these depressing times.

Gretchen Peters
The Night You Wrote That Song: The Songs of Mickey Newbury (Proper Records)
★★★

A KEY figure in the 1960s-inspired Outlaw Country movement in the US, Mickey Newbury is known as one of the great artists in country music, his oeuvre made famous by performers such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Similarly, the 62-year old Gretchen Peters is a renowned songwriter — check out the achingly beautiful On A Bus To St Cloud — with her work turned into hits by Faith Hill and Bonnie Raitt.

Recorded in Tennessee with legends such as Charlie McCoy (harmonica) and Buddy Miller (harmony vocals), Peters lets the songs breathe, with her largely stripped-backed acoustic takes of Newbury’s work highlighting just how talented he was.

Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) is transformed into a bluesy ballad, while Frisco Depot is presented as a despairingly lonely lament.

An interesting set of great American songs.