Allison Moorer
Blood
(Thirty Tigers)
★★★

ACCORDING to the publicity blurb, the 10th studio album from US singer-songwriter Allison Moorer is her “most personal and revealing work to date.”

Released to coincide with the publication of her memoir, the song Cold, Cold Earth is particularly striking. Written in 1999, it concerns the last hours of her parents’ life before her father shot her mother and then turned the gun on himself.

While shocking, the set isn’t defined by this horrific childhood trauma. Opener Bad Weather bigs up Canadian songstress Kathleen Edwards and, I’m fairly sure, Gillian Welch, while the rocky All I Wanted (Thanks Anyway) blows the cobwebs out.

Her sister Shelby Lynne wrote the acoustic ballad I’m The One To Blame, while Mary Gauthier co-wrote closer Heal.

Sitting somewhere between straight country and what is known as altcountry, Blood is a contemplative, ultimately comforting listen.

Field Music
Making A New World
(Memphis Industries)
★★★★

THE SEVENTH album from the Sunderland indie-rock band is a daring concept album about the after-effects of WWI, from the experience of returning home to a different world (the Bowie-sounding Coffee Or Wine) to, er, songs about air traffic control and Tiananmen Square.

The gentle psychedelia of A Change of Heir concerns Dr Harold Gillies, whose pioneering work on skin grafts on injured servicemen led him to earlier gender reassignment surgery.

The music is equally ambitious, with brothers Peter and David Brewis creating a suite of experimental, edgy and deeply engaging songs.

Money Is A Memory is a brilliant funk workout, while the astonishing single Only In A Man’s World — a feminist take on the marketing history of sanitary towels — is the closest you’ll ever get to hearing a new Talking Heads song.

Exciting stuff.

The Just Joans
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of The Just Joans
(Fika Recordings)
★★★★

THOUGH it’s perhaps not quite as immediate as their 2017 record You Might Be Smiling Now, the new album from the cult indie Glasgow band is another brilliant showcase for their idiosyncratic music and lyrics.

Led by brother and sister duo David and Katie Pope, on the surface it’s an incredibly dour listen, making The Smiths sound like party music. However, like Morrissey’s outfit, The Just Joans are into making pop music.  

Their bleakness is leavened by self-deprecating humour, evident in song titles such as My Undying Love For You Is Beginning To Die and When Nietzsche Calls.

Amusingly, the intro to Hey Ho, Let’s Not Go, a paean to staying in and going to bed early, apes The Ronettes’ Be My Baby.

Poets of the mundane, The Just Joans are in danger of becoming something of a British institution.