I am a great believer that you sing with the voice you have, but it also matters what kind of songs you are singing. On the best of Come Ahead, Gillespie’s proselytising is deftly buried in the mix with superbly arranged backing vocalists from the House Gospel Choir. Opener Ready to Go Home is toweringly gorgeous, the Fela Kuti-like frenzy of Circle of Life is thrilling and the one chord riffing Love Ain’t Enough is a blast.
Ballads offer more of a challenge, where Gillespie’s wheezy vocals have nowhere to hide. He carries off the tender Heal Yourself with conviction, opening up about personal struggles with addiction, but the whole album is capsized by misjudged closing epic Settlers Blues, which equates Jacobite Scots defeated by English Redcoats at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 with the modern day plight of the Palestinians. The intent may be to demonstrate that we are “all pawns in a Colonial game” but droning through a nine-minute dreary dirge Gillespie comes across with all the authority of an asthmatic drunk at closing time still banging on about ancient grievances.
Best New Songs
By Poppie Platt
Chappell Roan, The Giver
Pop’s brightest, feistiest up-and-comer performed her new country track on Saturday Night Live last week, and it’s a far cry from her usual raucous pop. “All you country boys saying you know how to treat a woman right / Well, only a woman knows how to treat a woman right,” she sings, bringing the fiddles and catchy hooks popularised by the Chicks at the turn of the millennium firmly into Gen Z’s sex positive universe.
Gracie Abrams, That’s So True
Currently storming to the top of the charts around the globe after seemingly sound-tracking every TikTok and Instagram reel over the past week, Abrams’s latest track offers up more of her indie-folk musings on modern love, anchored by a killer final bridge straight out of the Taylor Swift playbook (Abrams is her protegee, after all).
LCD Soundsystem, X-ray Eyes
James Murphy and co hark back to the understated sound of their Losing My Edge days on yet another electro-fuelled banger; already announced as co-headliners for Barcelona’s Primavera Sound next year, the New Yorkers show no sign of giving up their crown as kings of indie dancefloor-fillers (sorry, The Dare).
The Amazons, Pitch Black
Taken from the Reading-raised rockers forthcoming new album, 21st Century Fiction, Pitch Black is a confident, guitar-fuelled blend of hard rock and outlaw country; think Queens of the Stone Age or Johnny Cash’s work on American IV.