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Part 1 selection of 2023 favourite albums
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 1, and Part 2 is also out here. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order. This is all about quality and innovation …
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Django Django: Off Planet
New album: A 21-song mega-release by the innovative, experimental London-based art-rock and pop quartet features a variety of great guest vocalists with music that plays around more in the electronica-dance genre and various world music beats, but overall feels more like four EPs
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Christine and the Queens: Paranoïa, Angels, True Love
New album: French artist Héloïse Letissier aka Chris, now using the he/his pronoun, returns with a passionate, epic, sensual, existential synth-pop triple LP odyssey, fuelled by the grief over mother’s death, and expressed through concepts of inner angel voices, including a guest appearance by Madonna
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Christine and the Queens: Redcar Les Adorables Étoiles (prologue)
New album: Grand and theatrical, with oodles of 80s synth sounds and a big dash of Grace Jones and David Bowie-sytyle glamour, Héloïse Letissier returns with his (recently confirmed as a trans man) flamboyant, poetic third LP
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Metronomy’s seventh LP, Small World
New album: Crisp, breezy, sharply written pop accompanies the welcome return of Joe Mount and co with a seventh studio album that has bittersweet post-lockdown flavour, but ultimately is positively uplifting
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From the cover of Parcels’ new album Day/Night
New album: Released in last month by the Australia-Berlin electrofunk/disco quintet, a superbly catchy package of sounds, styles and danceability based on a 24-hour concept across a truly diverse 19 tracks
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Shopping dilemma: from the video for Free From Gravity
Album review: This fourth LP by the Edinburgh-formed, London-based art-rock quartet contains many of their signature sounds but also contains space-travelling new textures, such as breathy guest vocals by Charlotte Gainsbourg
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HMLTD
The latest roundup includes a wealth of funk, disco, pop, soul and electronica, from the theatrical delivery of HMLTD to the funk of La Roux, complex experimentalism of Beatrice Dillon to the emotional voice of Isobel Campbell
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