Album reviews: Hifi Sean & David McAlmont |Neil Young | Rizzle Kicks

Neil Young: Oceanside Countryside (Reprise Records) ★★★★

Rizzle Kicks: Competition Is For Losers (BMG) ★★★

F.O. Machete: Mother of a Thousand (Last Night From Glasgow) ★★★

Having delivered the hands-in-the-air new-day-dawning ecstasy of Daylight in 2024, the fertile partnership of Soup Dragons’ frontman Sean Dickson aka Hifi Sean & David McAlmont now presents the crepuscular flipside. Twilight is an entirely new DIY album of nocturnal transmissions replete with atmospheric filmic fragments overlaid with spine-tingling vocals.

The Comedown, made in collaboration with DJ/producer The Blessed Madonna, opens the album with the vaguely unsettling childlike incantation “daylight becomes twilight” and twinkling, otherworldly arpeggios, lapping waves and moody woodwind, while the dark, celestial title track is embellished with field recordings of the dawn chorus and Dickson’s barking dogs.

The wee small hours are captured in the woozy electro funk reverie of Uptown/Downtown with McAlmont seamlessly modulating from breathy subtlety to falsetto fancy. Sorry I Made You Cry is classic torch song territory mussed up with distorted strings and synth drops and there are further adventures in analogue synthesizers and trip-hop textures on Equinox’s Children as McAlmont pleads “won’t someone please switch on the moon”.

The entire album evokes the unearthly frisson of the nighttime hours be it the insomniac lullaby Sleeping Pill or the pulsing pleasures of Night Drive and is another exquisitely crafted suite from this simpatico soul duo.

The latest in Neil Young’s Analog Original Series of vinyl releases is the lost-and-found late Seventies album Oceanside Countryside, originally recorded in late 1977 in Florida and Malibu (Oceanside) and Nashville (Countryside) to reflect Young’s abiding love of folk and country music. Unreleased at the time, some of the songs found their way on to other albums or archive volumes but are now restored with original mixes and tracklisting reminiscent of his 1980 game of two halves, Hawks & Doves.

The softer, solo Oceanside songs provide a window into his Laurel Canyon hippie enclave. Young harmonises with himself on Sail Away and digs deep for biographical folk lament Captain Kennedy. Come the hillbilly side two, he is joined by session musicians wielding dobro, pedal steel, fiddle, even haunting singing saw. The latter can be heard on the beguiling fantasy folklore of The Old Homestead, while the album ends on a stripped back rendition of Pocahontas, previously performed with Crazy Horse on Rust Never Sleeps.

Following a deliberate hiatus to deal with issues including depression and drug dependency, the likeable Brighton hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks return with their first album in over a decade. Jordan Stephens and Harley Sule are teenagers no more but there is still soul funk energy to burn, topped with Sule’s sophisticated vocals and Stephen’s mature spoken word musings.

Comeback single Javelin features smooth soul vocals, carefree sentiments (“we don’t need to worry about a thing”) and an elastic bassline in the style of London electro soul outfit Jungle. Irish rapper Maverick Sabre joins them for the darker Pleasure & Pain and there are reflections on lad culture, celebrity excess and “breakdowns and breakthroughs” to come. But their default setting is the positivity which they share on the irrepressible summer R&B of Vice and the lean gleeful funk of Love & Delight.

Glasgow-based outfit F.O. Machete also return from self-imposed exile. Now slimmed to a duo, Natasha Noramly and Paul Mellon pick up where they left off in 2011, conjuring the spirit of classic US alt.rock with their preference for grungey guitars, off-kilter post-rock tunings, gothic basslines and Noramly’s vocals which range from creepy whisper to incandescent scream. She channels the punk insouciance of Kim Gordon on The Enhance Button Is Not Working, while the freewheeling spirit of Gordon’s erstwhile combo Sonic Youth is all over the rollicking Kids of the Summer.