ALBUMS OF THE WEEK

The Antlers Green To Gold (Transgressive), out next Friday

★★★★★

Try as they might and they don’t try hard at all, The Antlers can’t shake off the gloommongers label. It attached itself to them after the release of 2010’s debut album Hospice; a concept album about trying to dump an abusive girlfriend who then develops cancer. Dancing shoes aren’t required for the Brooklynites. Effectively the vehicle of singer-songwriter Peter Silberman, The Antlers quietly sing truths not knowing where they might be heard. Someone of a certain emotional makeup might hear Solstice and be rendered catatonic by its fragile beauty. Stubborn Man and Just One Sec also humbly beg for your attention, but you will be thankful. The late Elliot Smith, though sonically similar, would sound boorish by comparison to all this. Maybe too fey for some, for others it might be the comforting soundtrack of dark days made more bearable.

Ben Howard

Collections From The Whiteout (Island), out next Friday ★★★★★

It’s been nearly a decade since English singer-songwriter Ben Howard ear-wormed his way to prominence with the platinumselling Only Love. In the intervening years he has veered away from the path marked out for him to Sheeran-like ubiquity.

Many of the songs on Collections from the Whiteout are prompted by snippets of oddities of the news cycle. The Strange Last Flight Of Richard Russell relates the story of a Seattle man with no piloting experience who, in 2018, stole a plane and died by suicide by crashing it on a sparsely populated island nearby. The blackly humorous Finders Keepers is about a friend of his father who was found dismembered in a case floating down the Thames. Samples, loops and machines that go ping zip around on the Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift) production.

It’s all quite odd, but very likeable.