Nadia Reid
Enter New Brightness
(Chrysalis)
★★★

SINCE releasing her 2020 career-enhancing album Out Of My Province at the start of the pandemic, Kiwi Nadia Reid has had two children and relocated to Manchester, England.

Enter New Brightness, recorded back in New Zealand between 2021 and 2023, is the singer-songwriter’s fourth record. She continues to thicken her sound from her folky beginnings, with single Hotel Santa Cruz a hooky rock song, with a dash of country too.

Her lofty vocals remind me of Laura Marling on Woman Apart, which leads to a niggling feeling I have about the set — it’s difficult to discern a musical personality that differentiates it from the work of other talented female singer-songwriters like Lucy Dacus, Julia Jacklin and Marling herself.

Of course, if you like these artists, then you’ll get a lot from the literate, personal songwriting that Reid excels at.

Manic Street Preachers
Critical Thinking
(Columbia)
★★★★

LIKE many people, my passion for Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers declined after 1996’s stadium-sized Everything Must Go album. 

I loved their Chomsky-introduced 2000 single The Masses Against The Classes, but they seemed to drift into a mush of dad rock, with an attendant centring of their previously anti-Establishment politics (sample lyric from 2021: “We live in Orwellian times/It feels impossible to pick a side”).

Which makes Critical Thinking, their 15th record, a welcome surprise. James Dean Bradfield provides some brilliant guitar riffs (People Ruin Paintings) and there are some serious adrenaline rushes (Decline and Fall).

The sloganeering title song targets the wellness and mindfulness movements, there is a track inspired by Allen Toussaint, and a sweet Smiths-sounding missive to Morrissey (“Dear Stephen please come back to us”).

A return to form for the outsiders from Blackwood.

Mathias Eick
Lullaby
(ECM)
★★★

NOW on his sixth solo instrumental record with ECM, forty-something Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick has become a mainstay of the highly respected German jazz label.

Recorded in Oslo with Kristjan Randalu and Ole Morten Vagan on piano and bass, and Hans Hulbaekmo on drums, opener September is a jittery, propulsive number. It’s something of a red herring — as the album title suggests, the rest of the set is generally filled with much more relaxed and thoughtful playing from the quartet. 

What stands out is Eick’s lyrical playing, the flat, reedy sound he gets out of his instrument suggesting his fellow countryman and trumpeter Avre Henriksen is a big influence on his music.

On Free he also contributes soothing chant vocalising which, combined with the rest of the group, creates a searching, slightly out-of-kilter sound, giving rise to a pleasing frisson.