BEABADOOBEE: This Is How Tomorrow Moves (Dirty Hit)
Verdict: Rising star comes of age
From Charli XCX’s Brat, released in June, to last month’s Vertigo by electronic pop star Griff, the summer has been illuminated by compelling new solo albums from British women. On the evidence of her latest offering, Beabadoobee is now joining the party.
The 24-year-old Philippines-born singer, real name Beatrice Laus, isn’t exactly a new face. Having moved to London when she was three, she began posting songs on YouTube in her teens. Her first album, 2020’s Fake It Flowers, written in a childhood bedroom festooned with Tom Hanks posters, was derivative — of 1990s rock, grunge and Britpop — but full of potential.
Beabadoobee fulfils much of that youthful promise on This Is How Tomorrow Moves. Made with rock and rap producer Rick Rubin at his Shangri-La studio in Malibu, her third album shows the increasing depth of her songwriting and widens her appeal by augmenting her bracing indie-rock with touches of jazz and folk.
Many of the 14 tracks bear the stamp of Rubin’s stripped-back approach. The producer, who has worked with the Beastie Boys, Metallica and Johnny Cash, is known for avoiding fancy trickery and focusing instead on the studio performance, and he pushes Laus to fresh heights on songs that veer from the fierce to the fragile.
The summer has been illuminated by compelling new solo albums from British women. On the evidence of her latest offering, Beabadoobee is now joining the party
The 24-year-old Philippines-born singer, real name Beatrice Laus, isn’t exactly a new face. Having moved to London when she was three, she began posting songs on YouTube in her teens
It’s business as usual on the opening three numbers. Beabadoobee’s audience is mostly young and female, but there’s something in her fondness for angular art-rock that will also attract older fans who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s listening to American guitar bands such as the Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement.
Those taut, twisting riffs are certainly to the fore on Take A Bite and California, while One Time features a gutsy solo. The latter is a break-up song on which she shows her maturity by refusing to apportion blame (‘It takes two people to make that mistake’).
Having asserted her rock credentials, she spreads her wings. Last year, she moved towards jazzier material by recording a bossa nova duet, A Night To Remember, with Iceland’s Laufey. In March, she covered Broadway show tune It’s Only A Paper Moon for a TV soundtrack, and there are more forays into softer styles here.
Coming Home is a lovely acoustic waltz about missing loved ones while on tour. ‘I’d do anything just to be with you,’ she sings. There’s also a country-ish track, Ever Seen, that she says was inspired by supporting Taylor Swift last year on her Eras tour. With its fiddle and accordion, it recalls Folklore-period Taylor. The Man Who Left Too Soon is a shimmering track about bereavement, and Girl Song a sensitive letter to her younger self that is McCartney-like in its cascading piano chords. ‘Let me write a song like all the songs I love to listen to,’ she adds on This Is How It Went. There are plenty of them here.
BILL WYMAN: Drive My Car (BMG)
Verdict: Motors along nicely
Given the musical connections he made as a founding member of The Rolling Stones, it’s no surprise that Bill Wyman doesn’t go through the motions as he covers songs by Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal and John Prine on Drive My Car, his first solo LP for nine years. He falls back, fondly, on his own, first-hand understanding of all three songwriters.
Given the musical connections he made as a founding member of The Rolling Stones, it’s no surprise that Bill Wyman doesn’t go through the motions as he covers songs by Bob Dylan and more
Singing in a husky South London whisper, Dylan strikes a laid-back note on Sweet Baby, and carefully avoids straying into the outside lane on a swinging title track. ‘You can drive my car, but don’t drive fast,’ he cautions
The bass guitarist — now 87 — has known Dylan since meeting him in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and counted country singer Prine (who died in 2020) as a good friend.
He’s also known U.S. blues musician Mahal for 56 years. ‘He was fascinated that I was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society,’ recalls Wyman, of their first encounter in 1968. ‘We bonded over botany.’
His versions of Dylan’s Thunder On The Mountain, Prine’s Ain’t Hurtin’ Nobody and Mahal’s Light Rain are certainly affectionate. He even takes the odd liberty on Thunder On The Mountain, from 2006’s Modern Times, omitting Dylan’s lines about Alicia Keys and replacing them with a tribute to rock and roller Jerry Lee Lewis, who died two years ago.
Beyond acknowledging old friends, the former Stone — who returned to the band briefly last year to play on their Hackney Diamonds album — also covers Dutch bluesman Hans Theessink and adds a handful of likeable, if hardly essential, originals.
Singing in a husky South London whisper, he strikes a laid-back note on Sweet Baby, and carefully avoids straying into the outside lane on a swinging title track. ‘You can drive my car, but don’t drive fast,’ he cautions.
As the Stone with the most extensive solo career — this is his 15th studio album, including six with his band the Rhythm Kings — he’s still rolling.
Both albums are out today. Beabadoobee plays All Points East, London, on August 18, and starts a tour on November 11 at O2 Academy, Glasgow.
Best of the new releases:
Reviews by Tully Potte
That Woman:
Find Joy (Highwater)
After five albums with Oh Wonder, the pop duo she continues to front with her husband Anthony, Josephine Vander West adopts the alter-ego That Woman for a solo debut that explores female stereotypes, 30-something angst and sexism in the music business. ‘I’m a cup half-empty kind of girl,’ she tells us on Love Dies In The End, but Find Joy ultimately lives up to its optimistic title. Beautifully sung, it fleshes out her candid, poetic lyrics with melodic piano, finger-picked guitar and swirling strings.
Will Young:
Light It Up (BMG)
Will Young reverts largely to his own material on an album that stretches from tasteful rock to silky synth-pop
Bold enough to stand up to Simon Cowell as he pipped Gareth Gates to win Pop Idol 22 years ago, Young has shown remarkable staying power. After covering songs by female artists on 2021’s Crying On The Bathroom Floor, the singer, 45, reverts largely to his own material on an album that stretches from tasteful rock to silky synth-pop. Midnight is a wry look at middle age — ‘I can’t even keep these house plants alive,’ he sighs — while the sole cover is a take on 1980s hit I Won’t Let You Down, originally by Ph.D.
Pixey:
Million Dollar Baby (Chess Club)
Liverpool singer Elizabeth Hillesdon — aka Pixey — dips into nostalgic indie dance and the ‘Madchester’ rhythms of the 1980s on a debut that, for all its retro influences, fizzes with catchy pop hooks, most of them fashioned by the singer at home on her laptop. Bring Back The Beat, co-produced with Jungle’s Tom McFarland, is a brassy R&B pastiche, and the synth-driven title track a satire on fame-hungry wannabes. The string-powered The War In My Mind recalls The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony.
Liverpool singer Elizabeth Hillesdon — aka Pixey — dips into nostalgic indie dance and the ‘Madchester’ rhythms of the 1980s on her debut album
Isata Kannneh-Mason:
Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1, etc. (Decca)
First Night of the Proms star Isata Kanneh-Mason hasn’t put a foot wrong in her recording career. Her latest CD begins with Felix Mendelssohn’s G minor Piano Concerto, Op. 25, with its outer movements that go like a bat out of hell; she’s equal to the technical demands — and deploys her lovely phrasing in the central Andante. Rachmaninov’s transcription of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream also features, as does elder sister Fanny Mendelssohn’s beautiful Notturno in G minor
Track of the week:
Dancing at the end of the world by Brooke Combe. The Edinburgh singer-songwriter strikes up an elegant soul groove on a taster for her forthcoming debut album. She mixes intimacy and power on a ballad harking back to Marvin Gaye’s classic 1970s sound.
