Album reviews: Brooke Combe | FKA Twigs | Loki | Middle Class Guilt
Brooke Combe: Dancing At The Edge of the World (Modern Sky UK) ★★★★
FKA Twigs: Eusexua (Young Recordings) ★★★
Loki: Not Funded By Creative Scotland (self-released) ★★★★
Middle Class Guilt: The Committee (self-released) ★★★★
Edinburgh soul singer-songwriter Brooke Combe follows up her 2023 debut mixtape Black is the New Gold with her first album proper. Dancing At The Edge of the World draws clear inspiration from classic Sixties and Seventies soul and R&B, with Coombe and her producer, The Coral frontman James Skelly, sprinkling the arrangements with alternative pop flourishes and a burnished vein of psychedelia, kicking off with the hep northern soul drive, exuberant disco strings and ringing rhythmic guitar of This Town, layering on distorted saxophone to acoustic soul track Guilt and heady strings to Shaken By the Wind.
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Hide AdLeave Me the F*** Alone is a guitar-backed break-up ballad in a Burt Bacharach style, musically wistful but with blunt lyrics to make Dionne Warwick blush. If I Could Only Be Yours is the other side of the coin, Combe’s robust soulful yearning lavished in guitar reverb.
Combe is a natural talent, a gifted singer with a rich, retro soul tone. She also aims for the stratosphere on the Minnie Riperton-like hippie soul ecstasy of Butterfly and brings it all together in Marvin Gaye style on the aching, cathartic title track.


There is also some Minnie Ripertonesque falsetto on the title track of FKA Twigs’ new album Eusexua. The singer born Tahliah Debrett Barnett favours a delicate, breathy delivery over tough, flinty beats across a collection which majors on sexual desire and politics, getting straight to explicit business on the likes of Drums of Death.
Perfect Stranger sounds like a limp Madonna tune but elsewhere there is lyrical intrigue and unexpected embellishments such as the skyscraping ululation on Striptease and the oriental chimes on Keep It, Hold It, a Kate Bush-influenced display of husky chanting and breathy beseeching. She offers a change of tone on the upbeat, belligerent Childlike Things and more declamatory vocals on the clipped clubland odyssey Room of Fools, before rounding off with the fluttering ballad Wanderlust.
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Writer, rapper, activist and broadcaster Darren McGarvey has released his final album using his Loki moniker. Not Funded by Creative Scotland takes aim at the Scottish arts establishment and goes out in a scathing blaze of glory with pithy, no-nonsense titles which tell their own story – best of all, A Satire of the Twee Estates (“cry me a river of kale-flavoured tears”).
Beats come courtesy of a number of producers, finessing backing tracks with Bond strings, sultry jazz samples, angelic choirs and big beat colour. The curt, fidgety backdrop of Toxic Traits is as uncomfortable as its message, while Don’t Jump addresses the causes of male suicide and Origin Story recalls the everyday violence and survival tactics which “taught me how to pick the locks and take it to the gatekeepers”.
The title track is a percussive cultural dust-up, with Loki raging on representation (“I love the smell of bureaucrats in the morning”) but also punching sideways against female-fronted tracks on radio playlists. We Run It, featuring Scottish scratch DJ Krash Slaughta, is his bid to create a Scottish hip-hop anthem, while A Freak Manoeuvres revisits the class clash at Glasgow School of Art hip-hop night Freakmoves where McGarvey cut his lyrical teeth.
Glasgow-based, Shetland-born six-piece Middle Class Guilt are all over the map on their debut album, The Committee, from the ramshackle indie folk of Good Evening Shetland via dub-infused jam Do Y’Ever Feeling Like Nothing? to the post-punk slickness of Long Hot Summer with its burly blasts of organ and overwrought vocals. They also make reference to their Shetland roots in the headlong charge of Burra and the lop-sided folk punk of Trowie Song, which sounds like a big band Ivor Cutler number.
CLASSICAL
Praise Him with Trumpets (Delphian) ★★★
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Hide AdWhile some choral societies are struggling to exist, Bristol Choral Society seems to be bucking the UK trend: not just in numbers - it has around 100 members - but in the ambitious repertoire, which on this ambitious album ranges from Vaughan Williams and Britten to Judith Weir and Cecilia McDowall. The playful eccentricities of Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb are instantly captivating under director Hilary Campbell and with Richard Moore’s catchy organ playing. The joyous duetting trumpets (Jo Harris and Neil Brough) make their lustrous appearance in the title track, Weir’s Praise Him with Trumpets, a work that takes time for the choral writing to flow. Nor is Elizabeth Poston’s Festal Te Deum the most riveting of settings, even when so well sung. One particular gem is Grace-Evangeline Mason’s A Memory of the Ocean, laced with imaginative, magical textures. McDowall’s Four Shakespeare Songs (sung alone with piano by soprano Charlotte Mobbs) are exquisite. Ken Walton
FOLK
Gwilym Bowen Rhys: Aden (Recordiau Erwydd) ★★★★
The Welsh singer and multi-instrumentalist’s fifth album, Aden – “Wing” – sees him deliver both venerable and contemporary material with rough-grained eloquence, accompanied by such fine players as harpist Gwen Màiri and Patrick Rimes on fiddle. Bowen Rhys imbues songs with a dramatic energy that helps surmount the language barrier (there are bilingual commentaries in the sleeve notes, plus translations online). His singing shifts between coarse and tender in Wennol fwyn, welcoming spring swallows over plucked and bowed strings, while he builds dramatically from an earthy mutter in the opening, 16th-century Coed Glyn Cynon, occasionally approaching growly throat singing, as in Tylluan Cwm Cowlyd, concerning an ancient owl, in Welsh legend the oldest creature in the world. He fairly spits out the murder ballad Llofruddiaeth Hannah Dafis; the contrasting Y Tebot – “The Teapot” – is an easeful instrumental, and there’s wonderfully skittish guest harmonica from Will Pound in Wil Treffynnon.
Jim Gilchrist
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