Album reviews: The Script | Jorja Smith | DMA's

placeholder image — The Script | Simon Emmett

The Script offer more broad appeal than deeper meaning on their latest album, writes Fiona Shepherd

The Script: The User’s Guide to Being Human (BMG) ★★

Jorja Smith: What Are the Odds (FAMM) ★★★

DMA’s: DMA’s (RCA) ★★★

Scott C Park: Revival (self-released) ★★★★

You could never tell from his resolutely middle of the road songwriting but The Script frontman Danny O’Donoghue has been through the mill in recent years, striving to get to grips with the death of bandmate Mark Sheehan in 2023 in not entirely healthy ways. The group’s 2024 album Satellites was forged in the eye of that particular emotional storm but now O’Donoghue and cohorts are ready to look outwards and upwards on their eighth album with the hopeful title The User’s Guide to Being Human.

Is ample human life here? That depends on whether you are searching for deep meaning or broad appeal. These qualities are not mutually exclusive but with The Script perpetually manifesting as the Irish Coldplay and O’Donoghue the poor man’s Gary Barlow, expect far more of the latter. Indeed, the album’s title track could be described as Coldplay-lite, which is quite an achievement.

Lead single Man in the Arena is an undeniable earworm - one you might want to extract given its heavy airplay rotation - fitted with an infernally catchy tune, martial drumbeats, vague sentiments and a little Celtic vocal mysticism on the run-out groove. Follow-up single The Crowd Was Singing Wonderwall is a bland busker tune dwelling on a fractured friendship and a chance coming together at an Oasis gig. As O’Donoghue muses, “staying mad when life is short is a luxury we can’t afford”.

Scars Align tells a micro story in its title but the song itself is underwhelming. After We’re Gone, in which O’Donoghue seeks a form of divine revelation (“I wanna know, does the best go on after we’re gone”), has a bit more lift, creating a serviceable rave pop moment.

Elsewhere, Alive is a blatant rip-off of The Weeknd’s blockbusting Blinding Lights with a fraction of the attraction, while One Team For Life starts in with the Bruno Mars funk soul groove but soon descends into mediocrity. However, both tracks are preferable to the cliche-ridden Grow Old With Grace, a gloopy serving of sentimental symphonic soup on lasting love featuring feeble lyrical triplets as “when she gets grey hair/I know I won’t care/as I sit in my rocking chair”.

Mellow soul girl Jorja Smith must be wondering how Olivia Dean stole her thunder as she returns with her third album What Are the Odds. For want of better terminology, Smith is definitely more urban, framing her languorous torch songs in skittering jungle beats and snatches of spoken word. Pizzicato strings, bass burps and mantra vocals accompany perky R&B pop tune What’s Done Is Done, while This City is elemental drum’n’bass with a conversational guest rap from grime artist Devlin, adapting lyrics from his own London City (“hard to know the cost when you have everything”). Nigerian singer/songwriter Wizkid adds autotuned reggae vocals to the silky Alive, while the fidgety, funky Dancing sounds too processed to meet its intriguing potential.

Australian indie pop trio DMA’s are unapologetically derivative Britpop groupies but they can certainly muster a melody. Their fifth album intersperses meat and potatoes indie with more delicate moments such as the tender My Baby’s Place. Hurracane brazenly wanders into La’s territory, united in apostrophe, and Killing Time picks up the pace to a more urgent jangle yet, despite the self-titling of the album, nothing here sounds like a definitive statement.

Stornoway singer/songwriter Scott C Park follows up his debut album Crossing the Line, about leaving his faith, with an album about rebuilding. Revival encompasses the swaggering pop of Preach, the mellow country blues of Work of Art, Squeeze-like melodic power pop of Porch Golfing and impressive rootsy alt.rock of Pepperblack 40 without breaking sweat.

CLASSICAL

Grieg: Lyric Pieces Vol 2 | Ballade (Chandos) ★★★★★

To complete a two-volume survey of Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces with colourful affection is one thing; but by adding the substantial Ballade in G minor pianist Peter Donohoe opens our ears to a very personal moment in the Norwegian composer’s life - the loss of his parents - and how that inspired music combining deep and expansive thought with the delicious folksy minutiae of the shorter character works. Written in the form of “variations on a Norwegian folk melody” the potential for dramatic interplay is ripe, and Donohoe takes full advantage. Whether steeped in melancholy, angrily robust or fired by light-fingered explosions of ecstasy, this is a performance as judiciously calibrated as it is free, easy and impulsive. Even in this longer form, Grieg’s music possesses unpretentiously characterful purity. Donohoe’s playing honours that sincerity. Ken Walton

FOLK

Shooglenifty: Stamina Island (Shoogle Records) ★★★★

Is it really more than three decades since Shooglenifty released their debut, Venus In Tweeds, beating out what would become known as “acid croft”? Numerous personnel changes later, the energy and groove remain unabated, with founder members drummer James Mackintosh and guitarist Malcolm Crosbie joined by Eilidh Shaw on fiddle, singer Kaela Rowan, bassist Euan McLaughlin and Ciarán Ryan on banjo and mandolin. The opening set, bemusingly titled Up the McFud, launches with an uncompromising guitar twang before intensive banjo and fiddle join in, the take-no-prisoners, Mackintosh-powered approach permeating the album. Dig Deep introduces Rowan’s impassioned vocals and Old Pal Aonghas is an echoing ode to their late founder fiddler, Angus R Grant. Bairns o’ Gaza is a wider, forceful lament for children trapped by warfare everywhere, Rowan interspersing verses with snatches of canntaireachd vocables, while a pair of traditional Gaelic puirts are suitably, er, Shooglecharged. Jim Gilchrist

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