Album reviews: Michael Buble – Love, and The Good, the Bad and the Queen – Merrie Land

★★★★☆

No one does smooth quite like Michael Bublé. But after a difficult couple of years for the Canadian singer, fans might expect him to return a little rougher around the edges.

In fact, it’s very much the old Bublé his followers know on new album Love – his 10th studio effort, and the first to be released since his son Noah was diagnosed with cancer (he’s now in remission).

While his rich, sonorous timbre has shades of fellow crooner Frank Sinatra, Bublé decorates his own vocal performance with the flair and flexibility of the best modern pop. His twinkly, rose-tinted romance is perfect for a slightly silly rendition of one of his favourites – a classic from the American songbook – “I Only Have Eyes For You”, which is pure class – as is his rendition of “Such a Night”, with its jaunty big band. But on “La Vie en Rose” he’s too soppy, the instrumentation too plodding, to conjure up the same heart-rending emotion of Edith Piaf’s version.

“Love You Anymore”, a song written by young pop hitmaker Charlie Puth (he does backing vocals on the track), is slightly new territory for Bublé, who prefers to write his own songs when he’s not covering the classics. “Forever Now”, which Buble did write, is a piano ballad of charming sincerity.

Calling it his “most romantic album to date” is a bold claim, but this certainly is a more settled sound compared to his wildly varied 2016 record Nobody But Me. Love is Bublé doing what he does best. Roisin O’Connor

★★★★☆

It’s 11 years since Damon Albarn’s supergroup The Good, the Bad and the Queen – comprising former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen and The Verve guitarist Simon Tong – released their one album. If that record was a sad paean to London, its follow-up focuses on Britain as a whole – or at least the Britain we used to know (the spectre of Brexit and all its surrounding tensions loom over Merrie Land).

The title track is a stream-of-consciousness lament that sets the mood. Over strings and circling, muted synths, Albarn sings: “If you are leaving/ Please still say goodbye ... Leave me my silver jubilee mug.” “Merrie Land” refers to the archaic description of a utopian England, and imagery – of green and pleasant land, and maypoles – is a thread throughout this album, mirrored by the instrumentation.

“Gun to the Head” takes on pure English folk with a catchy wooden flute motif, but beneath its bucolic quality something far from idyllic is simmering. The flute is joined by layers of urgent yet whimsical piano, strings and broken beats, culminating in a cacophony of sliding strings redolent of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”. It’s a genius piece of songwriting.

For all its gloom, Merrie Land is an entertaining and theatrical album, with vocals that capture the social observation of early album Parklife. It’s also an immensely clever feat of word painting, never relying on lyrics alone to reflect the sense of anxiety. Scattered beats and minor, chromatic descending melodies give an uneasy tension to tracks, nowhere more powerfully than on the ghostly “The Great Fire”. The introspective, fingerpicked “Ribbons”, with its mournful oboe, drips with melancholic beauty.

Surely there won’t be an album that captures our unsettled times more sublimely. Elisa Bray