Heartbreak harmonies

Albums of the week

INDIE POP
I NEVER LEARN
Lykke Li
LL/Atlantic
****

INDIE ROCK
GHOST STORIES
Coldplay
Parlophone
***

INDIE POP
MAY
Broken Twin
Anti-
****

Moaning and wallowing and pouring terrible scorn on the other party - you expect fireworks in break-up albums.

This week's three releases - I Never Learn by Swedish thrush Lykke Li, Ghost Stories by English indie-rockers Coldplay, and May by Danish newcomer Broken Twin - demonstrate how fragile the human heart is.

It gets broken time and again - how you deal with a break-up separates the merely ho-hum from the genuinely stirring.

Lykke Li's third album, I Never Learn, is her bleakest and most uncompromising yet, billed by the singer as "power ballads for the broken".

It's light years away from the hipster chic of her 2008 debut, Youth Novels, and a parallel universe to the brilliantly fraught 2011 follow-up, Wounded Rhymes. Whereas previously, she's paraded as a goth-dance widow belting 1960s-styled girl group choruses, here she's more ascetic, drawing you into her mysterious cave.

But what a cave - it's a cavern with Sensurround emotions ricocheting off its walls.

She's incapable of masking or moderating her spleen.

"I lie here like a starless lover/I'll die here as your phantom lover," she sings in the opening title track, echoey, as a tsunami of guitars and strings wells up and drowns you.

Her catharsis spews all over, yet, strangely, the melody is naked, stripped to its bone.

The template is repeated throughout. For less patient ears, this may sound indulgent. It's a fair criticism.

Still, given the right mood and time (midnight, hours before you drag yourself out of bed to go to work), I Never Learn is exactly what one needs to feel bad.

Never Gonna Love Again swirls as a goth-psych anthem from This Mortal Coil, but amplified for 21st-century radio play.

The claustrophobically strummed Love Me Like I'm Not Made Of Stone makes for deliciously unpleasant listening - her voice fraying till she tips over the cliff and the words don't matter.

In comparison, Coldplay's sixth album, Ghost Stories, is measured to a fault.

Coming in the wake of frontman Chris Martin's "conscious uncoupling" from actress Gwyneth Paltrow, it's an album pivoted on different stages of loss.

Yet, you can barely get a glimpse into the singer's head, least of all his grieving heart. The songs subsist in a purgatorial La La Land where you can gently bob along to the band's melancholy chill.

The decorum is initially fetching, as you try to pinpoint references to real life in the single Magic, particularly its accompanying video which shows Martin in a love triangle with a nastier alter ego and Zhang Ziyi as a circus performer.

Before long, you give up and give in to Coldplay's crafty thievery: The xx in the above-mentioned Magic, an eerie imitation of Bon Iver in Midnight, and even Ryuichi Sakamoto in O.

These are ghosts of other people's albums, when all you need is Martin.

As for Danish songstress Majke Voss Romme, who goes by the stage name of Broken Twin, she intuits the best of confession and allusion.

Contrary to the album title, May feels eerily wintry.

But it's a wintry blanket of sorts - you feel at home in the Nordic womb. Her kindred spirit would be fellow Copenhagen native Agnes Obel, who can break your heart and soothe it at the same time.

Whereas Lykke Li is wont to pound, Voss Romme is contained.

You feel pain nonetheless. In the beautifully cinematic If Pilots Go To Heaven, over subtly tweaked piano/guitar improvisations, she coos that she has "come across the border to be where you are".

Before you know it, she's right behind you.

Indie pop rock
UNREPENTANT GERALDINES
Tori Amos
Mercury Classics
***½

She marches to the beat of her own drum, and you're either with her or not.

For early fans hearkening for a return to piano-caressing, singer-songwriterly Tori Amos, her 14th album, Unrepentant Geraldines, may be right up your alley.

She's reliably barmy on Giant's Rolling Pin, a jeremiad targeted at the FBI, National Security Agency and the tax system veiled as a fairy tale.

She alludes to Cezanne in the quasi- classical-jazzy meditation on ageing called 16 Shades Of Blue, her imperial soprano fluttering over piano and a sputtering electronic beat.

A moving, organ-laced duet with her 13-year-old daughter Natashya in Promise shows how maternity has deepened her recommitment to life.

She's still attuned to every day's little earthquakes - you just have to listen.

Pop
KISS ME ONCE
Kylie Minogue
Parlophone
***

Kylie Minogue, 45, has perfected the art of saying sweet nothings.

Kiss Me Once, her 12th album - a vanilla blend of dubstep-like, house-like pop shots - is so utterly listenable, you don't press pause. Yet you barely remember a single tune.

That's not a criticism: It shows how the Aussie pixie queen can slip into whatever costume you toss her, and she'll dutifully perform in it.

Whether it's Pharrell Williams' Midas touch on the dance ditty I Was Gonna Cancel or the Auto-Tuned ballad Beautiful or purring about sex in a trio of songs, everything can't change the core of Kylie-ness.

It's water off a duck's back, and she'll be fine.

This article was first published on May 29, 2014.
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