'Swag', as personal as it is tiresome (★★✩✩✩), and other albums of the week

The Canadian star had announced with just a few hours' notice that his new album was finally coming, a Swag album that is now the seventh in his full-length discography. The most remarkable thing about it is that its author seems older, that it's undoubtedly the most personal of his career, and that it offers little substance. Aside from the music and sound, the lyrics of the 21 songs that bring it to life swing between self-indulgence, "I feel sorry for myself," invocations to God, and an insistent and heavy praise of love.
In his new work since the 2021 release Justice , Bieber pilots a sonic vehicle rooted in nineties synth pop, albeit with an R&B focus, an easily accessible hip-hop, and a repetitive use of spoken word . In any case, with Swag , the pop star clearly abandons the saccharine, commercial pop of his previous work and here immerses himself—through a seemingly less lustrous production—in a more arid and raw sound. And the album gets off to a good start, with the appealing eighties R&B track "All I Can Take ," where his voice, occasionally reverbed , and the piano surrounding him promises an interesting proposition. But from there follows a stylistic transition that may be attractive but is undoubtedly inconsequential, and lyrically, things don't give much, whether through the aforementioned loving invocation to his wife ("she's my baby, she's iconic," he says in Go baby ) or to his son (an exhausting Dadz love despite the collaboration of Lil B), how bad he's been through ( Therapy session , about his mental health) or...
★★★★✩A DAWNINGambienTMERCURY Ólafur Arnalds and Eoin FrenchÓlafur Arnalds and Eoin French, known professionally as Talos, have released an album conceived before the latter's untimely death in 2024. The album, which Arnalds describes as "full of carefree experimentation and exploration," is an immersive sonic journey, a bath of ambient that transports you in a pleasantly immersive way.
★★✩✩✩I WANT MY LOVED ONES...americana-folk Records Label/SONY Noah CyrusI Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me is the second album from Miley Cyrus's sister, and the one she says explains who she is now. She does so backed by Fleet Foxes (on the remarkable "Don't Put It All on Me ") and Blake Shelton, and with a sonic approach that draws on Americana and indie folk. Not surprisingly, one of her greatest influences is her father, the great Billy Ray.
★★★✩✩Darrere els hortsNEOfolkgreat canyon records Ferran OrriolsThe Nyandú singer-songwriter's voice permeates from top to bottom a work that, on the other hand, offers sincerity, rawness, and closeness in abundance. These are songs of the land in a folk key, but rich in nuances and influences reminiscent of the Mediterranean, the Arab pulse, the Balkans, and the Caribbean. And all of this provides a sonic framework for lyrics that invite you to do nothing.
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