Wait, What?

If my musical 2006 has had a running theme, it's got to be "second chances" - these days, I can barely turn around without a jaw-dropping new album by an artist I'd previously written off smacking me in the face. This is, of course, really great; as a dude who listens to way too much music, I can testify all day about the soul-crushing ennui that can set in when the time you waste on music you don't really care about starts to stack up, so of course it's going to be incredibly refreshing any time you get to rewrite the history of your misspent life. It's just the kind of phenomenon that happens so rarely that even when you overlook not one but two bands' pasts to drink deeply from the wells of their new records in a year, you can still sleep on it sometimes. Well, this week alone I found three records that fit that criteria to varying degrees - needless to say, naptime is over.

Nelly Furtado, "Say It Right" - Let's start with the easy one first. To be fair, you kinda had to see this one coming - I mean, I could probably get into an album I made with a newly-recrowned Timbaland, especially when he's serving up piping-hot cups of WHAT THE FUCK juice track after track. After all, by this point, the man's entire career is pretty much public domain - I mean, do you ever need to hear another bhangra sample again in your life? - but therein lies the difference between Timbaland and Everyone Who Isn't Timbaland: where most people would have set off in search of a new gimmick, Tim just went "Fuck it" and out-Timboed everyone on earth. Like Rollie said, the programming on Loose is just fucking retardedly intricate - fuck, "Say It Right"'s a friggin' prom ballad waiting to happen but for those tabla percolations and synth stabs playing off each other. I don't want to say that all ten of his tracks on Loose are winners - he really did hit something of a peak with "Maneater", although "Say It Right" comes a whole hell of a lot closer than I was expecting, especially the more I listen to it - but damn if it ain't thrilling to see one of the true gods wake up from hibernation and just start hurling lightning bolts around.

Still, it has to be said - the extent to which Nelly really does carry her weight on Loose isn't some little thing. That's not to say that she turns in some Aretha-esque diva performance or anything; it's a fair bet that if you haven't found her particularly compelling before now, Loose isn't going to change your mind. It's just that up until now, I've basically only ever seen her as a lightweight popstress, something like Shifty Shellshock with a vagina (I leave the obvious joke to YOU, gentle reader), and now all of a sudden here's all this attitude. Seriously - the fact that it's not necessarily always a success (I think we can all agree that Missy would have ripped "Promiscuous" into confetti, and as much as I like "Say It Right" I can't help but think that Our Rachel's immaculate blankness could have only added to it) doesn't change the fact that at least she's coming up in the conversation these days; it actually makes me want to investigate her old stuff and see if I might have missed any signs, and I say that as someone who probably couldn't have been more overloaded on "Like A Bird" back in the day, so those aren't just words. (Click here to pre-order Loose from Amazon.com)

Junior Boys, "When No One Cares" - I do realize that I was literally the only person with both internet access and a tragically life-defining hunger for new music to not flip out over the Junior Boys' Last Exit two years ago, but sometimes that's just how you have to roll. It's not that I couldn't hear all the batshit-crazy stuff going on; I actually bought Last Exit blind and couldn't have been more excited for the album's prospects after "More Than Real" and "Bellona", freakishly mannered and impeccably arranged as they were. It's just that I never ended up finding anything compelling on the disc - even songs like "Birthday Party" just sounded like incredibly intricate video game music, which probably sounds cooler than I mean it to unless I point out that I mean that like how video game music is at its best when it's not distracting you from the action. So This Is Goodbye, however, managed to set me right in about four seconds flat; I don't want to make any bold claims about how its icy sound compares to Last Exit's since I didn't give its predecessor enough of a chance to form any comparisons, but it's damn sure a billion times more beautiful and melodic right from the get-go. And then there's "When No One Cares", which must have been lying in wait towards the end of the album specifically to send me off to the internet howling about how stupid I am; if they'd spread the sumptuous beauty of this one song over the entire running length of Last Exit, I probably would have had to post it under some other thematic umbrella. I mean, not to hammer home how utterly slavish I am to one particular descriptive trope or anything, but seriously y'all - this is exactly the kind of song Wong Kar-Wai runs his credits over, and there's a reason for that (I hasten to add that no, Faye Wong does not appear on this track). It'll be interesting to see if So This Is Goodbye has the same kind of legs as its most immediate referent in my head, Kelley Polar's Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens - to be perfectly frank, I certainly hope it doesn't, since even though I'll still defend Love Songs as one of the very-very-very best albums of last year I sure can't say that I'm tempted to throw the CD in the player very often. I do know for a fact that come August 14th, I'll start finding out. (Click here to pre-order So This Is Goodbye from Amazon.co.uk)

Herbert, "Moving Like A Train" - And finally, there is the little matter of Herbert's Scale, an album which manages to be so good that I'm even willing to give Pitchfork the credit of putting me on it (or at least Jess Harvell). The funny thing is that as recently as a month ago, I'd have thought that Herbert had already had his day in the sun with me by way of his production on Roisin Murphy's Ruby Blue, an album which very much sent me screaming off to the internet in search of everything else he'd ever done only to see myself completely exhaust his entire ourvre all at once. Well, once again, I am nothing if not a dumbass; as it turned out, Ruby Blue was less of a failed introduction than an album that just isn't anywhere near as good as Scale (although in its defense, that could be said about a whole bunch of albums). I mean, yes, Scale does still have the palpable weirdness that you can reasonably expect from Herbert album - translation: the word you're probably going to be looking for is "jazzy" - but it just pushes the whole aesthetic so much farther in terms of having fun with it. Fuck, "Moving Like A Train" could pass for something Michael Jackson trimmed from Off the Wall at the very last moment - whole scores of people probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference until Herbert's habitual chanteuse Dani Siciliano seizes a couple tracks' worth of mics and shoots you up with warmth instead of histrionics. The great thing is that the whole album is both simultaneously like this song and wholly dissimilar to it - you've got your torchier songs, you've got your Arthur Russell-influenced songs, you've got your - well, you've got a whole bunch of stuff that's just way, way, way too easy to not dislike even one iota. I don't care if his entire catalogue is studded with examples of Herbert being more "inventive" or "on-message" or "evocative" or whatever, but fuck it - I already know how to enjoy Portishead. I wanted an album that taught me how to enjoy Matthew Herbert, and Scale is it in a huge, huge way. (Click here to buy Scale from Amazon.com)