POST MALONE: F-1 Trillion (Island)
Verdict: Epic country music homage
American superstars Taylor Swift and Beyoncé choose their collaborators carefully, so any artist who has been invited into the studio by both of them clearly has something special to offer.
Step forward Post Malone, a Texas-raised singer and rapper who features on Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department and Beyoncé’s country album Cowboy Carter.
What’s more, the duets in question — Fortnight on Taylor’s LP and Levii’s Jeans on Cowboy Carter — are high points on a couple of the year’s best albums, with Post’s tender voice dovetailing seamlessly with two of the most famous women in pop.
Far from being overawed, the bearded, heavily tattooed 29-year-old rises to the occasion.
If those collaborations were a surprise to fans who had him pegged as an R&B and hip-hop phenomenon who occasionally strayed into alternative rock — as when he live-streamed a set of Nirvana covers from his home during lockdown — then his latest move will come as an even greater shock: on F-1 Trillion, Malone has made a feel-good country record.
Post Malone, a Texas-raised singer and rapper who features on Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department and Beyoncé’s country album Cowboy Carter
F-1 Trillion an affectionate homage rather than a ground-breaking endeavour, that’s debatable
Maybe his decision to don a cowboy hat isn’t so unusual, though. Country music is in the ascendancy.
In addition to Beyoncé’s album, 2024 has seen Shania Twain performing at Glastonbury and Zayn Malik taking tips from Nashville.
Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy) is one of the songs of the summer, and Lana Del Rey is currently working on a country record.
So, does Post Malone bring anything fresh to the rodeo? With F-1 Trillion an affectionate homage rather than a ground-breaking endeavour, that’s debatable.
But with the singer backed by a truly stellar cast of good old boys and rhinestone divas — Chris Stapleton and Dolly Parton among them — there’s no doubting his vocal talent or ability to spin a good yarn.
It’s an album of bad-luck tales and hard- drinking songs. ‘I got ten problems down in Tennessee, and I ain’t got the time to fix ’em all,’ he sings on Wrong Ones, a duet with Tim McGraw.
On Pour Me A Drink, which he sings with Blake Shelton, he’s drowning his sorrows on account of getting a speeding ticket and watching a last-minute defeat for the American football team the Dallas Cowboys.
F-1 Trillion occasionally tips over into cliché. It’s also way too long — its original release, as an 18-track single LP last weekend, was followed by the appearance of another nine songs as part of an expanded ‘Long Bed’ edition.
The quality of the writing is high, but there’s still a lot to digest.
I Had Some Help, sung with Morgan Wallen, showcases Malone’s melodic instincts, while the up-tempo Dolly duet, Have The Heart, is sprinkled with characteristic Parton stardust and humour.
‘Wanna hear something sexy?’ she teases. ‘I like the way that my bed is looking over your boots, and them bell-bottoms I wear make walking out hard to do.’
Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion record (pictured) is the rapper’s sixth studio album (pictured: Post Malone performs in Times Square on July 18)
Post Malone’s latest album of bad-luck tales and hard- drinking songs
On California Sober, a duet with Stapleton, he picks up a female hitchhiker who steals his wallet, while M-E-X-I-C-O, sung with bluegrass star Billy Strings, begins with him dating a diplomat’s daughter from Brooklyn. After a series of entertaining scrapes, he ends up in a Mexican jail.
The nine-track Long Bed bonus album opens with songs of a darker hue, however. Dead At The Honky Tonk is the tale of a heartbroken lover who drinks himself into an early grave, while Killed A Man is a classic murder ballad — that’s two bodies in the first three songs.
But the mood then lightens, with Back To Texas a celebration of his home state, and Ain’t How It Ends a tribute to the art of writing a country tune.
Might any of his lead characters live happily ever after? ‘That ain’t how it ends in a country song,’ he concludes, rounding off a sprawling, but spirited, love letter to Nashville.
FONTAINES D.C.: Romance (XL)
Verdict: Ambitious indie-rock
Like touring buddies Arctic Monkeys, Dublin quintet Fontaines D.C. have moved away from their raw, indie-rock roots to something more cinematic.
In an era when guitar groups are struggling, their 2022 LP Skinty Fia topped the UK charts and helped them to a BRIT Award — and new album Romance will only speed up their progress to arena-headlining status.
Named after a character, Johnny Fontane, in The Godfather (the D.C. bit stands for Dublin City), the band are now embracing everything from lush balladry to 1990s nu metal, while still offering something to older fans who grew up on the 1980s post-punk rock of Echo & The Bunnymen and fellow Irishmen U2 (the group covered U2’s song One in 2022).
Dublin quintet Fontaines D.C. (lead singer Grian Chatten pictured) have moved away from their raw, indie-rock roots to something more cinematic.
There are echoes, too, of The Cure on an eerie title track that sees 29-year-old frontman Grian Chatten singing of sinking ‘into the darkness’ before wondering whether ‘romance is a place for me and you’.
There’s a similar tension to Starburster, inspired by a panic attack at a railway station, and the sinister Death Kink, about a toxic relationship.
It’s the ballads that steal the show, though. Horseness Is The Whatness, its title taken from James Joyce’s Ulysses, is enhanced with strings. In The Modern World, all twangy guitars, owes something to Lana Del Rey, a singer Chatten has long admired. Their ambition continues to grow.
Fontaines D.C. play Reading Festival tomorrow and Leeds Festival on Sunday. They start a UK tour at The Halls, Wolverhampton, on November 20
Best of the new releases:
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS: Woodland (Acony)
The First Couple of modern Americana return with a record named after their own Nashville studio, a former theatre that has been fully restored after being badly damaged by a tornado in 2020.
California-raised Welch breathes fresh life into traditional styles, harking back to old-time blues on Here Stands A Woman and singing of her love for the Deep South on the acoustic ballad North Country.
Rawlings adds the classic singer- songwriter touches, evoking Neil Young’s falsetto on What We Had and Bob Dylan on Turf The Gambler.
The First Couple of modern Americana return with a record named after their own Nashville studio, a former theatre that has been fully restored after being badly damaged by a tornado in 2020
ROSIE LOWE: Lover, Other (Blue Flowers)
London-based singer Rosie Lowe packed her portable recording equipment into a bag and travelled to Barcelona and Berlin to create the songs for this, her third solo album.
The upshot is an independently minded release that makes the most of her intimate, close-miked vocals and understated electronic grooves. She varies the tempos very cleverly.
Mood To Make Love is slow and sultry, while In My Head — driven by Jamie Woon’s guitar — is more danceable. ‘Something’s got me stirring in the summer breeze,’ she sings. It’s a subtle delight.
London-based singer Rosie Lowe packed her portable recording equipment into a bag and travelled to Barcelona and Berlin to create the songs for this, her third solo album
LISZT: Faust Symphony, etc (BIS)
The movements on this record depict Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, decreasing in length from 30 minutes to 16, and a startlingly good recording reveals some excellent playing by the Liège Royal Philharmonic
Among the composers to fall under the spell of Goethe’s Faust was Franz Liszt, who finished this symphony in 1854.
By the premiere in 1857, he’d written a choral finale; but Wagner preferred the original three-movement version that we hear here.
The movements depict Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, decreasing in length from 30 minutes to 16, and a startlingly good recording reveals some excellent playing by the Liège Royal Philharmonic, conducted by Hungarian Gergely Madaras. He adds the Mephisto Waltz No. 1 as an apt encore.
Track of the Week:
DIE WITH A SMILE Lady Gaga & Bruno MarsLady
Gaga was in Malibu when Bruno Mars invited her to collaborate. Mixing Lady Gaga’s dramatic power with Mars’s finest falsetto, the results hark back to 1970s soul harmony groups.
