Arlo Parks returns with ‘My Soft Machine,’ an uplifting new album filled with colour and light

Thanks for reading the Toronto Star’s Weekend Music Digest, a roundup of new music, concert listings and more.

This week’s roundup includes new music from Arlo Parks, Rich Aucoin, Lovejoy, plus a track from Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” gets a remix featuring Kendrick Lamar.

Click here to listen along to the Spotify playlist.

Album of the Week

Arlo Parks: ‘My Soft Machine’

Arlo Parks was only 21 when she won the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize for her 2021 debut “Collapsed in Sun Beams.” Inspired by James Baldwin’s novels and a kaleidoscope of musical influences, the album offered a glimpse inside the mind of a young person grappling with loneliness, depression and queer love.

Parks’ sophomore effort, “My Soft Machine,” touches on similar themes but engages with them in a new way. A little older, a little more mature, the English singer sounds confident, even hopeful — like someone who understands that heartbreak can make you stronger.

“I radiate like a star,” she sings on “Impurities,” an unhurried synth-pop song punctuated by cheeky record scratches. “When you embrace all my impurities / I feel clean again.” Elsewhere, she dabbles in guitar-driven pop-punk (“Devotion”), disco-funk (“Blades”) and dream-pop (“Weightless”). Not even guest vocalist Phoebe Bridgers, queen of the sad indie girls, can bring Parks down on the lovestruck “Pegasus.”

“This record is life through my lens, through my body — the mid-20s anxiety, the substance abuse of friends around me, the viscera of being in love for the first time, navigating PTSD and grief and self sabotage and joy, moving through worlds with wonder and sensitivity,” Parks said. Filled with colour and light, “My Soft Machine” shows that vulnerability has the power to not only affirm but uplift.

Star Tracks: More of the best new (and newish) music

Rich Aucoin: ‘Lyra’

Rich Aucoin has a unique, even extreme, approach to creating music. In 2011, the Halifax musician released “We’re All Dying to Live,” an electro-pop record that he recorded while running half-marathons across the country, recruiting hundreds of musicians in every city to contribute to the project. Several years later, he cycled from L.A. to New York, recording voice memos that eventually became his 2020 studio album, “United States.”

Now, Aucoin is midway through his “Synthetic” tetralogy: a series of four instrumental electronic albums that he recorded using dozens of rare synthesizers during a residency at the National Music Centre in Calgary. “Synthetic Season 2” is a high-octane space odyssey, one that’s made for both dancing and fist-pumping.

On the muscular “Roger Luther,” Aucoin takes listeners on a four-minute journey that feels a bit like driving a tractor 120 km/h through a dimly lit tunnel. On “Lyra,” Aucoin layers an eerie synth line over a driving hip-hop beat and a healthy dose of sub-bass. “Whatever music I’m making, I feel like I’m just a visitor of someone else’s scene,” Aucoin told me. “I’m not following all the normal rules that apply to dance music.”

Beyoncé (feat. Kendrick Lamar): ‘America Has a Problem’

Given the hold that Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” had on the culture in 2022, it’s hard to believe that she only released two singles from the album. Nearly eight months after “Cuff It” broke the internet, Bey has shared a third single in the form of a remix featuring Kendrick Lamar.

“America Has a Problem” was already one of the best tracks on “Renaissance” — that breakneck beat, those retro synth stabs, the emphatic way Beyoncé says “no” on the chorus. But on the remix, a fired-up Kendrick provides an extra shot of adreneline. “Even AI gotta practice clonin’ Kendrick / The double entendre, the encore remnants,” he rhymes, taking aim at the absurd proliferation of AI-generated rap music.

It’s a fun, nimble verse, which feels particularly refreshing following the moody introspection of his (divisive) record from last year. But it also throws into relief Beyoncé’s talent as a rapper: “Tony Montana with the racks / Ivy P on my bag, double G’s on my dash,” she raps with supreme swagger. Even next to one of the best in the world, she still steals the show.

Symphony Orchestra: ‘Intersection’

As the bandleader of the Toronto experimental collective Badge Époque Ensemble, Max Turnbull has built an eccentric musical universe of jazzy neo-psychedelia and ’70s pop. For his latest project, he’s found a kindred spirit in Michael Rault, an Edmonton-born artist whose songwriting channels the spirit of ’70s soft rock and ’80s yacht rock.

Performing as Symphony Orchestra, the duo have discovered a kind of disco-prog equilibrium, characterized by funky drums, tight guitar solos and plenty of detours into synth-drenched psychedelia. On their debut album, “Radiant Music,” Turnbull and Rault get the chance to show off their distinct musical sensibilities, for a pairing that works like pizza and Lambrusco.

Lovejoy: ‘Portrait of a Blank Slate’

Lovejoy continue to raise the bar with each new release. The British indie-rock band — who make their Canadian debut at a sold-out Danforth Music Hall show on May 30 — have fully found their groove on their third release, the EP “Wake Up & It’s Over.” All six songs hit a new level, but feverish opener “Portrait of a Blank Slate” is a standout, reminiscent of early Arctic Monkeys, an influence that recurs throughout the record.

On Twitter, frontman William Gold explained that the song was about “society’s relationship between sex and love … The constant grapple between what you want now and what you need forever.”

Like many other Lovejoy songs, the lyrics speak to the protagonist’s longing for a woman who doesn’t want him in the same way: “But I’m just the same, I’ve got a boring name / Across the board of what you want and what you came here for / So I’ll wait here for you / I said, ‘Please, just let me stay.’” — Sima Shakeri

More new releases

Miscellanea from around the music world

Andy Rourke shouldn’t have had to clamor for the sliver of the Smiths’ payday that he did receive. It shouldn’t have even been a sliver. Pull his parts out and the songs collapse. The maneuvers that put Rourke at a disadvantage in the band that made him famous are inseparable from the story of its hits. And the xenophobic rhetoric Morrissey has shared over the years is difficult to pry off of the smirking, aching loneliness that colors his early work. From the vantagepoint of 2023, where the pathway from jilted isolationism to nationalism and exclusionism is very well lit, it turns out to be a short trip from “England is mine, and it owes me a living” and “Has the world changed or have I changed?” to Brexit and the For Britain Movement. Sometimes, everything burns up just as quickly and magnificently as it gels. It’s important to understand why it happens, to view a creative endeavor as a series of plays people made, not just carving out bits we want to remember and papering over parts that make us uneasy. We’d have less idols to shatter that way.

“taylor swift pr team works harder than the devil,” one user wrote. “The fact that this is her first collaboration with a black woman in her 17 year career is telling,” wrote another.

While the last decade of her life was spent as a citizen of Switzerland, Tina has quite a few connections to Toronto. She and then-husband Ike Turner closed out “Club 888” at the Masonic Temple site before it became The Rock Pile. In 2008, Tina’s mini-Air Canada Centre residency were her last-ever concerts in North America before she retired. And while it wasn’t her biggest hit in a catalogue that freely mixed R&B with soul and pop, who could forget “It’s Only Love,” which she duetted with young rocker Bryan Adams at the Harbour Castle Hilton Hotel for the 1985 Juno Awards?

Newly announced concerts

Toronto Concert Calendar: A selection of upcoming shows across the city

SATURDAY, MAY 27

The Australian rock band will play Budweiser with support from Ohio alternative group Spirit of the Bear.

One of Toronto’s most celebrated indie outfits is calling it a day, having announced its looming breakup after nearly 15 years together in March. The band hits the stage in its hometown one final time this coming weekend for a pair of sold-out shows at Lee’s Palace on Saturday and Sunday. Read the Star’s feature on the Dilly Dally here.

MONDAY, MAY 29

The English synthpop band is on tour in support of their eighth studio album, “Freakout/Release,” which came out last summer. These guys are an absolute blast live.

TUESDAY, MAY 30

British indie-rock band make their Canadian debut on Tuesday as part of their “Across The Pond Tour.”

THURSDAY, JUNE 1

The electronic music group formerly known as A Tribe Called Red is teaming up with the Toronto hardcore punk band F—ked Up for a double bill at the Phoenix.

The Canadian-born, New Zealand-based country and soul singer will play the Longboat Hall (in the basement of the Great Hall) with Long Range Hustle.

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