I have a feeling this is going to pass a lot of people by but will be an outstanding album. This is so good and much better than 'Samson'.

Edited September 11, 201311 yr by Davidson

I'd like to get excited by the album but I still don't want to get my hopes up that it'll actually be released :(

I'd like to get excited by the album but I still don't want to get my hopes up that it'll actually be released :(

 

Well she has set the release date as being the 8th of October and revealed it's artwork so I am confident it will even if it does do terribly:

 

http://www.tellallyourfriendspr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/Release_Image/SamsonDelilahCover.125242.143920.jpg

 

The music video for this is coming tomorrow apparently.

 

SO GOOD.

This is definitely a LOT better than Samson! I have no hopes for the album doing anythng at all, but I'll give it a listen for sure given that Travelling Like The Light was so good (not that this will be like that at all).

This song is so good! I never expected her to release anything worthwhile again, but there's a real Grace Jones BOOM to the vocals, especially in the chorus.

YES david. totally grace jones all over!!! really surprising.

'The Apple' is great. Still not sure if I'll like the whole thing, though.

"The Apple" is very good and is growing with every listen.

She recorded a version in French though (she was relatively big here) and I can't get a word of what she was singing. It's Girls Aloud/"Je ne parle pas français" all over again :lol:

Edited August 31, 201311 yr by Hayzayy

This is f***ing excellent.

 

She may have a hideous person but when Channeling Grace she finds herself...

Sounds very interesting and quite good! Her debut was nice, so will check out her 2nd album when released. ^_^

Edited September 2, 201311 yr by Envoirment

So, listening to the album now. Really strong. The production has so much BASS and darkness, it's so immersive. Her voice is far richer than it ever was on her first album. So surprised by how this has all turned out!

I heard the first half and it's surprisingly good, though I miss her funky side.

 

This should be in Indie instead of Pop, btw.

This should be in Indie instead of Pop, btw.

Eh. I think of it as a Marina situation, but in reverse.

MOVE IT TO INDIE

This album is rather superb.

This sound is completely different and will appeal to a different audience in the main part.

I liked her first album very much. It was quite patchy in places but the great songs were there. It felt a lot more natural to me than the music she's currently making, too.

I really liked the first album too and with such a jump in sound I was pretty surprised when I heard the first singles that she'd gone there, and I thought it was a bit contrived. Hearing the album though, I feel this kind of suits her more.... I do miss the days of Shark In The Water and Leave, but I'm so so impressed with how she's done this!

Popjustice review:

 

Music’s great isn’t it? Well not all of it – some of it’s shit. But there’s an album of great music out today and, like a lot of great pop music, it runs the risk of falling through the cracks in the pop pavement when really it should be blasting out of military-grade loudspeakers on every street corner.

As it happens, the album in question is the direct result of its creator spending the last decade falling through cracks. It’s third reinvention lucky for an artist who has already lived two pop lifetimes, which is to say she’s been signed (and dropped) by not one but two major labels over the last ten years.

For each phase of her career, she’s shifted her look and sound. First she was a UK R&B artist, and she was pretty good. It didn’t quite work. Then she championed a strange but interesting pop-doo-wop sound. That didn’t really work either. Last year, under her own steam, she started putting out music again, changing direction for a second time. There was, apparently, an album ready to go, but ten months ago she pulled the plug on the whole thing. It wasn’t right, she said. And then she sort of disappeared. She went away, and she made the album that is released today.

Some people seem to have found this constant genre-hopping slightly disingenuous, as if this transparently motivated singer songwriter is just crossing off musical styles on a list until one of them finally brings her success. It’s strange how some pop artists are applauded for being queens of reinvention while others are labelled desperate. Anyway, the album that’s out today doesn’t seem desperate. If anything it just underlines this artist’s versatility. And yes, she may be hoping for success – her interviews, tweets and songs burst with ambition. But at the same time, quite right too. How many decent popstars truly lack ambition? We can think of two.

Anyway, after all the ups and downs and further downs associated with going through the major label mangle twice, it’s brilliant that the plaudits that will surely come for this new album will be hers, and hers alone, to absorb. She’s releasing it on her own label, too. How great must that feel. You spend a decade ricocheting between major label A&Rs, product managers, publicists, pluggers and all the rest. All these people who are doing their best with music that isn’t quite right for whatever the public, or the radio and TV people who stand between you and the public, are looking for at that point in pop history. So you and the people you’re working with start bending over backwards to make people happy, and it doesn’t really work, and it’s all pretty shit. And then you piss off and do something by yourself and it’s brilliant. Really brilliant.

About three years ago, when her second attempt at chart success had gone tits up and the singer was trapped in the kind of post-deal netherworld from which few popstars tend to escape, members of various music forums (including the Popjustice one) took the piss out of her when she posted a video talking about ‘development’. They made a gif of her spelling the word de-vel-op-ment. It probably seemed quite funny to a handful of people and the video was, to be fair, pretty terrible. With hindsight she was probably having some sort of breakdown, artistically at least. But in 2013, she’s vindicated. The development, now complete, was extraordinary, and necessary.

Often when artists are dropped they limp ahead trying to extend a career that’s already failing. It’s like they’re fixing the roof of a collapsing house. You’ll see them talking a lot about the freedom they now have. Actually, very often, they’re not making the most of that freedom. The music they’re making isn’t that different from what they did before – they’re just trying to do it on a budget. So when they talk about their freedom they’re actually still trapped by the decisions that were made when they were at their former label.

But here’s an album that revels in the fact that, actually, nobody was really waiting for it. Away from the pressure of expectation, this artist has made an album that far exceeds the promise of her earlier attempts. It’s a big album. The melodies are huge. The production – electronic, dark, enveloping – is exquisite. The vocals are extraordinary. Lyrically there’s immense power and depth. It’s an album that creates its own world, insular and at times claustrophobic, but large parts of it are brilliantly accessible. It feels like the perfect companion piece to Siobhan Donaghy’s ‘Ghosts’, another album made by someone who had to hit the bottom in order to discover the true extent of her creativity.

To start with, we didn’t really get what the artist was trying to do with this project. There was a single a few months ago which didn’t make much sense at the time and we thought, well, we liked her in her first incarnation, we liked her again in her second incarnation, the third one that didn’t come out didn’t really appeal and this new one seems a bit weird, so maybe after ten years it’s time to give this act a swerve. But when you like an artist you’ll always give them one more chance, so when she put out the second single a month or so ago, we gave it a click anyway, and it was brilliant. Now, in the context of the whole album, that first song we didn’t really understand makes complete sense.

Don’t expect to see this album in the midweek Top 10 tomorrow. But do expect to see people talking about it over the coming months, and do expect to fall in love with it yourself. People will, eventually, go properly mental for this album. Reviews have been great so far. The album will still be picking up fans a year from now. It feels like an important album but, most importantly, it’s just really great to listen to.

 

I am so pleased to see this getting such critical acclaim, it really is so deserved.