New road

Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band less like that grunting Manc convocation, except in the fact that BCNR are just about the biggest band in the country right now, as the Gallagher bros were all those years ago. Vocalist (of a sort) Isaac Wood has left and with him has gone the occasional temptations to stray into stadium bombast, à la Arcade Fire. Instead, with three females sharing vocals, we have evanescent chamber pop, occasionally buttressed by a certain glam swagger, almost always underpinned by plucked acoustic guitar and May Kershaw’s superb and imaginative piano. It

Grade: A+ It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new music being made. Just almost nothing new and almost nothing good. The majority is indeed toxic landfill, rehashes of that least appealing of decades, the 1980s, and performed by pasty-faced, limp-wristed, deluded woke idiots whose chief concern is to tell you their gender. But there are yet pockets of brilliance, just as there were in 1975 and 1995 — and this youngish Cambridge band (the only other place they could have come from is Oxford) inhabit one of those pockets. Upon completion of this, their second album, the lead singer