Album Review: Alt-J's Relaxer hits shelves today

For every award nomination and glowing review, Alt-J have had their critics, bemoaning their heavily stylised, angular indie rock as all posture and no heart. The haters are going to love current single ‘In Cold Blood’ – almost a caricature of an Alt-J song, which has Joe Newman apparently singing in binary code with a brazen lack of irony.

It’s the kind of tune you can imagine musically-inclined internet trolls creating to lampoon their unorthodox song structure. The track also encapsulates this difficult third album perfectly, alternating as it does between pristine brilliance and wayward self-indulgence.

Opener and lead single ‘3WW’ – which apparently translates as ‘Three Worn Words’ (aka ‘I Love You’) – is truly beautiful, Newman and Gus Unger-Hamilton trading verses before Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell joins the fray. The rural homage of ‘Pleader’ and the slowly building atmospherics of the haunting ‘Adeline’ are similarly lovely, the former resurrecting dreams of Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel, How Green Was My Valley, famously made into a film by John Ford in 1941. ‘Last Year’, meanwhile, mutates from otherworldy drone into acoustic lullaby, with both sections proving equally impressive.

However, a radical reworking of the Animals classic ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ misfires badly – one wonders why they felt the need to experiment with it in the first place. Elsewhere, the weirdly lo-fi sleaze of ‘Hit Me Like That Snare’ sounds like Alt-J covering Sonic Youth, and not in a good way, while the shouty electro-soul of ‘Deadrush’ is either deliciously different white-boy soul or Alt-J by numbers: even after a fortnight, I can’t make up my mind, which is pretty much reflective of Relaxer in its entirety.

Listen: '3WW'

Out Now