Album reviews: The Snuts | Michael Kiwanuka | Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman

It’s hard to argue with the live-for-the-moment sentiments of The Snuts’ new album, but sadly much of it consists of banal, hands-in-the-air indie pop, writes Fiona Shepherd

The Snuts: Joy in Short Moments (Happy Artist Records) ★★

Michael Kiwanuka: Fudge (Polydor) ★★★★

Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman: House with a Curse (Clay Pipe Music) ★★★

In some respects, The Snuts are heading backwards - physically back to their West Lothian roots to start families and back to independent operations following the end of their relationship with Parlophone Records. Joy in Short Moments is the second album release on their own pointedly named Happy Artist Records. Being free from commercial pressures and able to work to their agenda sounds like every musician’s dream. So where are the idiosyncrasies? Are they really pleasing themselves by making such generic MOR indie pop?

Joy in Short Moments is the musical equivalent of contentedly moving to suburbia: nice comfortable house, just the same as every other house in the hood. The hungry pups of old have all but vanished. Even their gifted guitarist Joe McGillveray struggles to cut through. There’s a bit of revving bite in the otherwise sleek Youth Ain’t Easy, some quasi-Edge wrangling among the big, bland synths of PTS but the tasteful, soaring guitar of the breezily inoffensive In Motion is more typical of the streamlined sound, while Country Music features none of the titular twang to colour the magnolia palette.

This is banal, hands-in-the-air indie pop following the proven Coldplay template, aspiring to euphoria, big chiming keyboards, background music for the daily grind. Sometimes they tilt towards their skiffly Scotpop peers, elsewhere there are fleeting sparks of energy but the music generally smooths over the lyrical cracks, leavening the heavier sentiments of separation and connection on Warsaw.

Still, one can’t argue with the album’s themes of living in the moment and taking joy in the everyday. Defibrillator celebrates life before death, while frontman Jack Cochrane advises his young son to walk don’t run on buoyant closer Little Marathon Man.

Michael Kiwanuka’s fifth album Fudge was good to go last year, having been recorded spontaneously and self-produced in tandem with his Danger Mouse-produced fourth album Small Changes. But a far from small change forced its delayed release: sometime in the summer of 2025, Kiwanuka suffered a serious stroke, requiring weeks of ICU care. Even now, he is still residing in a rehabilitation centre as he works on his speech and mobility with no sense of when or even if he may return to making music.

Even without this poignant context, Fudge is a beautiful healing draft. Its roots may be DIY and its title puckish but the music still resonates with Kiwanuka’s signature pastoral soul, living up to the name of the tiny studio where it was recorded, Dreamers. On recent single Sing, Kiwanuka ploughs similar territory to the Travis number of the same name. This album highlight both hails and demonstrates the spiritual power of music in its understated, moving grace.

In keeping with its improvised conception, many of the tracks are long and languorous, with the seven-minute Love in My Heart the most potent example of giving his musicians free rein to dig deep but also go with the flow. Were this to be Kiwanuka’s last album, it would be a gorgeous swansong. For his sake - and the benefit of our ears - let’s hope that it’s not.

Scottish composers Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman continue their collaboration with a Hallowe’en treat of a release. Commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts’ Dundead Film Festival, House with a Curse is their new modern soundtrack album to 1925 silent classic The Phantom of the Opera, which works as an independent suite of eerie chimes, limpid piano and ghostly siren calls, infused with suitably operatic echoes and noirish prowling percussion. Only in the latter moments do they succumb to more conventional horror soundtrack territory by breaking out some sinister synth arpeggios.

CLASSICAL

The Witch Trials: a mirror to our callous hearts (Delphian) ★★★★

“Double, double toil and trouble”, incant the witches from Macbeth. It’s a line that feeds more than literally into this enchanting new album by director Ellie Slorach and her versatile vocal group Kantos. The Witch Trials is a genuinely complete experience, an uninterrupted sequence of plainsong and motets connected by the spoken word, which confronts the concept of witchcraft in both mythical and real human terms. Kantos present a panoply of musical evocation ranging from the traditionally sacred and devotional (Renaissance classics from Allegri’s sublime Miserere to the spiritual perfection of Byrd, Palestrina, Strozzi and the gloriously eccentric Gesualdo) to edgier modern settings such as Anna Disley-Simpson’s cackling theatrical version of the Macbeth witches text, Rory Wainwright Johnston’s uncommonly ritualistic Ave Maria, and Camden Reeves’ feverishly irreverent Spells, Remedies & Potions. The narrative thread - whether sung or spoken - journeys with fluid intent to the final Amen. Ken Walton

FOLK

The Brothers Gillespie: Kingfisher (Own Label) ★★★★

This fourth album from the Northumbrian songwriting duo is beguilingly immersive, its opening Worlds Unfold couching us straight away amidst Border moorlands and their light, evoked in the siblings’ softly eloquent vocal harmonising. Their accompaniments – Sam Gillespie on guitar, wooden flute and banjo, James sticking to shruti box – are empathetically complemented by contributors on fiddle, percussion, bass and backing vocals. There’s a hint of Sixties folk guitar – Jansch or Graham ­– in the fingerstyle drive of Snowdrop Song, while Oisín’s Song is a pantheistic benediction, with further echoes of Celtic spirituality in the spell-like beauty of Anam Cara. Tweed One includes an affectionate tribute to family elders – “Uncle took us fishing in the Cuddy Burn” – while Tweed Two faintly suggests the Incredible String Band in its dream-world remembrances. Even a sole protest song, Till Palestine Is Free, views the atrocities from a Borders landscape touched by distant inhumanity. Jim Gilchrist

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