Ezra Collective won well-deserved critical and commercial acclaim for 2019's You Can't Steal My Joy, a raucous debut long-player laced with elements of Afrobeat, jazz, hip-hop, and grime. However, before they could take it on tour globally, the COVID-19 pandemic set in. They introduce the same musical chemistry on Where I'm Meant to Be and still employ massive doses of jazz-funk layered inside swinging Afrobeat, salsa, grime, and soul.On "Life Goes On" (featuring Sampa the Great), party sounds meet James Mollison's honking tenor sax, Femi Koleoso's funky beats, and Sampa's rapid-fire delivery as T.J. Koleoso's insistent bassline and Ife Ogunjobi's trumpet solo above Joe Armon-Jones' organ and piano vamps before massive funk arrives with a trumpet solo to carry it out. "Victory Dance" commences as a triple-timed drum and percussion orgy atop shouted human voices. Afro-Cuban-styled horns and hand percussion bump and burn before the horns usher in an Afro-Cuban theme. Armon-Jones enters, then takes off with rapid montunos as the tune moves to intense salsa with soaring trumpet. They don't let up when Kojey Radical fronts the band on the single "No Confusion." Anchored by T.J.'s circular funk bassline, the horns pulse in driving Afrobeat style above Femi's breaking snares and hi-hat while Armon-Jones lays down sinister chord voicings, adding to the rhythm section's heft as Radical syncopates his incendiary delivery. "Welcome to My World" is all groove and grit as post-bop and Afrobeat horns meet dubwise rhythms in a strutting frenzy. "Ego Killah" is strictly dubwise steaminess with double-time bass and piano vamps; interlocking drums and percussion rub against and buoy one another. That track is followed by the R&B-centric "Smile" led by Armon-Jones' crystalline jazz piano harmonies supported by a rhythm section playing smooth, gentle, neo-'80s soul. "Live Strong" inserts grooving '70s-styled funk into shimmering contemporary jazz piano and swinging horns. Emeli Sande assists on the livelier sounding "Siesta," offering her heavenly yet assertive soprano atop Rhodes piano, congas, bongos, and bass. "Belonging" arrives as interstellar space jazz with glorious soloing from Mollison and martial snare from Koleoso. Armon-Jones opens a harmonic door in the bridge as the tune begins to assert itself, wedding spacious spiritual jazz to driving neo-electro and funk. His knotty acoustic piano solos with both Koleosos in trio. The set closes with a reading of Sun Ra's "Love in Outer Space" as a finger-popping, smooth, jazzy, neo-soul jam with Nao (Neo Jessica Jones) emoting in her wispy, reedy soprano as T.J. Koleoso guides her with a slippery, resonant bassline framed by ascendant horns and spectral keys. While Where I'm Meant to Be is a logical follow-up to Ezra Collective's debut, it's a soulful, musically advanced, rhythmically infectious one, too.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Los Angeles-via-Michigan folk-rockers Lord Huron make their major-label debut with 2018's Vide Noir, their third album overall. Following the mainstream success brought to them by their platinum single, "The Night We Met," the quartet was signed by Republic Records, where their sepia-soaked epics received a heavy tonal makeover from mixing engineer Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, Tame Impala). Darker in both mood and content than either of their previous outings, Vide Noir's English translation is "Black Void" and centers around themes of depression and heartbreak. © Timothy Monger /TiVo

Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason presents us with her album entitled Summertime in which she explores the most significant realms of 20th-century American music, including the world of the spirituals whose roots run deep in American musical culture. We are offered some world premieres and some rarities (Coleridge-Taylor's pieces, Copland's The Cat and the Mouse) presented alongside some popular 20th century works (Gershwin's Summertime and I Got Rhythm in Earl Wild's arrangements, and Barber's Sonata). In this fine recording, Kanneh-Mason is virtuosic and totally captivating in the miniatures, and she displays much grace in Gershwin's Three Preludes, as well as in the great masterpiece of the programme, the Barber Sonata, which - without reaching the perfection of Kenny Broberg's recording, a version that has gone unnoticed and yet has been published by Decca Gold - is astonishing in its restrained lyricism and its decisive artistry of construction. A delightful surprise for your contemplative evenings in the summer of 2021. © Pierre-Yves Lascar/Qobuz

The problem with many retrospectives is that they usually place an artist's best-known and/or best-selling songs in a sequence that can defy context. The end result can be a rather jagged listening experience. Ben Harper's By My Side seems to address that issue by looking at it directly. Instead of simply letting his label choose a slew of tracks and call it a "hits" or "best-of" collection, Harper handpicked a dozen cuts, and focused on a particular aspect of his work: ballads. In addition to ten standard-bearers from his catalog, he also chose an alternate studio version of "Not Fire Not Ice," which sounds like a nicely recorded demo (and was never available in the United States before), and provided a single new cut, a sparse, sexy, soulful number called "Crazy Amazing" with his Relentless7 bandmates. The remaining tracks are canny choices: the vast majority of them would be the very cuts his fans would choose for such a collection. They span his entire career beginning with "Forever," from Welcome to the Cruel World. Also included from that recording is "Waiting on an Angel" near the end of this set. The two tracks chosen from Fight for Your Mind are the title track, of course, and "Gold to Me." The title track to Diamonds on the Inside is also here. Among the other selections are "Morning Yearning" from Lifeline (with the Innocent Criminals), "Beloved One" from Burn to Shine, and "Happy Everafter in Your Eyes" from Both Sides of the Gun. Taking in Harper's ballads without the rockist guitar pyrotechnics is solid not only in conception but in execution. While there's no doubt that fans have most of these tracks already, listening to By My Side's presentation of them as a resonant sampling of a particular area in the larger context of his work adds both depth and dimension to Harper's reputation, not only as a songwriter but as a singer as well.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

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It can be said with as much certainty that any outside observer can have that the Sounds' sophomore effort, Dying to Say This to You, has achieved all of its goals and then some. The Swedish indie rock band by all appearances set out to make a fun, high-quality pop/rock record and they did so, brilliantly. This disc has been rendered with creativity and panache, and it features hooky songwriting so compelling that it's easy to listen to the mere 35 minutes of material (divided into 11 three-minute long, radio-friendly songs) on a continuous loop. Missing Persons comparisons have abounded in reviews of the Sounds, owed mostly to their integrated use of synthesizers, and singer Maja Ivarsson's sassy delivery (not to mention her iconic look, complete with obligatory Nordic platinum blonde hair), but this doesn't really do the group justice. Keyboardist Jesper Anderberg's use of synth on the album finds the instrument's natural place in indie rock, giving it a chance to evolve rather than languish as a tool for the retro and sarcastic. The hard rocking guitar and an unapologetic rhythm section don't let up to make way for the synthesizers; they all simply exist in a cohesive arrangement. This, combined with Ivarsson's spunky voice, brings to life highly danceable tunes that come off as just a little bit punky, despite their strong on-paper adherence to pop sensibilities, which proves that attitude in delivery counts for a lot in the overall feel of a record. Moods of individual songs do vary, from the pissy vibe on "Queen of Apology" to the wry and earnest ballad "Night After Night," which manages to evoke a sense of vulnerability amid the just-out-for-a-good-time songs that surround it on the album. The tone of the disc as a whole, however, is consistent and clear, leaving no question that the Sounds have found their voice.© Cammila Albertson /TiVo