Album Review- Phil Selway

A favorite recent “obscure” album is 2010s Familial, the debut record. by Philip Selway. Weird in some ways because of the MadLibs nature of it - in this case the (drummer) of (Radiohead). Weird in that Familial is for lack of a better term- an indie folk record I’m not one to make fun of appearances, but Selway surely looks like he would belong in a prog or classic metal band, but this instead is in full Nick Drake and Badly Drawn Boy territory. Selway was part of the Neil Finn fronted indie supergroup Seven Worlds Collide, and Familial contains a similar cast or talented (and unexpected personnel including Lisa Germano, Sebastian Stienberg of Soul Coughing and most of Wilco. In 2014, Selway recorded the follow up Weatherhouse. Here, Selway took his folk sound a bit closer to the Radiohead template to create a fine (if forgettable) second album. 2023s Strange Dance is somewhere in between. It isn’t quite as delicate as Familial and it probably isn’t completely accurate to say it splits the difference between that album and Weatherhouse, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it Selway brings in Adrian Utley of Portishead, Hannah Peel and producer Marta Salogni (who worked on the new Depeche Mode album and a whole list of others - Black MIDI, Goldfrapp, David Byrne, Tracey Thorn, Groove Armada) alongside multi instrumentalist Quinta from the previous album. It captures some of the intimacy of Familal that way without being "bare". I think it’s a nice addition to Selway’s catalog and one of my favorite releases of early 2023. I don’t expect everyone to have the same reaction but I do think it deserves to be heard.