Albums to hear this week: Niamh Regan packs a confessional punch while Paul Weller grows old gracefully

The latest to borrow the Attica/McLaughlin gold-dust is Niamh Regan, the Galway native who impressed with her understated 2020 debut album, Hemet, shortlisted for the Choice Music Prize. Come As You Are is a singer-songwriter album in the classic vein, one that continues the hushed majesty of her first, while also displaying plentiful signs of artistic progression.

Regan wanted this album to capture a richer, full-band feel — inspired, apparently, by a love of Wilco — and she succeeds. The resulting songs sound less like arrangements being pulled together on a studio console, and more like a group of talented musicians playing together and vibing off each other.

At the centre of it all is Regan’s confessional songcraft. Comparisons to Carole King and Carly Simon will continue, but that’s hardly a bad thing. What marks her apart from many is her willingness to be introspective and vulnerable, to question relationships and to wonder if precious time has been squandered. “A lot of it is about being in your late twenties,” she has said, “and kind of realising we’re all running out of time.”

It’s to her credit — and to the strength of her songwriting and delivery — that the material never comes across as navel-gazing. Instead, tracks like the piano-led Take It Easy pack a universal punch. “I was giving you all my best,” she sings, Feist-like, “but I can’t any longer/ I can’t keep acting like this/ I know he’s not coming back.”

A hidden final track, Record, sees her exchange vocals with SOAK — another Attica alumnus. It builds into a dramatic coda and ends on a positive note: “I know you’re out there waiting for me.”

For a man who who celebrated the power of youth in many of his early songs, Paul Weller is growing old with great grace. His 17th studio album, 66, refers to the age he’s at now, and many of the songs concern themselves with the aging process. It’s a subject that could have been turgid, but the Modfather finds new things to say, not least on the gentle, ruminative A Glimpse of You where he sings “Into the gardens in blooming May/ I find a wooden seat where I can wait until the end of the world”.

Careworn vocals and elegiac arrangements characterise the album and there are plenty of surprises, especially the pretty, lo-fi opener, Ship of Fools, which finds Weller singing the specially written words of another great survivor, Suggs from Madness. A frontman of a different vintage, Noel Gallagher, lends a hand on Jumble Queen. It’s a lively brass-inflected blues rocker that’s impossible to dislike.