Uncluttered & strong

Longing, pain, loneliness and a need to believe pour out of ‘Long Live the Angels’, the second album by the Scottish singer Emeli Sandé.

It’s a clear, accomplished cry from the heart, exorcising its sorrows by declaring them bluntly. ‘Loving you the way I do — it hurts’, she belts in ‘Hurts’, the album’s first single and one of its very few up-tempo songs, a burst of post-breakup rage and recrimination propelled by relentless hand claps and cinematic orchestral crescendos.

Sandé had Britain’s bestselling album of 2012 with her debut, ‘Our Version of Events’, which introduced her strengths: a voice with tearful intensity, songwriting that goes directly to the point and productions that are well aware of both R&B’s gospel-rooted history and 21st-century dance-music technology. But in hindsight, the album also had a debutante’s nervous eagerness; it was full of arrangements and vocals that held a few more flourishes than needed. In the four years between albums, Sandé took time to step away from pop’s promotional treadmill.

Her return is lucid and uncluttered, placing all the expressiveness of her voice at its centre. Sandé has delicacy, volume, graininess, melismas and sly, rhythmic nuances. But she inhabits her songs rather than overpowering them. Most of the songs begin with Sandé singing quietly above a hushed, echoey backdrop. And some of them stay there, deliberately exposed and vulnerable, like ‘Selah’, which longs for a spiritual rebirth above the harmonies of a distant, wordless choir, or ‘Right Now’, which sets her voice trembling above a lone electric guitar as she makes a simple, increasingly anxious plea: ‘Don’t you dare say tomorrow’.

Intertwining love, faith and music, as Sandé does through much of the album, is a time-tested idea. But it’s also an abiding and deserving one, especially when it’s carried off with such unfailing grace.