pop music
Russ Coffey
If you just knew him from the pop and world-music part of his career you might struggle to believe that Peter Gabriel was once considered to be synonymous with everything that was white and stiff in music. His Genesis work, all public-school poetry and am-dram costumes, not only practically invented prog rock, but also spawned its most infamous practitioner, Marillion. By “Sledgehammer” and “Steam”, however, Gabriel had fully switched sides of his brain. That was, however, until last year when he revisited prog by replacing his touring band with an orchestra. Not everyone was impressed.The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There was not likely to be much ballet here, despite the Pet Shop Boys’ proud use of the word to distinguish their substantial three-act score. This delivers a richly James Bond-ish ride through big pop tunes, opulent filmic moments and some nice bumps between fantasy scene-setting and camp nightclubbing. It was the two musicians who thought up the idea of turning Hans Christian Andersen’s very beautiful and poignant 1897 fairytale into a ballet, a story in which the deliberate destruction of an astonishing, ingenious clock is not the end of the story, but becomes a celebration of creativity Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone expecting the 1977-style foghorn-voiced Poly Styrene from Generation Indigo is going to be disappointed. Instead, this album is sweetly delivered, melodic and driving modern pop with a Euro electro-dance sheen. She’s not bellowing “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” over bee-in-a-jar guitar and caterwauling sax, but embracing something much more friendly.Of course, this review is tempered by the recent news that Poly has been diagnosed with cancer. Produced by Youth, Generation Indigo isn’t for those sporting punk blinkers, although she’ll always be defined by having fronted X-Ray Spex between Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anyone remember Haddaway? Or Dr Alban? These were flash-in-the-pan early-Nineties pop stars who combined European dance music with tints of R&B and Afro-Caribbean pop. Who'd have thought their sound would be the template for mainstream American pop for the early 2010s. From Black Eyed Peas to Jennifer Lopez, everyone's into low-calory trance-house cheese with a side order of gutless electro.And now here's Chris Brown riding the tepid gravy train. The US R&B superstar's fourth album is overflowing with under-par rave leftovers, vocoders everywhere but flavour and bite duly neutered, as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jet Harris was one of the architects of British rock'n'roll. His death rams home just how distant that era now seems. A former skiffler, he joined The Shadows after a spell backing Terry Dene, British rock's first bad boy. In time, Harris became a bad boy too, setting the template for the self-destructive lifestyle that would become a cliché. But his moody image will survive too. His rumbling bass guitar will forever be synonymous with those evocative Shadows' hits.The Shadows' world-changing moment came in August 1960 when they topped the British charts with “Apache”. Everything in British Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Arnaud Fleurent-Didier’s La Reproduction was one of the most striking albums of last year. The news that he and his band are playing the UK for the first time next week at the Institut Français is exciting as La Reproduction was more than great musically. It was also a cultural benchmark, putting the Mai 68 generation under the microscope and taking them to task for being inward-looking – they made great mayonnaise at the expense of paying attention to their kids.La Reproduction is Fleurent-Didier’s fourth album, his first for a major label. His songwriting draws on the classic romantic arc Read more ...
joe.muggs
Googling for academic articles about Britney Spears is one rabbit hole I've managed to avoid falling down thus far, but one imagines there are reams of the things. From demonically driven Disney child star via pigtailed Lolita and sex-droid air hostess to shaven-headed loon lunging aggressively towards her public through the paparazzo's lens, she's provided no end of provocative and iconic images, and stirred up all kinds of problematic issues around post-feminism, celebrity and voyeurism, while remaining an odd non-presence at the centre of it all.
Not an obvious provocateur like Madonna or Read more ...
josh.spero
Why were any of us watching Lily Allen: From Riches to Rags last night, about the pop star's move from selling millions of tracks to stacks of vintage clothes? It was not because we need a lesson in the hardships of starting up a business - Allen bought all the stock out of her musical profits and her office was thick with roses. No, it was because the real intruded into a reality show: this was not car-crash TV - it was miscarriage TV.Any rubberneckers waiting to be entertained would have been disappointed by last night's first episode: we had a promise of tragedy at the start, and the Read more ...
howard.male
Why do bands still insist on dabbling in drum’n’bass? It was always an absurd, overwrought style, even when it first assaulted our eardrums in the mid-1990s. It’s more like a technological malfunction of the drum machine than a natural, felt groove, hurtling along, as it tends to, at a ridiculous 200 beats per minute. Ironically, Marseilles’s Watcha Clan probably think it’s one of their strengths that they throw a couple of tracks into their live set powered by this anachronistic rhythm, but they are much more effective when utilising less familiar grooves.Rich Mix is a relatively new north- Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Blancmange is a sweet pudding commonly made with milk or cream and sugar thickened with gelatin, cornstarch or Irish moss, and often flavored with almonds, says Wikipedia. Not sure about the Irish moss bit. Blancmange is also, as any fule no, a fabulous Eighties synth duo, playing on a tour for the first time in 25 years. I know there are a few of you out there who prefer your Pet Shop Boys. Personally, I find the PSBs too much. Every track rammed full of too much stuff, eventually they make you as sick as if you had stuffed your face with dessert all night.Despite their name (originally they Read more ...
howard.male
Judging a CD by its cover has always proved fairly reliable in my experience, but in this instance it also wouldn’t seem unreasonable. For this young Sao Paulo-born singer-songwriter did all the charmingly whimsical artwork herself and its gentle Surrealism (the featureless face that doubles as the silhouette of a tulip) does reflect the understated quirkiness of the music.It’s easy to think of Brazil as simply the home of samba and bossa nova, but in the past few years there’s been a wealth of intelligent innovative pop and rock of many different shades reaching our shores from this part of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Poor Charlie Fink. First losing Laura Marling to Marcus Mumford, and then, last month, suffering the indignity of having to watch Mumford & Sons win Album of the Year at the Brits. Still, on recent evidence he’s the one with the real talent, and the confidence with which he changes style implies he knows it too. On 2009’s The First Days of Spring Fink had morphed from naive nu-folk into sophisticated Bill Callahan-style acoustica, and now he’s gone all Eighties pop-rock. Unsurprisingly for such a radical change of sound, Last Night on Earth has divided opinion, with the way people feel Read more ...