pop music
Kieron Tyler
The Lemon Twigs aren’t shy about telegraphing their inspirations. A Dream is all we Know, their swift follow-up to last May’s Everything Harmony, is stuffed with references. “Sweet Vibration” is rooted in The Left Banke’s “She May Call You up Tonight.” “In the Eyes of the Girl” draws from The Beach Boys’s “Girls on the Beach.” Album opener “My Golden Years” nods to second album Big Star. Todd Rundgren looms large over the album’s title track.Brian and Michael D’Addario’s bold fifth album needs, though, to have more going for it than good taste and evidence for a cool record collection to make Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Taylor Swift’s unfathomable ability to articulate human emotion shines as brightly as ever in her latest double album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. The 31 track collection combines the gentle melodies of previous albums folklore and evermore, the soul baring chaos of Red, the cool synth-pop production of Midnights, and the extreme vulnerability and intricate storytelling that is persistent throughout her entire discography.Swift’s dedication to authenticity is to be credited for the success and inevitable longevity of this album. Having shared a diaristic account of her Read more ...
joe.muggs
At 24, Bradfordian Nia Archives has already clearly marked out her musical territory.While many of her Gen Z contemporaries have embraced the rave, jungle and drum’n’bass sounds of the early-mid 1990s, she’s done it more wholeheartedly than most: particularly rebuilding the rolling breakbeats and deep bass of jungle as a kind of British urban folk music, collaborating with older generations (original junglists DJ Die and Randall of Watch The Ride), and demonstrating how her natural Caribbean-influenced Yorkshire vocal articulation fits perfectly into that. Crucially, though, having shown Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Half-way through this three-CD set, the energy level suddenly shifts upwards. It’s just one track of the 67 collected, but in this context this basic, blunt recording stands on its own. Issued in October 1974, Dr. Feelgood’s debut single “Roxette” was an early sign that British music could change, needed to change.Along with “Roxette,” Patterns on the Window - The British Progressive Pop Sounds of 1974 features a few other tracks associated with the back-to-basics pub rock phenomenon: Ace’s soul-rock hit “How Long,” Brinsley Schwarz’s “The Ugly Things” and Kilburn & The High Roads's “ Read more ...
mark.kidel
The second act of a trilogy, launched with “Renaissance” (2022), Beyoncé’s latest release has been loudly proclaimed as her “Country” album. In a tradition of surprising and controversial self-reinventions that includes among others Bob Dylan’s gospel albums and Ray Charles’s “Modern Sounds in Country and Western” (1962), the superstar has once again broken the rules of genre, and done her own all-too-remarkable thing – with the usual brilliance and panache.Of course, this is so much more than a Country album, even though she's surrounded herself with some of the top black Country singers, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“So Ends Another Life” is strange. Very strange. The song’s dolefulness is immediately set up with a strummed guitar along the lines of the intro to The Bee Gees’ “New York Mining Disaster.” “In a world of agitation, there’s no time for compassion” are the opening lyrics.As it continues, the song asserts that life goes on until you don’t belong. The chorus bleakly commences “so ends another life.” It takes the Gibb brothers’s most maudlin moments to the Nth degree. The arrangement’s use of brass and strings enhance the Bee Gees feel.Next up on the album featuring “So Ends Another Life” is “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dee C Lee was born Diane Sealy in London in 1961. She is best known for her 1985 hit “See the Day”, later covered by Girls Aloud, and for being in two of the Eighties' most notable pop acts, The Style Council and WHAM!. But she was also prolifically involved in multiple other musical projects, and now has a new album appearing, Just Something, her first in over 25 years.Lee’s first break came through talking her way into working with the British soul outfit Central Line, who had a couple of US club hits in 1981. From here, EMI picked her up as a session singer and, alongside Shirlie Holliman Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
On this, their 10th album, the melodious Mancunians started at the drum kit and built from there. This is no bad thing. The overall effect is wide-ranging, surprising and altogether more uplifting than either the delicious despairing Giants of All Sizes (2019) or gentle, soulful Flying Dream 1 (2021).We kick off with “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself For Years”, (for instance, “Of course I’ll live to 96 and fix the welfare state”) a self-deprecating piece of analysis that packs in the influences without ever being derivative. As Garvey puts it, “We referenced The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ariana Grande is the seventh most-followed Instagram account in the world (nearly 400 million). She has worked in promotion and/or “brand ambassador” positions with Reebok, Givenchy, Apple and many others. She is a successful film/TV star (about to go next level with Wicked). She has her own billion-selling perfume line. In an age when consumer capitalism has replaced religion in the west, she is a dream, an exemplar.Music is a central supporting beam to her profile maintenance. Thus, her new album, her seventh, is key content for this well-oiled brand. It does its job efficiently and, Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts on an extremely literal note. The whole record is themed around Belgian born-and-raised Bolis Pupul’s explorations of the Chinese side of his heritage after his mother’s death in 2008, and his regrets at not having done so when she was alive. And the opening title track has him explaining precisely this, in a portentously pitched-down voiceover reading the titular letter to his mother. It’s sweet in its directness, but in context its “this is what this record is, and this is what it’s going to do” statement seems blunt – like turning the sleeve notes into a tune.It feels a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In June 1969, The Beach Boys released “Break Away” as a single. A month earlier, they had announced they were leaving Capitol Records, who they had been with since 1962. The split with their long-term label came after the band sued for unpaid royalties and other business failings. “Break Away,” the last Capitol single, was aptly titled.After the rupture, The Beach Boys were without a label – they went on in early 1970 to secure a deal with Warner/Reprise for their own Brother imprint. Between the release of “Break Away” and the new agreement, there was a Beach Boys-sized hole in American pop Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Transgression was so deliciously enticing. Back in the Eighties when I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the West End on three occasions, life was simpler – or so us straight white men flattered ourselves to believe. Consent was unproblematic for over-16s (unless you were young, gay and male), there was no social media, nor even any camera phones, and Britney was still a decade away from sucking on a lollipop and asking sweating middle-aged men how was she supposed to know on primetime TV. Things have become more complicated since, rightly so, and transgression’s darker side has Read more ...