pop music
Cheri Amour
When McFly returned to our loudspeakers in the summer of 2020 with Young Dumb Thrills, the record marked their first in a decade. The foursome, comprised of guitarist/vocalist Tom Fletcher, bassist/vocalist Dougie Poynter, guitarist/vocalist Danny Jones and drummer Harry Judd, had no qualmed about admitting the struggles that'd faced coming back together as a band (their lackluster 2010 release, Above The Noise, was very much the sound of a group hitting peak commercial heights with the overprocessed artwork and digital sounds to match).But, whatever your preconceptions of a band like McFly, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tony Kushner’s early 1990s play Angels in America is an epochal, mystical, political, state-of-the-nation address, revolving around the AIDs epidemic. By no means straightforward, its narrative runs the gamut from New York’s gay scene to God’s own sexual proclivities, via the ghost of executed Cold War spy Ethel Rosenberg, the fall of the Soviet Bloc and much else. At over three-and-a-half-hours long, it’s not for the fainthearted. Neither is the new concept album from Christine and the Queens, which is inspired by it.Described by its creator as “the second part of an operatic gesture that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHRahill Flowers at Your Feet (Big Dada)Rahill Jamalifard’s debut solo album somehow transmutes autobiography into gorgeous slow-pop. Of Iranian-American origin and best-known as singer of the band Habibi, she and FKA Twigs producer Alex Epton use home recordings and pensive, sometimes nostalgic lyrics to create something unique, lolling and amiable. Beck appears on one song, “Fables”, and the magpie spirit of his best work is a good reference point. It’s a lovely album that seems at once familiar, yet strange and new, a collation that includes elements of jazz, trip hop, hip Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” was the UK’s first explicitly psychedelic record. Although there were delays with it hitting shops, it was recorded in December 1965. A large part of its impact came through the instrumentation and arrangement. Jazz players were on board, playing in a folky way without abandoning their core musical sensibilities. The ground-breaking arranger responsible was John Cameron.In 1976, Heatwave issued the instant dance-floor filler “Boogie Nights” as a single. It was a world-wide chart smash in 1977. Producer Barry Blue brought in arranger John Cameron to work on the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A standing ovation part-way through a concert is unusual. Conductor Jules Buckley gestures to the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus that they should rise. Beside Buckley, Father John Misty stands looking from the conductor to everyone else on the stage, to the audience. Seemingly, in the midst of this, he’s thrown.That this is an overwhelming experience is summed up a little later by Buckley when he interrupts the magic to speak from his podium. “This is pretty crazy”, he declares before getting into acknowledgements and an explanation of how this evening’s Read more ...
Katie Colombus
What a conflict of interests. I feel like Jean-Claude Van Damme in that Volvo ad, with the truck on the left hand side being my music editor who was recently name-checked by Lewis Capaldi after describing him as “a constipated Hozier”, and my children on the other who are constantly squawking about the video snippet from “Wish You the Best” shared on Tiktok about the little dog in the bike basket that’s making hoardes of adolescent children sob at the bus stop.Personally, I massively rate Capaldi for being so snort-inducingly dry in his self-deprecating humour, and his honesty about living Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Estonia’s Mart Avi styles himself as “the twilight samurai of alternative pop”. He creates “nowhere-somewhere music, mapping uncharted territories between avant-pop and timeless grandeur”. The characterisations are issued via AVICORP, his internet presence.The in-person Mart Avi has an arresting charisma; a star quality making it impossible not to be drawn in by his 40-minute performance at Tallinn Music Week. The look could be enough – cutting a David Bowie and Brett Anderson dash. Despite what he says about its nebulousness, his music is a moody electropop with shades of The Associates, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kesha is one of the 21st century’s most characterful pop stars. She’s regularly stepped out of the boxes people have put her in, musically and otherwise. But, even taking into account truly oddball songs such as “Godzilla” (from 2017’s Rainbow), or projects such as working with Flaming Lips, Gag Order, created with cosmic ultra-producer Rick Rubin, is by far her most out-there work. It’s also the sound of a tormented human being.On her first two albums Kesha personified young American women raucously embracing hedonism, breaking out of the cultural straitjackets that had head-melted Britney, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brighton is writhing with music biz sorts. The Great Escape is here, the multi-venue festival that’s taken place here for over a decade-and-a-half, presenting bands from all over the world, most of them little known, at least in the UK. It takes place over four days, Wednesday to Saturday, although not much happens on Wednesday, so the real Day One is Thursday, and here we are. We’ll be back Saturday for a full day-long mash-up but, to start off, here's a quick dive into the first evening, starting at the Latest Music Bar, on a central street perpendicular to the seafront. Upstairs is an airy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Amongst the stranger recordings surfacing in 1977’s summer of punk was the version of Sex Pistols’s “Pretty Vacant” appearing on the budget Hallmark label album Top Of The Pops Volume 60 – the latest in a long-running series collecting ostensibly sound-alike versions of current hits recorded by anonymous session musicians and singers in a Wembley studio.This “Pretty Vacant” just-about caught the heft of the original but was in no way a convincing facsimile. The singer tried though. He adopted a voice along the Old Man Steptoe lines which might have caused the then Johnny Rotten to chuckle. Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Before even a note was struck, Yard Act’s singer James Smith was setting the bar high. “Over the past two days everyone we’ve met in Glasgow has been telling us this is the best gig we’ll ever play”, he declared, as soon as the Leeds band arrived onstage. They then proceeded over the following 70 minutes to deliver on that expectation, with an evening that’s among the best the storied old Barrowland has ever seen.That might sound like overzealous hype, but this was a beefed up set that possessed power, passion and playfulness all at once. This current short jaunt for the group is essentially Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
My associate for the evening has recently returned from Breaking Convention, a conference on psychedelics, celebrating their renaissance in recent years. He’s been microdosing regularly. Around us the crowd sways, many with eyes closed, bobbing, silhouetted by two screens and a stage backdrop on which a dancing silver-grey blob-humanoid grooves itself to liquid, splatters flowing off it.Equally shadowy onstage, two dark-haired men are clapping. The one on the left is singing too. “Can't say it’s what you bargained for/It’s forever at the push of a button/Up to the edge of the edge of the edge Read more ...