pop music
Thomas H. Green
Let me start by being pretentious and self-referential, spending ages doing that rather than reviewing the album. My theory is that most male music journalists aged between 45-65, like me, don’t PROPERLY love the music of 21st century female pop stars – Gaga, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé, Britney, MØ, Kesha, whoever – for reasons that are idiomatic. In fact, possibly most males of that age, full stop (and a good few women too).They cannot get beyond the form, beyond timbre, beyond cultural notions of authenticity or lack of it connected to the innate sound, rather than the song. If the same song Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The 1997 release of Time Out of Mind was the resurrection of an artist who appeared to have wandered off the reservation some years before, lost in transit on his Never Ending Tour, trailed by an army of "Bobcats" who followed him for show after grinding show. “How can you stand it?” he once asked of a woman who told him she’d seen dozens of NET gigs.While set lists shifted like tidal sands from night to night, the performances ranged from the ragged and wildly unfamiliar to the singular and revelatory. After attending one of 1991’s woeful run of shows at Hammersmith Odeon during a bitter Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Rock'n'roll rejuvenators, Eurovision winners with more of their songs streamed online than there are people in the world, the glammy young Roman rockers have opened for The Stones in Las Vegas, delivered a city-stopping sold-out show at Rome’s historic Circus Maximus and been hailed as “America’s New Favorite Rock Band,” in the Los Angeles Times. They recorded a lovely interpretation of Elvis’s late-Sixties hit “If I Can Dream” for Baz Luhrmann last summer, and their raucous, gritty, upbeat and confrontational third album, emerging from that audience explosion of the past year or two, is a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
CVC stands for Church Village Collective, a six-piece who hail from the countryside near Cardiff. They were the best live act I saw last year (of a long list which includes Melt Yourself Down, Paul McCartney, The Prodigy and Wet Leg). It was a joyously raucous and contagious gig, front-loaded with Seventies rock vibes and a sense of fun, so I’m intrigued to hear if their debut album can live up to it. But they’re a different proposition on record. The raucous rock wildness is missing, but the Seventies are there in a mellower, cheesier form.The best bits of Get Real, recorded in guitarist Read more ...
Katie Colombus
When asked what I wanted for Christmas this year, my response was mostly that I just want to drink Baileys out of Lindt bunnies and dance in my socks in the kitchen. Y'know?More specifically though, it's Beyonce's Renaissance that I particularly wish to be kitchen-disco-ing to. Mostly because it is the strongest, sexiest riot of soul, disco and house music I've heard in an age, but also because Queen Bey is (basically) the same age as me and my children think she's cool, which keeps hope alive in my soul.Whilst Harry Styles' "As It Was" and Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero" have been particular Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beatles loomed over everything else. It wasn’t inevitable, but the arrival of the revealing Revolver box set and Peter Jackson’s compelling Get Back film confirmed that there is more to say about what’s known, and also that there are new things to say about popular music’s most inspirational phenomenon of the 20th century.Just as it was when The Beatles were operational, the Revolver box and Get Back gave other things out there standards to aspire to. This pair of archive releases became a wholly unexpected yardstick for 2022. Obviously though, brows at labels aren’t furrowing about Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Each new Beatles album offered a chance for other acts to record their own versions of songs which didn’t make it onto singles. What was on the long-player could pick up attention if it was covered. Revolver was no exception. Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers’s version of “Got to Get You Into my Life” was in the charts the August 1966 week Revolver was issued.Revolver’s “Here There and Everywhere” was recorded by The Fourmost. “For no One” was covered by Paul McCartney sound-alike Marc Reid, “Yellow Submarine” by The She Trinity. None were hits, and The She Trinity were gazumped by The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Actually, Spotify tells me the album I’ve streamed most this year is Motordrome, the third album by Danish pop star MØ. When I reviewed it back in January I was underwhelmed by its doleful moodiness, but, showing how wrong a quick couple of listens can be, something about its vaguely remorseful, indie-tinged, girl-pop melancholy grabbed me deeper than I’d realised and kept drawing me back.Some years, my Album of the Year is clear and obvious. It’s the one that stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, listened to with giddy addiction. 2022 has not been such a year. In all honesty, my Album of Read more ...
India Lewis
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres is American critic Kelefa Sanneh’s ambitious survey of musical history. As such, it risks remaining only a surface-level summary of the seven genres he describes. I was wrong to worry, though: despite its broad coverage, Sanneh’s study is informative and personal, providing overviews of but also covering smaller diversions and developments within rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop.Each chapter loops back to the other genres to show their points of divergence, before travelling forward to explore the roads of sub- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Those old enough will recall Debbie Gibson as a squeaky clean, flash-in-the-pan teen pop star of the late 1980s. She was globe-trottingly huge for a couple of years – a peer of Tiffany “I Think We’re Alone Now” Darwish – but then her star waned. What’s less well-remembered is that she was a self-made creation; she’s still the youngest person to have written, produced and performed a US No. 1 single.Her new Christmas album displays a similar confidence. Unlike most such seasonal outings, dominated by the usual old chestnuts, 10 of its 14 songs are originals, written or co-written by herself. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Growing up in Sweden, sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg developed ways of combatting the biting cold and bleak darkness of winter. As well as writing during wintertime, they turned to the open landscapes and pervasive desert heat of the USA to inspire their music. Perhaps it is this that brings such a warm sheen to their presence.On a stage ablaze with the iridescent shimmer of a huge sun backdrop, the duo open with “Palomino”, to a retro film screen of horses running free and wild. The Nevada aesthetic continues with “Angel” and “It’s A Shame” accompanied by Super 8-style films of golden Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Good things don’t tend to come in slews. Slews seem to be reserved, pretty much exclusively, for the bad stuff: legal issues, school shootings, Christmas albums… And so we come, with aching predictability, to this year’s festive releases. Young at heart if not young in fact, US pop outfit Backstreet Boys have an impressive track record of catchy AF pop tunes under their belt from their 90s heyday. Use that as the sparkly wrapping for some of the biggest hitters in the Yuletide arsenal, and the result should be festive cheer all round, right?Well, let’s have a look… First things first, Read more ...