pop music
joe.muggs
Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.The pandemic, though, requires something different. With the announcements and performances on a live video stream, and extra interviews and video clips on an app, the Association of Independent Music had Read more ...
joe.muggs
This documentary is bittersweet viewing on quite a number of levels. First, it’s got all the glory and tragedy of the most compelling music stories: a Liverpool band struggling from humble beginnings, trying to find an identity, fraternity and fallings-out, coping with huge success and its aftermath – not to mention sex, drugs, mental illness and death. On top of that there’s a constant layer of narrative about the endless pressures of racism on black British musicians, told brilliantly both explicitly and in the micro-details of 1960s and '70s life.Maybe most devastating thing of all, though Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After 2016’s A Shot in the Light, DJ, producer and Disco Halal labelrunner Chen Moscovici has leaned full-tilt into synth-pop and, with Time Slips Away, has created a collection that’s both carefully placed and cleverly paced. Alternating between solo tracks and collaborative songs, the album is stuffed full of vocal hooks and earworm moments that have long been hinted at in the producer’s past work but never been this fully realised.That’s not to say that fans of Moscoman’s more four-to-the-floor outings need to look elsewhere for their fix, there’s plenty here that fits the bill. Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s been a hell of a four years for Glass Animals since their last album How to Be a Human Being, from a well-deserved Mercury nomination to drummer Joe Seaward requiring neurosurgery after a near-fatal bicycle accident. But while Human Being was leap forward in writing and production, new release Dreamland is a more subtle development. This is music designed to float on a sunlit pool to, though given lockdown restrictions, you may need to get creative with an air bed and your home lighting.It’s an album that takes its title to heart, building hazy soundscapes punctuated with drum machines Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was Alison Ellwood who directed 2013’s History of the Eagles, and now she’s at the helm of this new two-parter on Sky Documentaries, telling the story of the Los Angeles music scene from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies. The musicians’ community in the streets and meandering side roads off Laurel Canyon Boulevard was a hive of artistic activity encompassing among others The Byrds, The Monkees and The Turtles, Love and The Doors, Crosby Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, the Mamas & the Papas, Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Frank Zappa lived here too, and even the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When she announced her “surprise” 8th album on social media this week, Taylor Swift described its subject matter as a combination of “fantasy, history and memory” told with “love, wonder and whimsy”. For the listener, this hits home around track three. “The Last Great American Dynasty” tells the story of Rebekah, a “middle-class divorcée” who marries a heir to the Standard Oil fortune and spends her widowhood - and inheritance - on boys, ballet and annoying the neighbours of her Rhode Island mansion. And then? “It was bought by me,” sings Swift, turning the song’s misogynist refrain of “who Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Everyone keeps upping their game with what and how they’re presenting music in these unwelcome times, and this week sees a red hot selection on offer. Below is a cross section of the best that’s out there to see, hear and get involved withTomorrowland Around the WorldAs the weeks pass, new standards are being set for the presentation of music online. Nowhere more so than with epic European EDM festival Tomorrowland. Working with experts in 3D design, video production, gaming and special effects, they will be presenting eight stages, each one with a landscape equivalent to around 10 square Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I have had an obsessive-loop Dixie Chicks tune for every eventuality of my life so far – “Ready To Run” for a big break up; “Wide Open Spaces” for road tripping; “Cowboy Take Me Away” for whimsical love affairs; “Not Ready To Make Nice” for general rage and “Travelin’ Soldier” for a good old cry.With the release of their 8th album, some 14 years after the last, I am wondering if there is a fitting sound for unkempt-hairy-make-up-lacking-global-pandemic-PJ-wearing-lockdown-lacklustre. And I’m delighted to say, that of course there is. Not only have the 13 time Grammy winning group produced an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The lockdown which began in March is now noticeably easing, although in the realm of gigs and festivals things are still nowhere near operative. Nonetheless, theartsdesk is responding to the changes by ceasing our many weeks of New Music Lockdown Specials and looking forward to an increasing amount of actual live events. This week, we can only offer one, alongside plenty of streamed entertainment, but it’s early days. Here’s to the future. Dive in!Supersonic presents SofasonicBirmingham’s Supersonic is one of the only shindigs in Britain’s jammed annual summer festival calendar that truly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s been a long strange trip for Dennis Herrold. The Virginia-born rocker’s sole single, December 1957’s “Hip Hip Baby” / “Make With the Lovin’”, was a full-bore rockabilly two-sider. Yet it made no waves despite being reviewed glowingly by music biz journal Billboard. “Hip Hip Baby” was “a la Presley on a fast moving rockabilly tune,” while “Make With the Lovin’” “packs plenty of sales savvy into another infectious rockabilly song.” The single sold barely any copies. Nonetheless, over sixty years on Herrold is a rockabilly phenomenon.The 10-inch album The Mystery Of Dennis Herrold includes Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
National treasure Jarvis Cocker recently claimed in an interview with the New York Times that lyrics really aren’t that important. He’s so very wrong. Within this very album – brief though it is (seven songs, 40 minutes) and long overdue (the band started working on the material in 2013) – are some exceptional titbits. Both thought provoking and merry making.The whole album is so very much of these weird times. But it was with some prescience that tracks like recent single "House Music All Night Long" anticipated us all being stuck at home, unable to properly kick up our heels ("goddam this Read more ...
joe.muggs
Given the collaborator list on this album, it should be a bit of a mess. Brit punks IDLES, Aussie woozy pop auteur Tame Impala, pumping bassline house producer Chris Lorenzo turning his hand to drum’n’bass, as well as Ms Banks, Dapz On The Map, Oscar #Worldpeace and a host of other UK rap talents all add their distinct musical personalities to the mix. Yet somehow, what Mike Skinner drolly called “really just a rap duets album”, put together while waiting for a film to accompany The Streets’s comeback album proper, is some of his most coherent work ever.It is sonically diverse, mind. In Read more ...