pop music
Kieron Tyler
Tennessee Ernie Ford: Portrait of an American SingerAlthough there are different American music charts, success in one category but not another is not a marginal accomplishment. A major star on the country chart can be as popular, heavy selling and as big a live draw as one on the mainstream chart – now known as The Hot 100. But crossing over is still the dream. Taylor Swift isn’t for the country charts alone. Back in the Nineties, nor was Alan Jackson. The daddy of them all though was Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919–1991). In 1955, his single “Sixteen Tons” figured as strongly on the pop Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Love Affair/Steve Ellis: Time Hasn’t Changed us - The Complete CBS Recordings 1967-1971The connection between Sex Pistols, the stars of last week’s Reissue CDs Weekly, and late-Sixties London soul-pop hit-makers The Love Affair is unlikely, but genuine. Shortly after they formed, when their repertoire of originals was thin, the instigators of UK punk rehearsed a version of The Love Affair’s 1968 Top Ten single “A Day Without Love”. Despite the supposed year-zero ethos of Brit-punk, Sex Pistols covered a fair amount of pre-hippy nuggets, including – as well as that Love Affair song Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I don’t think I could handle it, I think I’d go mad.” It’s the sort of answer given by anyone asked how they’d react to fame. With the possibility looming of recognition beyond jazz circles, Amy Winehouse, who was then not so well-known, responded with something which could have appeared trite; the humble words of an aspirant not wanting to seem too big for her boots.What came later is well known. Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on 23 July 2011 after a too public decline which seemingly realised her prediction. Those off-the-cuff words in an interview took on a resonance few would have Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Normally, if an album as good as The Man Who Sold the World had itself sold the sum total of sod all on release, it would have been lost, then found, before becoming a fêted rarity, exchanging hands for hundreds while bootleggers had a field day. The fact that it was a David Bowie album meant that, despite the initial indifferent shrug from the buying public, it’s shifted more than a million and a half copies. It remains, however, overlooked and underrated by many.Having never toured the album at the time, last year saw Spiders from Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey and producer Tony Visconti put Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Do you remember Alisha’s Attic? The '90s sister-duo’s debut was the first album I bought, and it was full of pretty pop songs soaked in vinegar and malice. Wolf Alice, a grunge-pop four-piece from north London, remind me of Alisha’s Attic, at least on those songs fronted by angelic-voiced co-founder Ellie Rowsell - or more specifically, they remind me of Alisha’s Attic if the latter's Shelly and Karen were fronting My Bloody Valentine.My Love is Cool is a debut five years in the making but its protagonists – Rowsell and guitarist Joff Oddie, who takes lead vocals on meandering late-album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s way too much proficiency in music these days. There’s way too much interest in high production values. Also, half the people involved in popular music seem more interested in the business side, the branding and the online imprint. It is very, very boring. They are very, very boring. The Parrots will not change this, but I doubt they care and that’s a good thing. I’m not even sure they’d call this an album. Maybe they’d term it an EP. Who cares, it has six songs on it so we’ll say mini-album. Mika was supposed to be today's review but it never arrived. Probably for the best. That dude Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lesley Gore: California NightsThe reissue of 1967’s California Nights is a timely tribute to both Lesley Gore, who died in February this year, and Bob Crewe, the producer of most of the album’s tracks, who died in September last year. Gore first charted in 1963 with “It’s my Party”, which was followed by a string of hits including the feminist-slanted “You Don’t Own me”. Crewe was prodigious: he was a songwriter, manager, producer and singer. With Bob Gaudio, he steered The Four Seasons to success and wrote or co-wrote classics like "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
That How Big How Blue How Beautiful is as much a mission statement as an album title will come as little surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with either Florence Welch or her pop juggernaut of a voice. With new producer Marcus Dravs – known for his work with the arena-filling stadium rock likes of Arcade Fire and Coldplay – on board, rumours that the album would showcase a subtler change in direction were always going to turn out to be exaggerated. But on the strength of some of the finer moments on Welch’s third album – and there are many of them – anything else Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You might think that the carefree, gleeful melodies of sunny Californian surf-rock giants The Beach Boys would render them immune to the kind of egotistical wedge-driving that sunders most rock groups eventually. You would, of course, be wrong. Shortly after the band’s 50th-anniversary world tour in 2012, Mike Love, who owns the band’s name, took it away for his own version of the Beach Boys, leaving founder (and widely acknowledged musical genius) Brian Wilson and Al Jardine behind. Rumours, which will receive a thorough airing in the next year when first Wilson, then Love, publish their Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Hot Chip are a band who have, over the years, brought a different personality to the hedonistic house party – one that often seems caught halfway between the kitchen and the designated dancefloor. This, their sixth album, sees them trying to edge their way towards the latter while questioning their place – and relevance – in the wider musical firmament.Things kick off well enough with “Huarache Lights”, a song strong enough even to bear the weight of a hamfisted First Choice sample and hackneyed Daft Punk-esque vocoder and still cross the finishing line smiling. Similarly, the fidgity bounce Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is belatedly seen in a touching clip of Townshend demonstrating one of his new songs. Singing with acoustic guitar, Townshend tries a tentative run-through of “Glittering Girl”. Stamp’s face lights up as he hears the melody line take shape, Lambert is attentive. The relationship is not quite that of son to father, but it is familial.Lambert & Stamp Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back in the Seventies, in between keeping an eye out for the unwanted attentions of radio DJs and waiting for punk, the internet or colours to happen, there was real beauty if you knew where to look. By which I mean telly, of course. From the haunting fairground tones of the introduction to schools programme Picture Box, to the rolling sci-fi thrill of The Tomorrow People theme, it seemed that, far from not wanting to scare the horses, these oddball music makers would have sampled their galloping retreat and used it as a rhythm track for an animated short about a deaf boy and his magic snail. Read more ...