pop music
graeme.thomson
Entirely in keeping with the heightened narrative surrounding pop stars and their perpetual crises, Christina Aguilera’s recent history has been spun into the kind of tragedy worthy of Piaf or Callas. Her last album, Bionic, singularly failed to shift anywhere near the kind of numbers pop divas need to keep a hand on the crown; she had the temerity to put on a few pounds and – worse – seem pretty relaxed about it; she got divorced; she got drunk. Ravens were seen leaving the Tower.These routine potholes in the yellow brick road are rigorously exploited and amplified on Lotus. Aguilera returns Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There is something so otherworldly about Shingai Shoniwa, the vocal powerhouse who fronts Noisettes, that it is unsurprising to see the band play on it. Shoniwa arrived onstage in a blaze of light, in a spinning gold-hooped skirt that seemed to mimic a flying saucer in the chaos, before launching into a storming rendition of the band’s “I Want You Back”. The illusion lasted as long as it took her to kick off her towering gold high heels and attempt a terrible Scottish accent at the end of the first song.Although built around a duo - Brit School graduates Shoniwa and Daniel Smith, the band’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well that's a shame. Little Mix were likable, talented winners of The X Factor – four times Everygirl in clashing neon, funky, funny, vulnerable but self aware. They proved repeatedly on the show that they could sing and then some, and even though they were a thrown-together group harmonised like they were sisters. Their most memorable turn, doing En Vogue's “Don't Let Go”, perfectly caught the beginning of the current wave of nostalgia for the great 1990s R&B girl groups, and when they won it felt like they could be an actual characterful pop band in the way the Sugababes and Girls Aloud Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s nigh on impossible to separate One Direction’s music from their horrid, grinny, showbiz persona or their gigantic success representing Palpatine Cowell’s Syco empire. This is especially the case if you’re a 45 year old music journalist rather than a 13 year old girl whose hormonal development has exploded through staring at posters of smouldering Zayn Malik (the sultry one!). One Direction are no more aimed at me – and quite possibly you if you’re over 16 - than is a day spent watching CBBC.That said, there are obvious benchmark musical comparisons to be made, notably with their boy band Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A certain type of pop star takes time to lose their baggage. Once upon a time it was hard to enjoy The Monkees’ "Daydream Believer" or The Osmonds’ "Crazy Horses" because the bands were mired neck deep in record company shittiness and (as they didn’t call it then) corporate brand marketing. Thus it was with Robbie Williams a generation later. Some will never get over the fact he was “the cheeky one” from Take That, a crappy boy band who eventually came good with the critics. Nevertheless, Williams is likeable, he has showbiz genes tempered with unpredictability and a fascinating, unlikely Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Waves of modern dance history beat upon the shore this week with Rambert at Sadler’s Wells offering four works going back nearly 40 years, and Michael Clark’s newest Britdance creation at the Barbican. The hip people will be at the Barbican, of course, of which more further down. But if you think Clark is a shock jock, you must be as middle-aged as he is - just turned 50 he has, the man with the child in his eyes and nappy pin in his ear. Shocks, by their nature, don't last. Other things matter, like freshness, the capacity always to be new.At Rambert’s four-bill it’s the American veterans Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Killer Queen” by Queen, “Rocket Man” by Elton John and “Laura” by the Scissor Sisters are all songs that reek of design. Their finest details have been engineered to their smallest component parts, yet the tone is light, almost throwaway. They’re crafted, calculated classics, but they revel raw in pop glee. This is the feeling Mika constantly strives for and which, despite his brilliance at constructing songs, continues to evade him. Not that the world minds too much: his records are globally successful on a huge scale, especially his first album, Life in Cartoon Motion. He has sold multi- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might be a charismatic performer, or the most energetic band in the world. But some settings can’t be outperformed. Holding Berlin Festival at the city’s astonishing out-of-commission Tempelhof airport sets a challenge that’s almost impossible to rise to. Although it began working in the late 1920s, the surviving buildings were completed in 1941 and form a single block over a kilometre long, wrapped around an open quadrangle. The gleaming, pale buildings dwarf anything.The entrance hall is a cathedral to Albert Speer’s vision of a modern, world- Read more ...
josh.spero
After Lady Gaga's concert at Twickenham last night, I asked some of the Little Monsters scurrying back to the station the name of the last song she had sung. The song she sang right after declaring that she had to bring the evening to an early end. The song she sang an hour after screaming that she would "sing her pussy off" and no one could stop her. Someone stopped her and no one could name it. (See Update in the penultimate paragraph.)If someone had stopped her approximately an hour earlier, you would have felt shortchanged from such a brief evening but at least left on a high, perhaps Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
They’re best known for soundtracking a car advert with “Don’t Upset The Rhythm” - a song so preposterously catchy it’ll be stuck in your head by the end of this sentence - so you could be forgiven for trying to write the Noisettes off as a one-hit wonder. However Contact is in fact the third album from the London duo, and it surprises with its depth and sophistication.The strengths of the duo - Brit School graduates Dan Smith and Shingai Shoniwa - are well-established: think upbeat, bass-heavy dance pop with energetic vocals, as if Shoniwa was channelling the most pepped-up of gym instructors Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Bloc Party's fourth album comes after a lengthy break during which various members did various things with varying degrees of success. Most notably vocalist Kele Okereke pursued a more synth-based, dance-flavoured direction with mixed results. There was no messy fallout so it is no surprise to see these nice, polite chaps back together again. What would be really nice, however, would be if they had taken a leaf out of Britrock contemporaries Maccabees' book and shown some red-blooded beefy maturity this time round.Four is a terrific, traffic-stopping album. But only if you are already a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Although the Eighties revival has now been going on for longer than the actual Eighties, it shows no sign of abating – to the point where maybe it would be more sensible to refer to it as a tradition or a palette of techniques rather than than considering it as retro at all. However you see it, Jessie Ware and her production team do it with style.Ware was initially best known for her collaborations with UK electronic artists like Joker and SBTRKT, and producers Dave Okumu of The Invisible and Julio Bashmore normally deal in post-Radiohead experimentalism and classic house music respectively, Read more ...