pop music
Thomas H. Green
Dan Kelly is rapidly becoming a big noise Down Under. His uncle, Paul Kelly, is a star of long standing in Australia, but Kelly junior's profile is also now rising fast. Judging from his fifth album, the only thing I've heard by him, such attention is well deserved. In truth, it's his second solo album as he usually works with a group called the Alpha Males. Details aside, though, he's a joy to listen to because he combines the whacked-out madcap lyricism of Julian Cope with a musical sensibility that falls between the Beach Boys and Seventies glam dons The Sweet. In other words, his way with Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Two cult singers on the same bill. A stirring prospect in itself, but last night they were both also at watersheds in their careers. The headliner, Ron Sexsmith, was looking to cultivate a more mainstream audience. He’s had his moments over the years, such as when he was covered by Chris Martin, Rod Stewart and Curtis Stigers. But last night he seemed to want the fans to have another look at him. On one song he styled himself as a “late bloomer”, but he didn’t need to convince this crowd.Even though producer Bob Rock has done a good job putting some AOR sheen on the new record, the songs are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
N-Dubz's music is throwaway post-grime cheese-pop aimed at fans aged between 10 and 20, max. I've been writing a rearguard action for electronic pop in the pompously self-assured court of rock for more than a decade so I arrived at the Brighton Centre ready to sponge it up.Almost everyone present was a teenager or in loco parentis. Despite an expected sell-out the place was two-thirds to three-quarters full. This may be because N-Dubz peaked about two years ago, or it may be that Boho old Brighton is just not N-Dubz's core territory. Either way, much of their target audience has, perhaps, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The question used to be: “Can white men rap?” A more apt variant today is, “Can white men in their middle forties with juvenile nicknames rap?” Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA recorded Hot Sauce Committee Part Two in 2009, but then put the release on ice when MCA, aka Adam Yauch, was diagnosed with parotid gland cancer. Two years on he is on the mend and the album has been tweaked for our discerning 2011 ears.Any changes made since 2009 have hardly been to bring the style bang up to date. From the opening Starsky soundtrack wah-wah guitar and cowbells on “Make Some Noise”, this is an album that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I thought I was creating metaphysical history by running Creation,” says the label’s Alan McGee in Upside Down. Seconds later the meat-and-potatoes rock of Oasis blasts from the soundtrack. The drug-assisted disconnect between such lofty aspiration and the grounded music of Oasis was never going to be bridged. Even by the man billed as “the president of pop”.Creation Records was destined to go down the tubes at some point, and the success of Oasis hastened that fate (Noel Gallagher of Oasis, pictured below). Luckily, unlike great British failures like Eddie “The Eagle“ Edwards, Creation Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the lager-carpeted sweat box that is the KCL student union it was hard to fault The Mummers. There are some concerts where band and audience seem so lost in a private world that you can almost forget that the humdrum, everyday world even exists. Last night was one. It was no surprise that Raissa Khan-Panni and her gang were there to transport us. What did come as a revelation, however, was just how big it sounded. The musicianship was just the half of it, though. The expansiveness The Mummers created came from the fact that their music is loaded with imagination and astonishment.This Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I thought I was creating metaphysical history by running Creation” says the label’s Alan McGee in Upside Down. Seconds later the meat-and-potatoes rock of Oasis blasts from the soundtrack. The drug-assisted disconnect between such lofty aspiration and the grounded music of Oasis was never going to be bridged. Even by the man billed as “the president of pop”.Creation Records was destined to go down the tubes at some point, and the success of Oasis hastened that fate (Noel Gallagher of Oasis, pictured above). Luckily, unlike great British failures like Eddie “The Eagle“ Edwards, Creation Read more ...
david.cheal
These days it’s all meant to be about tracks, not albums; modern music listeners, it’s said, have pitifully short attention spans and skip flightily from one song to the next, like bees with ADHD in a blossoming orchard, without pausing to put each song in its proper context. But the third collection from Guillemots, the four-piece band who originated in Birmingham, is a proper, old-fashioned album: Walk the River has shape, structure, almost a narrative arc, taking the listener on an emotional journey that goes from despair to hope to joy to resolution.At times, it’s almost bipolar in Read more ...
david.cheal
This was one of the funkiest shows I’ve seen for a long while; perhaps even since Prince’s peerlessly funky residence at the same venue in 2007 (though nowhere near as brilliant). There came a moment, on "Deeper Underground", when everything just clicked – the bassist and the drummer were locked in a deep groove, the guitarist was doing his precisely controlled chopping thing, the percussionist was rattling his timbales, the brass section popped and squirted, the backing singers shimmied, and singer Jay Kay himself did that weird dance, almost nerdy: glide-jerk, glide-jerk. Looking Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As her black robe swirled around a black leotard, Lykke Li became the anti-Stevie Nicks. Instead of conjuring the mellow California feeling, she sang “sadness is a blessing”. Yet this Swede’s pop is as uplifting, as transporting as any good vibe merchant. More so. Last night’s show transfixed with its Bo Diddley beats, gospel choruses and wheezy garage rock organ. Rather than being a retro futurist, Lykke Li takes from the past and recasts it to fit her vision of what affecting pop ought to be.Recent album Wounded Rhymes was a magnificent drama, the post-nuclear-age Shangri-Las slugging it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With k.d. lang's original "cowpunk" days of Absolute Torch and Twang now a distant memory, she has settled into the role of deluxe vocal stylist with a bit of heritage balladry on the side (for instance, her collaboration with Tony Bennett, A Wonderful World). This batch of new material, most of it co-written with co-producer Joe Pisapia, rings familiar lang-esque bells. We're barely into the first track, "I Confess", when shades of her idol Roy Orbison become discernable in the vertiginous melodrama of the arrangement, and the late, great Patsy Cline frequently takes a peek over lang' Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day this Saturday, 16 April, will give vinyl a small boost. Many artists are creating special limited editions. Bands love all that. It reminds them of when people cared about music as more than "content". The Fall was originally available as a Gorllaz fan-club download last December and will be available on CD imminently but king Gorilla, Damon Albarn, wanted it first and foremost as celebratory Record Store Day vinyl - which is how I'm listening to it.While the format is retro, paradoxically The Fall was recorded primarily on iPad during Gorillaz' 2010 US tour and the inner Read more ...