pop
Jonathan Geddes
Time waits for no band, as Maximo Park’s lively singer Paul Smith opined early into his band’s set. “I am young and I am lost” he declared during "The Coast Is Always Changing"’s jangly guitar-pop, before drily admitting afterwards that he might have to retire those words soon enough. It’s over 20 years now since Maximo Park emerged as the thinking man’s indie rockers, all bursts of energy and romantic lyricism, and two of the quintet have departed along the way, in the shape of bassist Archis Tiki and keyboardist Lukas Wooller.Yet the albums and tours have continued regularly, save for the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again? He is in many ways the culmination of the deconstruction of hip hop machismo, being from a generation that grew up on the dweebiness of Drake, the thoughtfulness of Kendrick Lamar, the camp of Nicki Minaj, the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. Saved’s proselytising may have tipped the balance. “The hand is in the hand” Picasso once remarked – describing the most reliable marker of an artists’ skill – and the hands raised up in the album art for 1980’s Saved stuck out in the wider culture like Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s a decade since we sadly lost the talents of Gerry Rafferty to liver failure in 2011, at the age of 63, but this Friday sees the posthumous release of his 11th album, Rest in Blue.It comprises new Rafferty songs, some beautiful traditional numbers – “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “Dirty Old Town” among them – and an affecting cover of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “It’s Just the Motion”, a song he produced in the studio with the couple before Richard Thompson pulled the plug on those sessions. There’s also a fairly ebullient 1990s re-recording of the Stealer’s Wheel classic, “Stuck in the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Billie Eilish was shot through fame’s looking glass with increasing force right through her teens. A girl’s hopeful artistic dreams exposed her to infinite judgement of her body and soul, social and mass media magnifying every blemish and stumble. This sequel to her 2019 debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? transmutes the disorientation into a kaleidoscopic consideration of this self-described “trauma”: the crafted meta-autobiography of an adolescent mega-star. Rather than a cry for help in the Cobain meltdown mode that its lyrics suggest, it’s a 19-year-old’s sophisticated Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Rory Graham’s first words as he comes on stage are: “Well this is a bit weird, isn't it? It's been a while.” After a run of cancelled gigs, the band haven’t performed live for a year and a half – which feels, says Rory, “a bit like missing a testicle.”Anatomy aside, we all get it. While I knew how much I had missed live music, the depth of intense emotional response to this band's sound and lyrics; the overwhelming energy connection between artist and audience and the transformative healing power of music is another level at this gig.There is a chemistry in the Jazz Cafe that I have never Read more ...
peter.quinn
Album number three from Ivor Novello-winning singer-songwriter Laura Mvula sees her paying singularly personal homage to the music of the 1980s. Change, Chic, Michael Jackson and more are all called to mind at various points, with “Church Girl” seemingly nodding to the US songwriting and production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with its textural palate of drum machine (a Roland TR-808, perhaps?), hand claps and shiny synths, plus a final fade to the unadorned beauty of the human voice, a stylistic trait which Mvula uses to exquisite effect here and elsewhere on the album.Whether it’s the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
She became one of the most successful pop stars in history, but Britney Spears has also become a paradigm of the horrors and pitfalls of life in the white heat of showbusiness. This new documentary by Samantha Stark (made by the New York Times) tracks Britney’s path from her upbringing in the small Bible Belt town of Kentwood, Louisiana through her precocious progress from an 11-year old star of TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club – also featuring Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and Christina Aguilera – to monster-selling hits like "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops!.. I Did It Again". But then come Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Hailing from Benin and based in Paris since she was 23, Angélique Kidjo can sing in five languages, has collaborated with an A-list festival line-up of global stars ranging from Alicia Keys and Philip Glass to Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel, and had her first albums released by Island, after being spotted by label head Chris Blackwell. Each of them was studded with guest artists, including Branford Marsalis and Gilberto Gil, and featuring covers such as Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child”.She has won Grammys, travelled widely as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and set up a foundation to empower Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The first release that brought folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience to prominence outside of their native Norway was their Live in a Room EP, released in 2000. Recorded, as the title suggests, with a minimum of fuss, the cuts include pre-song count-ins, real-life room reverb and the occasional shriek of a string as a barre chord hurriedly settled into its seat. These moments defined the recordings almost as much as the notes themselves - acoustic music with an electric atmosphere.More than 20 years later, Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye have returned with Peace or Love, their first album since Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well this is bleak. Seven studio albums, three live albums, two compilation albums, one remix album, three EPs, 33 singles, 23 music videos, 120 million sales and streams well into the tens of billions seem to have completely erased what personality Maroon 5 might ever have had. Not that they’ve ever been a band to frighten the horses, of course: their giga-success has come through comfortably cruising along the middle of the road, cannily adopting zeitgeisty sounds and giving guest spots to current ascendent names, without ever letting them overwhelm their essentially solid soft rock Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When Laurence Binyon wrote: “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn…” he was, of course, talking about the fallen soldiers of World War One, not Amherst’s premier hardcore grunge punks. However, on hearing Sweep It Into Space, Dinosaur Jr.’s fifth album since their unexpected 2007 rebirth, it could easily apply to J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph.A lot has been written, much of it here, about the trio’s glacial evolution since their 1985 debut, and Sweep… certainly has all the familiar ingredients perfectly preserved in its slowly shifting ice. There’s heavy Read more ...