pop
Jonathan Geddes
Years have passed since the early days of Gorillaz, when the real musicians behind the cartoon band remained hidden from view onstage. Yet some things never change, and while there was plenty of cheering for the arrival of Damon Albarn onstage, it was dwarfed by the roars for the first appearances of 2-D, Murdock, Russel and Noodle on giant video screens overlooking the stage.Those cheers came from a wildly diverse crowd, from kids with their parents to Britpop stalwarts who have presumably followed Albarn ever since. Perhaps some of the younger fans were drawn by the anime style of the band Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In 1988, in The Manual: How to Have a Number 1 The Easy Way, Bill Drummond wrote: “We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul.”It looks like a reduction ad absurdum Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If you’re supposed to be in touch with pop culture as part of your professional life, there’s not much that can sharpen the lines of your ignorance like having teenage kids. Of course, not everyone can know or like everything, especially not in this era of unimaginable abundance. But my kids reaching the age of proper fandom has really brought me up on how I’ve lazily treated huge sections of the global mainstream as homogenous blocs, when musically and culturally they are really anything but. This has particularly been the case with the arena rave sounds of American EDM, and with the factory Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There was a surreal moment in February when, scrolling through my feed, I became briefly convinced that Sting had cult-napped Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso.The evidence was a deadpan video of the "Every Breath You Take" singer welcoming two traumatised-looking Argentine pop stars into something called the Free Spirits Wellness Centre. It took a sec to work out that this announced the new album from the smooth-voiced, mulleted, snarly-pouting Ca7riel and his friend since childhood, gravelly sounding and perpetually wide-eyed Paco Amoroso. What was going on?If you're not yet acquainted, the duo Read more ...
Tim Cumming
With two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing behind her, and tours aplenty to support them (including a recent trek with Suzanne Vega) singer songwriter Katherine Priddy’s third album is keenly anticipated and deftly delivered. These Frightening Machines is a reckoning with forces beyond your control. It was written and recorded as she enters her thirties, and the machinery in the title is her own body and mind’s workings and malfunctions, as well as the machinery of connections and visions, of friendships and passions, of the systems that we are a part of, and that Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
As a disillusioned ex-admirer – like so many – it’s with a degree of dread that I approach Morrissey’s 14th solo album (the first for six years) not least because of the positively Kafkaesque struggle to actually hear it. But an open mind is necessary.What if there were no axe to grind? What if the hopeless search for love had been answered? What if there were no conspiracy theories? Why, then, there would be no new album (and – let’s face it – we’re all thigh-high in conspiracy theories right now). So we must buckle up and hear what the once-great man has to opine. The hilarious album Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The first time I heard Wuthering Heights I felt a bit like I’d walked into the wrong room – one lit by firelight rather than LEDs. Is this the sound of an artist in retreat? Away from the dancefloor, from self-scrutiny, from the lime-green glare of her hyperpop Brat era? Or a clean break from the terms that used to define her?When film maker Emerald Fennell asked for one song last year, Charli was on the brink of burnout. But the more she got into the creative world of Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights adaptation, the more she realised how much she wanted to escape into someone else’s 177-year- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Another interesting thing about the endless flux of the streaming era is that, for all that it’s supposed to homogenise and flatten things out, sometimes it ends up allowing more interesting things to belatedly get their due. Look at the way once-obscure musicians like Julius Eastman, Alice Coltrane or Arthur Russell have snuck into the vocabulary of alternative and even mainstream music. But also, acts who weren’t short of success or acclaim but were nonetheless perhaps considered a bit cultish, nerdy or niche have gradually achieved a sort of cross-generational depth and universality of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s no coincidence that synth heavy 1980s AOR is one of the first genres to generate significant online hits. Not just because its structures are formulaic – every genre is to one degree or another – but because its textures are so slick, even down to the multitracked vocals, that sounding synthetic is a feature not a bug. One has to wonder if this means that it is a threat to some of the biggest stars: after all, in the post-Taylor Swift world, that tidily arranged soft rock vibe is very much the chassis of so much. Indeed, when I first put this album on, flicking through opening tracks “ Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Twenty-five-year-old South Londoner and current Celebrity Traitors contestant Cat Burns is a charming performer. Her songs have a rare ability to present the most fundamental of youthful relationship ups and downs as fresh and real. They also make more modern expressions of hope and solidarity around sexuality and neurodivergence escape the twee, flowery framing of live-laugh-love Mum’s-on-Facebook-again posting.Maybe most important of all, sings in her own accent with her own mannerisms, with a rich tone. All of which makes me want to like her second album Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s funny: people say a lot online that what you’re allowed to like and dislike in music is bounded by age, gender and so forth. “It’s not FOR you,” they say. And in many ways, when it comes to Taylor Swift, that’s fair enough.There are certainly quite a lot too many heterosexual men in their 50s opining on her in ways that are a bit off: angry that she’s not Joni Mitchell, or that she’s a bit full of herself, or that her melodies are simple… Angry with a passion they can’t find for any other pop music. And no, sir, this music IS not for you. However, for those of us that do care about pop Read more ...
Tom Carr
In the age of streaming, it’s never been less clear knowing when you can safely say an artist is well known in the mainstream. But for the rising star of Olivia Dean, the neo-soul Londoner, if Spotify streams count for anything then with over 20 million listeners, you could argue she is arriving on centre stage.On her debut album, 2023’s Messy, Dean provided a respectful and worthwhile offering of a vintage sound with lo-fi stylings: horn arrangements, slightly de-tuned piano chords, and soulful ballds. There was also mega-hit, “Dive”, Read more ...