pop music
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 ...
david.cheal
Frothier than a zero-gravity cappuccino, camper than a gay pride march through Brighton, cheesier than all the fromageries in France, and with almost as many beats per minute as a hummingbird’s heart: Kylie is back with a brand new show, and it’s quite something. Others will doubtless have rolled out the statistics – that it cost £530 million to stage, is built and staffed by a crew of 7,000, and requires a fleet of trucks that would stretch from London to Luton to keep it on the road. Or something. Whatever: it’s big, it’s spectacular, it’s silly, it’s kinky, it’s utterly inconsequential, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Keren Ann’s new album, 101, might showcase her new-found pop smarts but last night’s hour-and-a-half set ranged through her whole catalogue taking in country-flavoured balladry, early Velvet Underground chugging and introspective singer-songwriting. A single French-language song acknowledged where she first attracted attention. Her American-accented English betrayed little of her Franco-Israeli roots. Truly multinational, her show at the Jazz Café was similarly diverse.It was a peculiarly paced set. The up-tempo “Je fume pour oublier que tu bois” followed a harmonica-racked take of 101’s “ Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For weeks there have been rumours that the new Metronomy release would be electronica that would appeal to people who don’t really listen to it. The last bit, at least, is true. I don’t listen to much of that genre and yet every time I get to the end of The English Riviera I can’t resist hitting repeat. But here’s the thing - it’s not really that electronic. It’s what Metronomy man main, Joseph Mount, describes as “electronic music played using as many real instruments as possible”. And what that adds up to is a glorious mix of lo-fi, indie, pop and dance, with a fair few synths thrown in. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Drummers that sing lead are rare. Ones that sing while pounding away like Keith Moon are even rarer. Denmark’s Treefight for Sunlight are a talented lot, a four-piece who all sing, with three taking the lead. These are the vocals that drive the band and their melodies. Chuck in a wodge of psychedelic nous and you have an art-pop combo that can raise smiles and even the odd scream in hyper-cool Shoreditch. There’s little back story. From Copenhagen, Treefight for Sunlight formed in 2007. Their first single "Facing the Sun" was issued last May by Tambourhinoceros, the label run by a couple Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month, what's on offer in theartsdesk's Singles and Downloads veers towards the fresh and new rather than the tried and tested. We'll always chew over whatever's out there and right now these nine tunes speak loudest. Starting with carefree New York electronic punk frollicking, we also take on violent grime, Sixties-style guitar pop, Brit-pop hip hop, uncategorisable grunge cabaret and multifarious flavours of dubstep. Dive in.The Death Set, We Are Going Anywhere Man (Counter)
How could anyone not love the motherfuckin' Death Set, as they gratuitously refer to themselves in song on a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brooklyn band TV on the Radio have been critical favourites since they first appeared almost a decade ago. Always an intriguing proposition, they also seemed from their inception to be shrewdly aware of their musical Catholicism, as if they'd followed Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies before they'd even had their first jam. Brilliant, then, but tinged with Wire-friendly cerebralism.Their last album, Dear Science, followed this pattern and was among the best, most intriguing releases of 2008. Nine Types of Light, however, is a whole new glorious ball game. Where previous outings were recorded in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
After a couple of false starts, former Beautiful South frontman Paul Heaton’s last solo album finally received the high critical praise of the old days. But at 49 you can’t imagine him really caring too much about anyone else’s approval. This is the ex-alcoholic, after all, whose last tour was conducted by bicycle around the pubs of the North of England, who unashamedly told the world he was once a football hooligan, and who once set up a community bike park in Hull. When they made Heaton, they sure as hell broke the mould.Stylistically, Acid Country, the new(ish) album, finally echoes much Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Human League are one of the brightest lights in the history of electro-pop. They have had many incarnations over the years but since late 1980 the core of the group has been frontman Philip Oakey (b 1955) and singers Joanne Catherall (b 1962) and Susan Sulley (b 1963).The Human League bloomed out of Sheffield’s electronic underground in the mid-Seventies, releasing the seminal electro-pop single “Being Boiled” in 1978. They signed to Virgin but success was not quick in coming and by 1980, with two albums under their belt, they split. Synthesizer wizards Martin Ware and Ian Craig Read more ...
howard.male
Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of all the grizzly details. That is until I watched what turned out to be another of those cheap-to-make caffeine-charged documentaries which goes off on so many tangents that it’s hard to recall what it was meant to be about in the first place. For last night’s look at what was described as a pivotal year for the BBC’s once-essential weekly viewing Read more ...