pop music
Kieron Tyler
The Candy Company. Evergreen Tangerine. The Lollipop Fantasy. The Pretty People. The Primrose Circus. “It's a Groovy World.” “Meadows and Flowers.” “Summer Flower (She's on my Mind).”The band names and song titles don’t telegraph heaviness. The 24-track comp Trip On Me - Soft Psych & Sunshine digs into strata of late Sixties American pop which lay beneath similarly minded hit-makers like The Association, The Brooklyn Bridge, Harper’s Bizarre and Spanky And Our Gang. Soft rock – not in the Seventies way of Bread – and sunshine pop are labels capturing it. As did harmony pop before those Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s a minor tragedy that Yeah Yeah Yeahs arrived just in time to be bundled in with a spurious “new rock revolution,” because they were so much more than rock. The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Libertines all may have had decent enough songs, but all were ultimately extremely trad rock, sonically living in mythical pasts.But YYYs were anything but that: they were explosively in-the-now, perfectly able to use classic rock and punk tropes as tools but never beholden to them. Indeed they even sounded less retro than their more electronic NYC hipster contemporaries LCD Soundsystem. Not Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Presumably before setting out on their current tour the Big Moon smashed a few mirrors, walked under some ladders and crossed the paths of numerous black cats. Not only is this jaunt over two years in the making, endlessly postponed for the usual coronavirus reasons, but the foursome also lost most of their equipment in Spain just prior to hitting the road.In addition this Glasgow show was also hindered by them damaging their lighting on the day of the show. It’s therefore little surprise that bassist and keyboardist Celia Archer introduces “Trouble”, a song originally penned about frontwoman Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The British music weeklies were clear about where the Sound-On-Sound LP and its singles fitted into the current musical topography when they were issued in 1979. Comparisons offered up included Magazine, Talking Heads and XTC. And, more curiously, The Tubes. Whatever the assessments, the band behind these releases was new wave.There was a snag. The records were credited to Bill Nelson’s Red Noise. And Nelson had fronted Be-Bop Deluxe, whose first album came out in 1974. Their last, Drastic Plastic, had hit shops in early 1978. The music may have been new wave, but he was not. Really though, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In summer 2001, The Best of Roxy Music reached number 12 on the album charts. The 18-track compilation tied-in with the band’s reunion tour, which kicked off that June. Original band members Bryan Ferry, Andy MacKay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson came together for the dates. They’d last played live in May 1983, after which they split.The Best of Roxy Music was CD-only and now reappears as a double album to coincide with the band’s 50th-anniversary shows, presently on-going in the US. The UK dates begin in October. Between the 2001 shows and what’s in this year’s diary, there were tours in Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album – and its already multi-100 million stream single “Pink Venom” – starts off with a twang of Korean traditional instruments, a background chant of “blaaaackpink”, a monumentally crunching hip hop beat and – OH DEAR GOD ARE THEY DOING A JAMAICAN ACCENT? Well yes, Korean pop gigastar Jennie of Blackpink does indeed start their second album with a patois-inflected “kick in the door, waving the Coco”. Amazingly that’s not even the weirdest thing about the opening either. That line is an interpolation of a classic Notorious B.I.G. intro: “kick in the door, waving the four-four”, but Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I can still taste you and I hate it/That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it/You took the first slice of me and you ate it raw/Ripped at it with your teeth and your lips like a cannibal/You fucking animal.” The opening lines of “Cannibal” the first track on Self-Titled, the solo debut from Marcus Mumford – are the first indication this might not be the album you’ve been expecting. Even if you’re already aware of the childhood abuse the singer suffered, and which inspired this collection songs, prior knowledge does little to prepare you for the visceral punch those Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We played the Rolling Stones concert at Long Beach Arena. The Stones came on, and it was the first time that any band had ever done better than us. I was very angry about that.” Randy Holden was The Sons of Adam’s guitarist. He was pretty certain of his own band’s impact in November 1964.The quote comes from the booklet accompanying Saturday’s Sons: The Complete Recordings 1964-1966, a definitive, long-overdue collection of his band’s work. The Sons Of Adam issued just three relatively obscure singles over 1965 to 1966 but their reputation was certified when “Feathered Fish,” the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Three and a half years on from 2019’s False Alarm, Keep On Smiling comes album number five from Northern Ireland trio, Two Door Cinema Club. Known for having more bounce to the ounce than your average band, their brand of guitar-flecked electro pop has won hearts, minds and sales in roughly equal measure.Confounding expectations from the start, the new album is neatly (nearly) bookended by two instrumentals, the brooding “Messenger AD” and its penultimate partner piece “Messenger HD”. The first brings to mind heyday John Carpenter (or Stranger Things depending on your age). Clocking in at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In late August 1962, Liverpool’s Swinging Blue Genes were booked to play Hamburg’s Star-Club for the first time. At the opening show of their season, they were booed and the curtain was pulled across them. The audience took against their mix of skiffle and trad jazz. A musical rethink was needed.In mid-May 1964, The Swinging Blue Jeans, as they now were, were booed while touring the UK on a bill with Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Animals, King Size Taylor & The Dominoes, The Other Two and The Nashville Teens. They were pulled from the dates. The R&B and rock ’n roll fans in the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It is a testament to Coldplay’s capacity for reinvention that a good portion of this stadium crowd were not even born when the band first broke through over two decades ago. Such an age range in the audience clearly caught the eye of Chris Martin, who, in a rare moment of standing still, dryly noted that he owns trousers older than some of the people singing along.That admission preceded one of the night’s deepest cuts with “Sparks”, a fragile piece of indie from their debut album Parachutes, and a track that seemed unrecognizable next to the gargantuan pop that populated the majority of this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Telstar” was released 60 years ago this week. On 17 August 1962, British record buyers could purchase the second single by The Tornados, a band whose claim to fame until then was being Billy Fury’s back band – their March 1962 debut 45 was fittingly titled “Love and Fury.”It took a while, but “Telstar” entered the Top 40 in early September. It held the top spot throughout October and the first week of November, and was a big seller in continental Europe, especially France. More surprisingly, it became a US number one over Xmas 1962 and New Year 1963. The Tornados were the first British group Read more ...