pop music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an interview with Zane Lowe about her new album, Halsey said that the producers wanted to “make some really weird choices”. This was, you suspect, the intention: you don’t bring Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails onboard to produce the follow-up to your mainstream pop breakthrough without being open to something pretty weird. Described by the singer (who uses she/they pronouns interchangeably) as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth” and combining cinematic production with pure pop riffs, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the boldest Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To coin a cliché, the fourth album from London pop-dance success story Rudimental is a game of two halves. The first is off-putting and dull but halfway through, the band seem to wake up. There are 16 songs on the album. The eighth, “Handle My Own”, is the first one to make the ears prick up, and from track 11 on we’re in continuous business.A decade ago, the coming together of an unknown EDM trio, Rudimental, and a super-hot producer looking for a project, Amir Amor (who soon joined them), resulted in the chart-topping “Feel the Love”, featuring John Newman. The group encapsulated a moment Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rather than being retrospective, I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is about retrospection. The distinction is crucial as Saint Etienne’s follow-up to 2017’s Home Counties arrives 30 years on – to the month – from their debut, 1991’s Foxbase Alpha. Their 10th album is concerned with what contemplation induces. The period examined is 1997 to 2001: from the Labour Party’s UK election victory to the fall of New York’s Twin Towers. However, what could be historiography is indirect, oblique. Mood is what matters.Some pointers imply the specifics at play. “Pond House” refers to somewhere in particular Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Toyah, always a one-off, has been a surprise star of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Her YouTube Sunday Lunches, kitchen-filmed cover versions with her husband, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, have been celebratory shared moments, jaunty, unlikely, silly, revelling unashamedly in pop music (and, bawdily, in her own physical attributes!). Toyah is enjoyably eccentric, even when her music does not appeal, thus I really wanted to like this album, a celebration of her indefatigable spirit, but it failed to win me over.Co-written and produced by regular collaborator Simon Darlow, and with contributions from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Add some music to your day,” the Beach Boys urged in their song of the same name, from their 1970 album Sunflower. There’s far more than a day’s worth of music included on this immense five-CD package, which scrutinises the turn-of-the Seventies Beach Boys in miniscule detail as they made the awkward transition from their California surf-and-sand past to a more diffuse, more democratic and in many ways more interesting group. They would never repeat the scorching streak they enjoyed in the first half of the Sixties when everything they released shot to the top end of the charts – their high- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a band’s back catalogue has been reissued countless times, any new release needs a fresh approach to attract attention. Archives and collections can be scoured to find previously unissued tracks. There might be otherwise unknown recordings released under aliases, or maybe something which escaped via an obscure continental soundtrack album. But on their own, such discoveries aren’t enough. They need to be married-up with the familiar. Hence what can be a last-resort release: a complete works collection.A few bands can have their original master tapes mucked about with to offer a new spin Read more ...
peter.quinn
This second full-length album from South Korean 10-piece Golden Child moves seamlessly from pop balladry to anthemic EDM without ever losing its footing.With ghostly, submerged bell noises, ominous-sounding low brass, joined by strings and pounding drums that reaches a riotous crescendo, the pithy opener “Game Changer” certainly packs an incendiary charge, a figurative grabbing of the listener’s lapel which nicely sets up the dynamic rhythmic power of “Ra Pam Pam”.Incorporating 1980s-style power guitar riffs, cowbell hits and a squiggly synth line embedded into its chorus, “Bottom Of The Read more ...
Saskia Baron
How lovely it must be to direct a documentary about your favourite musicians and have no one stop you from cramming in everyone who has ever loved them too. The British director Edgar Wright, best known for his feature films (including Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead) and TV work (Spaced), is a superfan of the American musicians Ron and Russell Mael. With The Sparks Brothers, Wright gets to chronicle in loving detail, every moment of their 50-plus years in the music business.It’s a sugar rush of a documentary, very few of the 80 interviewees get to speak for more than 30 seconds, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Willow Smith has done more during her life than the average 20-year-old. The daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, she bounced off her childhood appearance in her father’s film I Am Legend to a No 2 UK hit with “Whip My Hair” a decade ago, and has since released a bunch of music. This is her fourth album and, where her last couple came from a musically contemplative, indie-tronic, singer-songwriter stance, Lately I Feel Everything ramps things into the sweary pop-punk and metal zone.Avril Lavigne appears on the slick self-affirmation power-pop of “Grow” (“I hope you know you’re not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anne-Marie Nicholson is a hard-working young woman from Essex whose career description is “Global Girl-next-door Pop Star”. She has incrementally worked her way there, attended the marketing meetings. Anyone requiring a CV that exemplifies the steady, data-farmed, disciplined path to contemporary major label pop stardom, should look to hers. Spontaneity and originality are out, every media detail is micro-managed, but a multi-platform, multi-territory project such as this can reap grand rewards. Her second album maintains the planned trajectory, conceptually streamlined, nothing unpredictable Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Spandau Ballet started well, their slick, slightly angular pop-funk adding a certain something to early Eighties new romantic frippery. Later, especially with the success of global schmaltz-smash “True”, they lost what teeth they had, drifting into cod-soul blandness. Kemp’s career since has focused as much on acting as music, but his recent round of gigs playing Syd Barrett to drummer Nick Mason’s early Pink Floyd tribute band, Saucerful of Secrets, was both unexpected and well-received. It was this that made me intrigued to hear Insolo. I wish it hadn’t. It’s one of the worst albums I’ve Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This writer has often pleaded to move away from vocal homogeny in pop. The current value placed on technical skill and hackneyed vulnerability-signifying has become a bore. It’s limiting that Chris Martin-meets-Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé-meets-Whitney Houston are primary templates. That said, the voice of Aussie singer Toni Watson – AKA Tones and I – is a challenge, a cloyingly cute teen-squeak of an instrument (although capable of taking flight). In the end, though, her music represents her bountiful character, and her voice suits it just fine.Debut album Welcome to the Madhouse will be a test- Read more ...