Janelle Monae says her show is all about making memories. She tells the crowd: “I hope that I can become a memory for you that you access when you’re feeling down – a memory that’s rooted in love and freedom.”
With the fabled fields of Glastonbury on the horizon, The Killers chose the equally mythic Cardiff Castle as their practice run. While Stormzy was making history on the Pyramid Stage, the Welsh capital played witness to a precision-engineered pop-rock spectacular, complete with pyros and an extravagant light show.
On his last album, 2017’s acclaimed The Possum in the Driveway, singer-songwriter Mark Mulcahy presented a collection that seemed almost anthological – a series of vignettes each with a strong sense of individual identity, sewn together in a pin-perfect patchwork by Mulcahy’s distinctive tones.
Eight albums in, you can imagine why a singer-songwriter in the confessional vein of Ingrid Michaelson might be ready to look elsewhere for inspiration - and inspiration for new album Stranger Songs came from a curious place.
Nineteen years, seven albums and untold side projects into their career, Hot Chip have for the first time enlisted outside producers: Rodaidh McDonald and French disco/house don Philippe Zdar. And it's worked. Over the course of the previous albums, the band had steadily evolved from ramshackle and rather self-consciously quirky writers and players to a far slicker operation.
They showed up with a 30+ song setlist, four costume changes and a floating platform, but the strongest moment of the Backstreet Boys’ tour was when they dispensed with all of that for an a cappella version of “Breathe”, from new album DNA.
“Like we used to do it,” Howie Dorough explained. “Not a lot of people know we started out as an a cappella group.”
Sadness abounds in Avicii's posthumous third album. In context, even the plaintive single syllable of the title is full of pathos. It reminds of the real person, the Swede Tim Bergling who as a teenager discovered he had an unerring ability to hit the commercial sweet spot with his dance productions, and rocketed to global giga-fame.
Over the past two decades, Brighton’s Fujiya & Miyagi have managed, without fanfare or fuss, to amass an enviable back catalogue of linear, krautrock driven grooves dresses in slinky, drop-shouldered pop melodies.
It’s a formula that has served them well and has proved elastic enough for them to grow without it ever seeming to give at the seams. This is, in part, due to an admirable sense of simplicity that reached a peak on 2017’s self-titled near-masterpiece (in fact a compilation of three EPs).
Carly Rae Jepsen is a brilliant pop star. Her music pure and unashamed radio pop, full of the excitement of living and loving, but her status with her audience and relationship with them are a bit more like what you'd expect from a cult indie act. As Canadian Idol runner up through her earnest singer-songwriter debut album she was charming enough.
Here they come again – the band most adept at capturing the mood of an era in catchy, critical three-minute songs. Just at the very point we need them most, the original ska-punk popsters surface and their message is as deeply relevant as it was four decades ago. But is this a 40th anniversary or a number one album tour? Or both?