house music
Thomas H. Green
Although they haven’t had a hit single in almost 20 years, Faithless remain a potent commercial force, continuing to rack up festival headline sets and big-selling albums. Longterm member Maxi Jazz left the band in 2016 but Champion Sound is the first album by remaining duo Rollo and Sister Bliss since his death in 2022. It is overlong at more than 75 minutes, but its four distinct sections pass in a warm MDMA throb.The quartet of song-suites are each themed. The first, entitled Forever Free, is introduced by Jazz prior to three tracks of pulsing head-nod. “In Your Own Groove”, with its Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s plenty of noise out there about 24-year-old Kentish musician Victoria Walker, AKA PinkPantheress. Since being acclaimed BBC Sound of 2022, the spotlight has been on her. She supported Halsey and Olivia Rodrigo on tour, worked with Beabadoobee, Skrillex, and K-Pop sensations Le SSerafim, and had a song on the Barbie soundtrack. It’s a lot. Perhaps, judging from this mixtape – a 20-minute filler release we might once have called an EP – she’s spreading herself too thin.The idea is that Fancy That tips its hat to millennial dance sounds and, indeed, it features Basement Jaxx’ music on “ Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a real bind for Kylie Minogue. Her core audience want disco pop, people like me slag her off if she branches out from disco pop and goes country, she does disco pop well… but it’s really, really hard to do disco pop relentlessly well all the time.She’s done much, much better at it than pretty much anyone else on the planet: her creative longevity and continued cultural relevance has been truly something to behold, she’s proved that being a pop princess isn’t only about providing low-camp fizz and sensation in the moment (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course) but can Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s been a lot of early 90s rave aesthetics in popular culture lately, but an awful lot of it has been at the level of signifiers. Fila, Stüssy, Air Max 90s, smiley faces, sirens, rewinds, crowd noises, hop in a Ford Cortina, tribes coming together, dancing at dawn, baggy hoodies for goalposts, isn’t it, wasn’t it, hmm? There’s been a little less discussed, though, about what raving actually felt like, and in particular that it its revolutionary character came from everyone having the same feeling of being on the same drug at the same time.Again, we might see the signifiers of tablets, Read more ...
joe.muggs
I made a terrible mistake when I first got this LP: I played it on my laptop speakers. That’s not the straight up foolishness you might think, mind – after downloading something for review I’ll often play it quietly in the background while I catch up on admin, because it can be a good way of getting the general shape of an album, an overview as it were, before properly diving into it. But for this album in particular that really didn’t work.Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points is a virtuoso producer – and one of the world’s best DJs, which has taken him on a consistent upward trajectory parallel Read more ...
joe.muggs
Joe Goddard’s torrent of creativity rarely fails to amaze. As well as eight albums as a crucial part of Hot Chip, he has made two in the 2 Bears duo with Raf Rundell, one as Hard Feelings with Amy Douglas, and there’s been various other collaborations besides (A Pulse Train, Extra Credit, Greco-Roman Soundsystem, Lightbox Of Magic Unknowledge), not to mention dozens of remixes and a none too shabby DJ career too. Through all of this there’s been a strong musical personality, circling around palpable love of the dancefloor and its communities, and use of synthesisers to conjure feelings of Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a whole generation of singers who’ve risen to considerable fame on the back of the return of home-grown commercial dance music to the charts since the early 2010s. Various Jesses and Ellas, Nathans and Calums have flooded daytime radio with decent enough, often TV talent show-winning, more or less generic vocals.They all seem perfectly nice, but it can be hard to pick them apart, and – as highlighted by Raye’s recent label wranglings, and the You Know My Voice podcast from Kelli-Leigh – there does seem to be a fast-track route to solo success afforded to certain categories of artist Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album has a lot to live up to. Its predecessor Future Nostalgia came along just as the Covid crisis was properly kicking into gear, and it became, in its way, era defining. As we said at the time, it was “the sound of a musician finding their own voice and revelling in it”: Lipa hitting a groove as a very charming avatar of disco/house glitterball vibes, just at the point we most needed them in our lives. Though she was no obscurity before, it catapulted her into the megastar firmament, with its singles achieving streams in the billions, and its status as a classic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Justice are a couple of super-suave rock star analogues. Leathers and aviators, yes, but with a very Parisian insouciance. Their music is the same. It has a rocker-friendly je-ne-sais-quoi, but air-brushed with the glitzy sci-fi futurism one might expect from a couple of guys whose origins lie in design. Their new album, their fourth and first in a leisurely eight years, retains their usual slightly-gnarly-but-smartly-turned-out vibe, but reaches towards new and entertaining musical directions.Justice blew up with Noughties monster remix “We Are Your Friends”, then rode the proto-EDM wave, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis hasn’t made large waves this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps this is because her appeal has partly been rooted in Latin communities across the US and, indeed, Central and South America. Last year her third album, Red Moon in Venus, reached the Top 5 of the US album charts. At the time she said she already had her next album ready, a Spanish language affair. This is it and it’s a slightly feistier creature than its woozily narcotic predecessor.Uchis’s current default setting remains sexy-stoned. Her voice is a seductive instrument. She silkily rolls language Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bradford unit Bad Boy Chiller Crew blew up from a regional scene which combined jokey lo-fi videos, a bangin’ fusion of UK garage and hard house (“bassline house” as they termed it), and grime-style rapping in local accents.Boasting parochial slang, tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, and a defiantly working class attitude, they were a breath of fresh air. Their vibe was redolent of acts such as Kurupt FM, Die Antwoord and Goldie Looking Chain. They were a blast. Live, they likely still are, but their new album sees them jump the shark.For one thing, it’s 21 tracks long where, as every artist Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Exactly 40 years since Madonna’s first UK hit, “Holiday”, was skittering about the Top Five, she launches her global Celebration Tour at the O2.It is spectacle on the very grandest scale. In the latter half, following a video montage of tabloid controversies that pursued her career, and, to some extent, made it, a banner headline flashes “Age is a sin”. Madonna responds, “The most controversial thing I’ve ever done is to stick around.” The most successful female artist of all time is here to refute the sniping.The show is biographical concept album as dance theatre. It begins, as Madonna did Read more ...