pop music
Thomas H. Green
It seems to me that Esben and the Witch would like to perform in absolute darkness. Or perhaps in silhouette behind a screen like an oriental shadowplay. Such a theatrical device might even suit their dark, menacing music. Instead, two of the three band members have to make do with a curtain of hair between themselves and the audience. Young and shy, they deliver their moody, occasionally explosive music with low-key confidence and, in fact, their slight awkwardness in front of a crowd only enhances the edginess of the atmospherics.Outside, the Brighton night is aptly overcome with mist which Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
James Blake's "Limit to Your Love" was a bolt out of the blue at the end of last year, perhaps even a quantum leap in soul'n'bass culture in the same way that Massive Attack or Roni Size once were. This fact was swiftly acknowledged in various New Face of 2011 polls which Blake started cropping up in.The 22-year-old from Enfield had quietly built a respectable reputation with some of dubstep's deepest heads (such as Ramadanman and Mount Kimbie) but his way with a keyboard on "Limit to Your Love" had a Spartan Classicism that was strikingly stark, different and effective, particularly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bleu Venise might be recorded in LA with figures familiar from Joni Mitchell, Madeleine Peyroux and Melody Gardot albums, but this French music takes from the Anglophone world without sacrificing its identity. Daphné’s Bleu Venise is modern, literate, chanson-based pop.Daphné’s break came in 2003 after she met Benjamin Biolay, France’s all-purpose and ubiquitous musical mover and shaker. He also kick-started the career of Keren Ann. But Biolay casts no shadows; his collaborators and protégés move on and flourish without him. Unlike Keren Ann and despite previous collaborations with The Divine Read more ...
Russ Coffey
P J Harvey has been shouty, and she has been tremulous. She has crunched guitars and caressed pianos. She has explored almost every emotion experienced on an ever-evolving musical journey. But on Let England Shake, her first solo album for almost four years, she’s turned away from the world within to give her take on the island on which she lives. And this bittersweet reflection feels like the culmination of everything she's been before.There’s nothing as radio-friendly here as 2000’s "Good Fortune", but it’s still her most immediate and accessible album yet. And that’s down to the beauty of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A midwinter night’s dream at the Barbican. Those who like their pop music performed by chaps with jeans, preferably gazing at their shoes, and are attached to certain ideas of authenticity would have run screaming for the exit. The Irrepressibles were pop as icy spectacle, as dizzying melodrama, while Gabby Young & Other Animals were raiding the musical dressing-up box and emerging with bits of French chanson, German cabaret and slinky tangos, and having a ball doing it.Gabby Young’s band created their own party atmosphere and invited the audience along. Their brand of recession chic Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There’s a story doing the rounds that, while good, Joan Wasser’s latest fails to hit the highs of her other albums as Police Woman. Don’t believe it; it’s pure snobbery. In a world of MP3s this is a gorgeous warm album that will sound forever vinyl. When first she ditched her violin in favour of becoming a singer-songwriter, Wasser claimed she wanted to create the sound of old Al Green records. Instead, she gave us fragile torch songs that sounded like PJ Harvey and Cat Power learning songwriting from Laurie Anderson. Here, finally, however, is the fruit of that earlier ambition.It is not an Read more ...
joe.muggs
While the world of indie bands is, with a very few exceptions, colonised by posh kids with well-conditioned hair and earnest agendas, this country's pop is feeling more like the voice of those who actually consume it than it has for many years. The Tinchys, the Tinies and the N-Dubzes might make music of variable quality, but they provide something that ordinary young people can aspire to that is not far removed from their own lives, and have added a dose of youthful vim to the charts to boot.Which brings us to Aggro Santos.com – the sound of a cheeky, cheery young rapper grabbing life with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The summer 1976 hit “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was Kiki Dee’s chart highlight. The duet with Elton John was inescapable, happy, upbeat, irresistible. A Number One, it peaked a chart run on his Rocket Records that began with her 1973 cover of Veronique Sansons’s “Amoureuse”. “I’ve Got the Music in Me” then hit the Top 20 in 1974. Kiki still plays live and records, but the treasure-filled and essential I’m Kiki Dee - The Fontana Years 1963-1968 – out this week – reveals her musical prehistory for the first time. There’s more to Kiki than the hits.Bradford-born Pauline Matthews signed with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last album from Brighton’s The Go! Team, 2007’s Proof of Youth, followed the template set by Thunder, Lightning, Strike, their 2004 debut. AD-HD sample-driven songs met Northern soul and hip hop with call-response vocals and melodies that could have graced any Sixties girl group. All at 80 miles an hour with xylophones and brass. Third time round, Go! Team mainman Ian Parton has stretched out without sacrificing what was great in the first place. Rolling Blackouts is The Go! Team’s best album so far.This might be due to a change in Parton’s approach to songwriting. He’s written from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month we have some unjustly hyped rubbish electro-pop, some unjustly ignored brilliant eletcro-pop, some postmodern retro-disco, some dubstep, some grime, some sampledelic New York punk, and, at the top of the pile, one of Britain's brightest young actors proves he's equally adept on the microphone. Thomas H Green and Joe Muggs plough loudly through the lot with glee and the odd barbed word.Riz MC All in the Ghetto (Confirm/Ignore)
So actors shouldn't try to become hip-hop MCs, right? Remember Warren Beatty in Bulworth? Riz Ahmed, however, was an MC long before he made his name with a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The annals of rock’n’roll are littered with complacency, fading stars, and acts who’ve had it and then lost it, forever. So, after 20 years, what makes the Manics different? How come they’re still turning out hit albums? Possibly it’s their hand-on-heart, Welsh-valley principles. Maybe it’s the way they find libraries as interesting a subject as love. Or perhaps it’s the way that they keep recovering from the brink of near self-destruction. Listening to them last night, though, something else became clear.In their souls they still appear to be 19. It showed in their choice of first song, “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luke Haines holds a small cassette player to the microphone, switches it on and the sounds of birds are heard. It’s “Me and the Birds”, one of his new Outsider Music songs. His old Britpop-era band The Auteurs were guitar pop. His next outfit, Baader Meinhof, were edgier, noisier. After that, Black Box Recorder were artier. But this is beyond any of that. He sings of drinking cocktails in the lounge of a Travelodge with the birds he’s heard outside his window. The Suede reunion wasn’t like this.Although The Auteurs cropped up just before Britpop, Haines was more arch than the aiming-high Blur Read more ...