pop music
Kieron Tyler
Liverpool’s The Cryin’ Shames were responsible for two of mid-Sixties Britain’s most striking single’s tracks. The February 1966 top side “Please Stay” was so eerie, so wraithlike it came across as an attempt to channel the experience of making successful contact with a spirit presence. “Come on Back,” an unpolished September 1966 B-side, could pass for US garage punk at its most paint-peeling.The Cryin’ Shames only issued three singles, so that’s a pretty high batting average in terms of quality. Add in the crunching Bob Dylan re-write “What’s News Pussycat” (sic), “Please Stay’s” flip, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further turned by The Beatles and The Mamas & the Papas. A copy of “God Only Knows’s” parent album Pet Sounds was bought.Newly thrilled by a pop she saw as more innovative than a jazz scene she thought too full of Ornette Coleman imitators, she wrote a song titled “Think of Rain.” In tune with the burgeoning harmony pop style, its baroque leanings and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
US electronic perennial Moby has had a good run. He was a rave culture phenomenon from 1991 onwards. He blew that with a vegan punk album. He released Play at the decade’s end and sold millions. He then had decadent superstar years, a run of huge, often juicy albums. He quit booze’n’drugs in 2008. His music blossomed again, culminating in a trio of albums raging at the state of his nation. Following the last of these in 2018, not much has held the attention. Always Centered at Night has moments that do.Those wanting energy and urgency should look elsewhere. This is mostly a downtempo Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHAriel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)Two offbeat albums from the uncategorisable Hamburg label BB*Island. They are home to the literary indie outfit The Burning Hell. The central figures of that band are Canadian singers Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt (assuming the latter is Canadian as Google wouldn't tell me). Together, their second album is a concept affair loaded with brilliant, poignant freak-folk responses to contemporary capitalism, the gig economy and similar. These include the inspiring title track “ Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was a point in this pop revival jaunt where you could feel members of the crowd wince. Not for the performance, but because Nicola Roberts introduced a song by mentioning it was from “the Chemistry album, which came out 19 years ago”. You could almost feel some in the crowd recoil, as if expecting to crumble to dust at that confirmation of the passing of time.Reunion gigs can often carry that nostalgic air, and it was more pronounced than most at this show, part of the girl group’s first tour in 11 years. The sad passing of Sarah Harding due to breast cancer, here remembered through big Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Charli XCX has been making scrambled eggs of pop for a decade. She’s written songs for/with artists including, but far from limited to, Lady Gaga, Iggy Azalea, Giorgio Moroder, Selina Gomez, BTS, David Guetta, Ty Dolla $ign, Blondie, Gwen Stefani, Raye, BTS, Camila Cabello, Benga, Caroline Polachek, Haim, and James Blunt. And then there’s her own albums. Six of them, including this one. But she’s not yet a full star. At least that’s what she reckons. And that’s what her enjoyably abrasive new album is about.The aforementioned abrasiveness is sonic. XCX’s lyrics are thoughtful, a navigation of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We hope if you like it, you'll buy it,” says Paul McCartney. It’s 4 April 1963 and The Beatles are on stage and about to perform their third single “From Me to You.” It’s out in a week.To his left, John Lennon instantly responds to the entreaty. “And if you don't like it,” he retorts. “Don't buy it.”This atypical approach to promotion was witnessed by the audience gathered in the Roxburgh Hall of Stowe School, a Buckinghamshire all-boys institution hosting a late afternoon concert nominated as “probably The Beatles most unusual live gig” by the foremost Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Savage's The Secret Public How The LGBTQ+ Aesthetic Shaped Pop Culture 1955-1979 accompanies the titular author/historian/journalist’s book of almost the same name. The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) and this 41-track double CD each track exactly what their titles say, drilling into what has often paralleled or underlain yet repeatedly influenced a constantly evolving mainstream.Little Richard is seen on the cover of the book and the compilation. Other figures crop up twice on the CD set: British producer and songwriter Joe Meek (with Joe Meek Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was – let’s see – 63 years ago today that Brian Wilson taught the band to play. Fabled for their resplendent harmonies and ecstatic hymning of the sun-kissed California dream, the Beach Boys seemed to represent everything golden and glorious about the mythic American West Coast. If you lived in Detroit or Deptford, it looked like a wonderland indeed.But as we now know from a variety of books and documentaries, the history of the Beach Boys would prove to be long, tortuous and bittersweet, littered with casualties and various kinds of heartbreak. Disney+ have brought the heavy mob in to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s a long way to the middle. Jack Savoretti has worked hard to get there. He’s grafted. His first album, 2007’s Between the Minds, hinted that his musical DNA bestrode early-Seventies Los Angeles, those Topanga Canyon strummers and such, but melded to something much more BBC Radio 2. It took a while for his core audience, the Dermot O’Leary mum-core massive, to find him. A nice fella and a looker, by about five years ago, they had. His last two albums were chart-toppers. But now he’s challenging the fanbase with an Italian language album. “Challenging” may be the wrong word. Miss Italia is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We’re all grown up, but we’re still little.”Little Girls, the band the Maso sisters formed and fronted was active in Los Angeles over 1980 to 1985. On vinyl, though, the evidence for their existence was limited. In 1981, they contributed a track to the compilation album Rodney On The ROQ Volume 2 – named after Bingenheimer and KROQ, the radio station he worked for. Two years on, there was the six-track, 12-inch EP Thank Heaven! Finally, in 1985, a Read more ...