pop music
Kieron Tyler
John Lennon does not appear on “Love You Too” and “For No One”. With “Taxman”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Here, There and Everywhere”, “Good Day Sunshine” and “I Want to Tell You”, his contributions are limited to backing vocals and, on odd occasions, some percussion too. He appears semi-detached from seven of Revolver’s 14 tracks.This realisation comes after reading the handsome book accompanying the Revolver box set. The pages with the track-by-track commentary have headings above each section of text, listing dates of recording, the studios used, the personnel and who played what. Leaf through, and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
First Aid Kit have grown up and moved on. So says the cheerful conglomeration of lockdown-emergent pop sounds that makes up their fifth studio album.The record has the movement of a road trip around the USA with kitschy Americana, echoes of Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty, folk and acoustic country. It makes you feel as though you’re driving down open highways under warm starry skies with the roof down. But Palomino is actually the first album Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg have recorded in Sweden since their debut, The Big Black & The Blue 12 years ago.Written during the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Taylor Swift’s transitions have become imperious, from the woody hush of her collaborations with The National’s Aaron Dessner, Folklore and Evermore, to the remade reclamations of her early work. Working at pace, she has assembled an impregnable coalition of critical acceptance and creative range.Her contemporary country roots remain in her focus on relatable personal stories, pushed now into a hyper-realm of total fame and universally pored-over relationships, dropped like paper trails in her lyrics. She confesses with wry assertion, a female star taking everything in her messy stride. Like Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the third week of April 1967, Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid” topped the UK’s single’s chart. Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String” was number two, and The Monkees’ “A Little Bit me a Little Bit You” snapped at her heels. Englebert Humperdinck’s recent number one “Release me” was at number five. All very pop, very mainstream.The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze” was in running too then, as were Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne” and The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” / “Strawberry Fields Forever”. But other chart entries like Whistling Jack Smith’s “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman”, The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the start of the song “Two Ribbons” Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth of Let’s Eat Grandma do a brief schoolyard pat-a-cake hand-game. The song is a guileless ode to female friendship, love even, a paean to their own bond, which was strained at one point by the travails of a music career.Of course, it’s a piece of theatre, but the pair also emanate a very real sense of young women enjoying each other’s company, revelling in the sheer creative fun they have together. It’s a big part of their appeal. Kate Bush would be proud of them.Three albums into their career, the Norfolk duo are still Read more ...
Barney Harsent
You’d be within your rights to imagine that Direction of the Heart, the follow-up to 2018’s patchy-but-decent Walk Between Worlds, would see the Simple Minds twin engine of Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill pull on billowing white shirts and head for the nearest massive windswept stadium, filling it to the brim with widescreen synths, anthemic singalong choruses and a staggering extravagance of emotion.And you’d be about right. After all, when you get to album number 18, no one’s expecting a volte-face, and no one particularly wants one either. Similarly, however, no one expects a classic. So it Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Rarely will the bar staff at the Glasgow Barrowland have had an easier night. The crowd for Beabadoobee was so youthful that the vibe felt more like a school disco at times, right down to clusters of parents at the back and on the sidelines alternating between keeping a wary eye on proceedings and burying themselves in their phones. Their offspring, meanwhile, were racing to the front eagerly, leaving the usually busy bar areas deserted.Given wild cheering greeted a roadie checking a guitar, it was no surprise that the actual appearance of Beatrice Laus brought on hysteria, both vocally and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are many reasons that I am obsessed with Florence Shaw. It's not just that as a long time sufferer of Resting-Bitch-Face I identify hard with her deadpan nonchalance, it's also pure props that she's brought spoken-word-set-to-music into the mainstream.Shaw fronts the band Dry Cleaning, a foursome with talent as luscious as their combined hair condition. The group's speech/song style occupies similar territory to Wet Leg, Sleaford Mods, Black Country and Yard Act. Their tracks consist of totally random musings that swing between barbed, bewildered, sarcastic and exhausted, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Does the world need to hear more from Red Hot Chili Peppers? Outside the bouncin’ bro’ fanbase, a regular consensus is that, despite being one of the biggest bands in the world, doing their global stadium rock thing – with free added funk! – achieving the highest level of commercial success, they're not of actual interest.Then they release two very long albums within six months of each other, Return of the Dream Canteen being the second. Who the hell needs that? Turns out that anyone with an ear for joyously executed West Coast-flavoured pop-rock just might.The twofold keys to its Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 1975 are always looking for a way to corral Matty Healy’s ambition, to bring focus to his scattershot mind, to perhaps after all manage a generational address commensurate with his half-serious dreams of what a band can still be.It was telling how easily their previous, sprawling double-album Notes On a Conditional Form (2020) tallied with lockdown’s insular alienation, Healy and co-writer George Daniel surrendering to a sense of rudderless drift with archly shrugged shoulders, seeing deficient attention and affectless ennui as promising themes. Being Funny in a Foreign Language is, after Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Candy Company. Evergreen Tangerine. The Lollipop Fantasy. The Pretty People. The Primrose Circus. “It's a Groovy World.” “Meadows and Flowers.” “Summer Flower (She's on my Mind).”The band names and song titles don’t telegraph heaviness. The 24-track comp Trip On Me - Soft Psych & Sunshine digs into strata of late Sixties American pop which lay beneath similarly minded hit-makers like The Association, The Brooklyn Bridge, Harper’s Bizarre and Spanky And Our Gang. Soft rock – not in the Seventies way of Bread – and sunshine pop are labels capturing it. As did harmony pop before those Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s a minor tragedy that Yeah Yeah Yeahs arrived just in time to be bundled in with a spurious “new rock revolution,” because they were so much more than rock. The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Libertines all may have had decent enough songs, but all were ultimately extremely trad rock, sonically living in mythical pasts.But YYYs were anything but that: they were explosively in-the-now, perfectly able to use classic rock and punk tropes as tools but never beholden to them. Indeed they even sounded less retro than their more electronic NYC hipster contemporaries LCD Soundsystem. Not Read more ...