pop music
Adam Sweeting
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-and-radio-play model is long gone, and Eilish’s high-speed ride was boosted by a deal with Apple Music, releases of individual tracks on SoundCloud and YouTube and hefty promotional support from Spotify. The pitch had been rolled for the arrival of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in 2019, which became a monster seller and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Interest in Britney Spears has not waned. The #FreeBritney movement, the new documentary Framing Britney Spears, and the ongoing controversy around her father’s legal conservatorship have served to put her back in the public eye over the last year. Not that she ever drifted very far away from it. She is, after all, Britney Spears. Eight years ago, theartsdesk offered an overview of her career via her videos. We now revisit it. Despite many dismissing her output as empty fluff, I argued then that “there's a rich story to be told, reflecting the paradoxical nature of the woman herself and Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Composed in the first lockdown, and recorded remotely, the seventh album from Newcastle’s Maxïmo Park was produced by Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Deerhunter). But it is not so much a record of the times as a snapshot of a time in the band's lives.And it opens strongly with a typically jerky piece of indie pop considering ageing in an exhausting world “As you can clearly see/I’ve lost some luminosity/I hadn’t bargained for such intensity,” Paul Smith sings in "Partly of My Making", still with the magical accent. I think we can all get behind that right now. Given our times, you Read more ...
joe.muggs
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But it has also been rewarding – and looking back over the 10 years of Disc of the Day reviews has been a good chance to remind ourselves of that. One thing in particular that drew me into the collective when it was founded, and has kept me going throughout, was the understanding that artistic forms would be treated with equal respect and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Continuing our week of pieces celebrating the 10th birthday of theartsdesk’s album reviews section, today it’s time to ‘fess up! Seven of our regular reviewers reflect on occasions when, in retrospect, their writing did not correctly sum up the music in question. Yes. It happens. Even to us!The Black Keys - El Camino – by Russ CoffeyContext, in music, explains a lot: it’s why mediocre melodies heard at the right time can send a shiver down your spine, while total bangers, experienced at the wrong moment, leave you cold. That’s pretty much what happened when I received my copy of The Black Read more ...
theartsdesk
On Valentine’s Day 2011 Disc of the Day album reviews sprang into being, and has been solidly reviewing five albums a week ever since. Out of the many thousands, which ones did we rate the most? To mark 10 years since its inception, 12 of theartsdesk’s music writers mark the occasion by choosing an Album of the Decade. They appear in alphabetical order by writer.Alt-J – An Awesome Wave – by Russ CoffeyThe early 2010s was a period when UK rock music slowly lost its swagger. The harsh economic climate meant songwriters increasingly forgot about the good times; instead, they turned their minds Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into theartsdesk’s front page design, where it still resides today. By the end of the year, we’d introduced the now-obligatory stars-out-of-five system, keeping in the swim with other reviewing media. Since then, Disc of the Day has covered approximately 2600 albums and, before COVID, when the tube trains were running, it gave me great pleasure to see those Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s difficult to know where to start with Sia’s Music. The album is billed as a collection of songs “from and inspired by” the film of the same name – so not a soundtrack, except for when it is. It tracks range from candy coated to overly earnest; liberated to sexless; pop fun to cinematic; oblique storytelling to big-name co-writes – and yet, as delivered in the Australian singer’s distinctive, powerful voice, have a tendency to blur into one.The album starts strongly with “Together”. Co-written with star producer Jack Antonoff, it’s a huge pop number that taps into both artists’ Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Slowthai’s debut Nothing Great About Britain was both strikingly intimate and anarchic. He rapped about his childhood and British inequality over grime beats that sounded as if they were falling apart around him. Here "abrasive" and "insightful" coexisted within the same songs effortlessly.On TYRON, slowthai divides these two attributes, splitting the album into a raucous first half and a sombre second. The caps lock is used to hammer home this overarching theme of dualism.The first half delivers the mosh pit energy that slowthai does so well. The dizzying instrumentals are excellent. On “45 Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s odd that there’s still no name for the wave of genre-agnostic British bands of the '00s. Not manic enough to be nu rave, way too interesting for the retro-guitar nu rock revolution / landfill indie tsunami, the likes of Hot Chip, Metronomy, Friendly Fires, Simian and the super-louche Wild Beasts between them mapped out a new area of psychedelic pop. And into this in 2009 came the Scottish / Northern Irish / English band Django Django, a perfect fit into this unnamed movement with their winsome melodies and ability to fold everything from psyche-folk to acid house to rockabilly into their Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Staves – Emily, Jessica, and Camilla Staveley-Taylor – have routinely been described as “an indie folk act”, and while the term folk has undergone a lot of stretching over the years the band’s first two albums – Dead & Born & Grown and If I Was – could broadly be said to fit, their latest, Good Woman, requires redefinition.The album – recorded in London with producer John Congleton – comes after a six-year gap, though the three sisters began writing the material for it in 2017. But matters of life, death and birth intervened, leading to the sisters regrouping in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Dorian Benediction” begins with a muted organ and spectral chorale. Minimal drums, an electric piano, vibes, melancholy saxophone and a jazzy solo guitar fill out the picture. Over its four-and-a-half minutes, the atmosphere is haunted and haunting. This is music which appears to have seeped from the walls of a baroque church. It’s the final track of The Free Design’s third album, 1969’s Heaven / Earth.“An Elegy” is more direct but still as mysterious. It’s also jazzy and strings colour the arrangement, but there’s an epic quality as the song moves though a series of crescendos. This time, Read more ...