pop music
Kieron Tyler
During their original 1980 to 1984 lifespan as a recording unit, Soft Cell issued three albums, a mini-album, eleven singles and EP. There were also compilation appearances, bonus tracks on discs included with albums or singles (such as the 12-inch of Jimi Hendrix cover versions accompanying The Art of Falling Apart) and extended tracks which appeared on 12-inch singles. Everything could probably be collected on six CDs.The new box set Keychains & Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story features 10 discs, one of which is a DVD. The albums and the Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing mini-album are not Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2017 was a year in which Paul Weller reminded us all why he’s a force to be reckoned with. An impressive foray into the world of soundtracks (the score to Johnny Harris’s Jawbone) was followed by A Kind Revolution, which was, for the most part, a very impressive collection. This year sees yet another album from an artist who is clearly mining a rich seam of form. True Meanings is a surprising album. Let’s get one thing out of the way at the start: it’s very, very good – that’s not the surprise. Given his recent run, you’d expect this to be the case. No, the surprise is in the timbre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a stream of creative new albums pointed to how what had grown from pop music could be reframed. Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline embraced country music. The Band’s eponymous second album drew on and was integral to defining Americana. The first album by Crosby, Stills & Nash shied away from the increasingly harsh template embraced by rock.In contrast, and bridging the Atlantic, little was more harsh than the debut albums by The Stooges and Led Zeppelin. The year's boundary pushers were seemingly endless: Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad, Can’s Monster Movie, Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Paul Simon is currently traversing the globe on his Farewell Tour. His new album clearly accompanies that. It’s a thoughtful look backwards wherein Simon has plucked numbers from his catalogue he feels deserve another go-round, recording them with guest artists, often from the world of jazz (notably Wynton Marsalis). It is, by its nature, somewhat self-indulgent, for there are none of his most famous songs here. These are numbers he wants to bring out of the shadows; that he reckons are worth further attention. On occasion, he’s absolutely right.The album opens with "One Man’s Ceiling is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In May 1981, Japan played two nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. For NME’s Paul Morley, the high-profile shows at the prestige venue were notable as “Japan can fill two nights at the Odeon and they're not yet a hit group.” Reviewing them, he said their frontman David Sylvian “advances, dances and freezes in motion so like Ferry it's debasing, it's like he is a surgically exalted version of the original Bryan. After ten minutes of Japan’s teenybop Simple Minds material – sumptuous in parts, dank most of the time – it was time to go. Not even a piece the liquid Sylvian wrote with the Great [ Read more ...
Owen Richards
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man. This is not another biography on America’s first son, but a study on the persona, the myth and the brand that was created around him.Everyone has their own idea of who he was: the hip-swivelling rebel, the military hero, the irresistible leading man, the grotesque Vegas attraction. He was, in every complex and contradictory way, the living embodiment of the United States Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Once pleasingly described on the Flight of the Conchords radio show as "the King of New Zealand", Neil Finn has a new gift for his subjects (and the rest of the world, happily) in the form of this album, which sees him recording with son Liam for the first time. Neil and Liam have toured together a lot, joining forces in 2015 and sharing the setlists. They decided to continue the collaboration in the studio, with the curious Lightsleeper the result. The family theme (in both personnel and thematic terms) goes beyond father and son, though, with Sharon Finn – Neil’s wife and Liam’s mum – Read more ...
joe.muggs
This may be tempting fate, and minutes after publication of this she'll probably be arrested for stabbing a dog or something, but Ariana Grande seems like an abnormally benevolent presence in the superstar stratosphere. Even leaving aside her dignified and genuine-seeming reactions in the aftermath of the bombing at her Manchester concert, she generally has an air of unstarry, unforced enjoyment of what she does, which stands in stark contrast to the gimlet-eyed faux-sincerity of the Drakes, Taylor Swifts and Ed Sheerans of this world.She can also really, really sing. And not just in the way Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Initially, this month’s theartsdesk on Vinyl began with the sentence after this one, but it's so dry readers might drowse off, so I started with this one instead and would advise moving through the next one, just picking up the gist quickly... Discogs, a key hub for global record sales in physical formats, recently presented its Midyear Marketplace Analysis and Database Highlights for 2018, which reckons vinyl sales are up another 15% over the last year. Very boringly stated but good news, right? The biggest seller was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon which is predictable but it’s Read more ...
caspar.gomez
One of the biggest crowd roars of the night comes right at the start when Jake Shears runs onstage. He is wearing a grey top hat, a white tail-jacket with glittered lapel-edging, silver glittery trousers, a tight black sequinned vest top, and a bow tie on his bare neck. The 600 capacity Concorde 2, right on Brighton's seafront, is sold out. The audience had been singing along loudly with the immediate pre-show tune, “All That Jazz”, then cheered when the band walked on looking snappy in matching zig-zagged suits like tropical pyjamas. The bassist is songwriter/sometime pop star Mr Hudson and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once heard, Wimple Winch’s “Save my Soul” is never forgotten. The A-side of a flop single originally issued in June 1966, it is one of the most tightly coiled British records from the Sixties and has sudden explosions of tension suggesting the band are ready to punch anyone within reach. Late the previous year, The Who’s “My Generation” had taken pop music to new, hitherto unexplored, levels of aggression. “Save my Soul” went much further. It is a landmark.Nevertheless, before 1984 the Liverpool group's single was barely known. It had been included – in lo-fi – on the 1983 bootleg compilation Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dance music duo Gorgon City exist within a fickle market. It’s all very well to mooch about on a Saturday night in Woking to house music merging into pop, R&B-tinted, smooth, garage-flecked, touched with just a whiff of Ibiza’s hedonic promise, but does anyone know who makes it or actively care enough to pursue them? Gorgon City fired out a run of Top 20 singles in 2014, but haven’t had such attention for the songs thus far released from their second album. It is, however, no worse - and may even be slightly better - than its predecessor.In any case, their market changed years ago. Read more ...