pop music
Liz Thomson
What’s not to like about To My Roots, the third album by singer-songwriter Emma Stevens? That’s the problem. Not just her problem, of course, but the problem with so many DIY indie artists who release albums, often crowdfunded (as this was), pick-up download traffic, sell albums off the back of tours, and maybe find a champion on mainstream radio. It's bland. Nothing to dislike but nothing to hook you in. Competent, but not memorable.Terry Wogan, who championed Eva Cassidy (unexceptional talent, life cut tragically short) and Beth Nielsen Chapman (exemplary singer-songwriter), described Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel hadn't set out to make a full-length follow-up to last year's Can You Pass the Knife? mini-LP, but once he had a backbone of songs, events sort of got away from him. I Love You, Go Away is the result and its nine songs, spread over nearly 40 minutes, appear, in one way or another, to deal with loss – of love, identity and self.The title of opener “New Heimat”, referencing the German word for the feeling of belonging to a place, suggests a new beginning of sorts. While the lines “Home is where the hatred is” and “No more fighting for the state/No more bleeding Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“You can't hate on Harris, he is summer king,” says an anti-troll post on a thread announcing the fifth album by the 6’5” Scottish super-producer known to his mum as Adam Wiles. But it would be easy to do just that. Calvin Harris is one of the key people responsible for turning chart pop into earbud shite, for fast-forwarding dance music into compressed saccharine trop-house/EDM candy. He, Will.I.Am and David Guetta have fucked it for anyone who wants to turn on daytime radio and not hear plastic suburban dancefloor toilet.In his 10-year career, Harris has become ubiquitous, worth tens of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Gossip – the trio fronted by Beth Ditto from 1999 until last year – always felt a bit overshadowed by their 2006 breakthrough hit “Standing in the Way of Control”. It's understandable: it still stands up now as a bona fide banger, in original form or the Soulwax remix that soundtracked a million Skins trailers and captured a dayglo period when indie rock and rave culture were “having a bit of a moment” together, and it absolutely deserved its ubiquity. But it's also unfair, as Gossip were a force of nature live, made plenty of excellent records, and were generally way more than one-hit- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a 1967 headline, The Washington Post pegged Lynn Castle as a “Shapely Blonde in Blue Jeans, Popular Barber in Hollywood”. She had attracted attention as the hairdresser of choice for The Byrds, The Monkees, Del Shannon, Sonny & Cher and Stephen Stills. Known as “The Lady Barber”, she also cut the hair of music business movers and shakers Lee Hazlewood and Monkees’ songwriters Boyce and Hart.The Washington Post had no interest in her other life as a songwriter. Her song “Teeny Tiny Gnome” (originally titled “Kicking Stones”) was recorded by The Monkees but wasn’t issued until 1987. In Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The statistics of Whitney Houston’s career are flabbergasting in this post-CD era. Her 1985 debut album sold 25 million copies. “I Will Always Love You” is the best-selling single by a female artist in music biz history. Its parent album, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, sold more than one million copies in a week. She had more consecutive Number One hits than The Beatles. She has sold 200 million records worldwide.But, as Nick Broomfield’s new documentary reveals, none of this could protect her from a grasping family, parasitic hangers-on, and an unfaithful husband who aided and abetted her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fat cigar at hand, Jim Morrison is pondering the future of music. “Maybe it might rely heavily on electronics, tapes,” he says. “I can envision maybe one person with a lot of machines, tapes and electronic set ups, singing or speaking and using machines.” When that prediction was first broadcast in late June 1969, what he described may have seemed outlandish but it came to pass. He can’t be held responsible for Howard Jones, but whole genres of music evolved which revolved around solo artists utilising, indeed, machines, tapes and electronic set ups.However, at that moment, it’s unlikely many Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. It’s utter balls, of course. When someone’s tired of London, they’re probably just knackered and wouldn’t mind living somewhere with more trees, fewer people and in a house that isn’t partitioned off by papier-maché walls. For many, returning, like salmon to the counties that spawned them, is the obvious move. Sure, they know that they’ll die there, but there’s an almost magnetic force at work – an attraction that is both complicated and impossible to ignore.For Saint Etienne's ninth album, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately. Modern classical, often computer-treated, is on the rise, recalling the long ago days when tweedy collectors would have chests of classical to dig into on Sunday afternoons, place on weighty old stereos, and sit quietly, eyes closed, contemplating the eternal verities (well, I knew one older gent who did that, back Read more ...
james.woodall
This is the most frustrating film. It’s probably no fault of the makers, but it’s rare to have to assess a documentary for what it doesn’t have. Over nearly two hours of celebrating the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Beatles period – late 1966 to their record label Apple taking off in 1968 – there is not a note of the group’s music.Well, alright, in the opening animated credits you detect a phrasal shimmer of George Harrison’s sitar-driven “Within You Without You”, but that’s it. The score, by Andre Barreau and Evan Jolly, is a confection of atmospherics and rhythms that could be the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the producer of the early Kinks and Who, Shel Talmy’s status as one of British pop’s most important figures is assured. He is, though, American. Despite being integral to the mid-Sixties boom years when the Limeys took over, he was born in Chicago in 1937.It didn’t stop with his two most successful clients. As the new collection Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production more-than amply demonstrates, his ears were always to the ground and the lesser knowns he worked with were as striking as the Top Ten acts. Pitch The First Gear’s sandpaper-rough version of “A Certain Girl” against The Kinks at Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Sacred and profane, trivial and profound blissfully combine in this irresistible, Olivier Award-winning tale of choirgirls gone wild. Lee Hall, of Billy Elliot fame, adapts Alan Warner’s 1998 novel with a similarly shrewd grasp of youthful hope amidst challenging circumstances, and with the arts once again proving a vital escape – albeit, in this case, temporarily.In a whirlwind 24 hours, a group of 17-year-olds travels from Oban to Edinburgh for a choral competition. Angelically voiced they may be, but they’re also here to “go mental”: cue the flaming sambuca, sexual experimentation, unholy Read more ...