pop music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When, back in October, Donald Trump sulked that his political opponent was being a “nasty woman”, little did he realise the cultural impact it would have.Those two words – a fit of pique that was impressive even amidst an ever-lengthening line of cry baby incidents from the man who went on to become president-elect of the United States of America – have become a rallying cry of sorts for those of us unprepared to take the 12-month garbage fire that was 2016 lying down. Of course, you can get Nasty Woman mugs, T-shirts and baseball caps. The name has lent itself to essays and anthologies. But Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Rachael Yamagata likes to take her time. Tightrope Walker comes a full five years after the American songwriter’s last release, and it’s an album that demands to be listened to with as much care as clearly went into its creation. Like the French daredevil Philippe Petit, for whom her latest album was apparently named, slow and steady wins the race for Yamagata: it’s there in its staid, rhythmic opener and title track; and it’s there in the atmospheric, but no less deliberate, “Money Fame Thunder”, which closes proceedings with another nod to its central character.Best known for the sort of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“My main talent is for turning trauma into something showbizzy,” said Robbie Williams in an interview to plug this, his 11th studio album. While a point immediately apparent to anyone with a passing knowledge of his work, it also speaks volumes about why, with The Heavy Entertainment Show, he has produced an album that never tries to turn his feelings into something universal, opting instead to give us a guided tour of his emotions using musical emojis.While John Grant (who contributes one of the album’s best moments in “I Don’t Want to Hurt You”) is prepared to open wounds down to the bone Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the reformed Undertones, with Paul McLoone replacing original singer Feargal Sharkey, have been a popular live draw since 1999, John Peel’s anointing of “Teenage Kicks” from their debut EP as his favourite recording suggests this is what they were about: a single, timeless song.Of course, it was not. The singles or lead EP tracks which followed – “Get Over You”, “Jimmy Jimmy”, “Here Comes Summer” and “You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It)” – were as wonderful. So were their first two albums. The recent publication of the engaging Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone, bassist Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For decades Brian Wilson was depicted as the mad, lost genius of the Beach Boys, but these days, at 74, he's looking more like one of pop's great survivors. After all, he has comprehensively outlived his brothers Dennis and Carl, and has restored his reputation with deliriously acclaimed performances of Pet Sounds and the salvaged Sixties masterpiece SMiLE. He gets invited to all-star galas and awards ceremonies at the White House.Of course, a lot of care and attention (much of it medical and psychiatric) has gone into bringing Wilson back from the brink. In the opening chapter of this Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After the success of 2014’s Aquostic, which saw the band shift nearly half a million albums, Status Quo are back with more of the same to see whether they can repeat the trick.The big lie about the Quo is that their entire career has been based on this very premise: turf out a load of three-chord, feelgood, 12-bar boogie blues; tour; repeat to fade. In fact, there’s rather more to them than that, and I don’t mean the reedy psych of “Matchstick Men” either. Transitional, early Seventies LPs Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon and Dog of Two Head, document a band who could write and play groove-led blues Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Readers of a certain type of lifestyle blog will be familiar with the concept of hygge. The Danish word, which refers to a state of cosiness and good cheer in which to survive the winter months, is nothing new – but this year, it’s popping up everywhere badged as a lifestyle trend. Hygge in 2016 is grey-knit blankets that look homemade, but which retail for £100; it’s steaming, monogrammed mugs of hot chocolate and rose-gold pillows. And it’s In Winter, Katie Melua’s collaboration with the Gori Women’s Choir – basic, yes; but there’s a reason nobody can resist the tie-in candle collaboration Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone.” So began the liner notes to Philosophy of the World, The Shaggs' sole album. Not many people read the words or heard the music when it was pressed in 1969. Only 100 copies were made. It was meant to be 1000, but a murky business deal meant the balance of 900 never showed up.The Shaggs were Betty, Dorothy and Helen Wiggin, three sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire. Their father, Austin Wiggin Jr., was their champion and took them into Revere, Massachusetts’ Fleetwood Recording Studio in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“If tears were diamonds, I’d be a rich man now.” Barry Gibb, that famous falsetto still pitch-perfect, isn’t mincing his words on the solo album that, at the age of 70, he never expected to be left to make. Whether writing with the Bee Gees or his youngest brother Andy, Gibb’s songwriting has almost always been a collaborative affair - and so it’s hardly a surprise to see sons Stephen and Ashley show up with co-writing credits.Despite a title that suggests learning to live in the present moment as a central theme, In The Now finds Gibb in a not-unexpectedly sombre mood. The album is dedicated Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“In time, you’ll be mine,” sings Van Morrison in the opening song to his first new collection in four years. That line sets the tone for a warm bath of an album, a genial, reflective, though always finely honed stroll through the themes and styles of the last four decades. All but one of these are new songs, and the four years they have taken to write have been well spent, though we are, both musically and lyrically, looking backwards. Stylistically, it’s a kind of tribute to the genres he’s mined over the years. There’s bluesy harmonica and piano on “Going Down to Bangor”, while Read more ...
james.woodall
It could be a book, film, TV or radio piece, essay or exhibition. If it’s about or based on The Beatles, the question is always the same: how on earth can anything new be said? In the case of Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, surprisingly quite a lot, is the answer.Factually, there’s little with which the Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind director can grab even the most noddingly acquainted. Four boys from very modest backgrounds test themselves as a band in the early 1960s in Europe’s raciest city (Hamburg), get noticed in a scuzzy Liverpool basement by a posh shopkeeper (Brian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beach Boys signed with Capitol Records on 24 May 1962. Early the next month, their first single for the label became “409”/”Surfin’ Safari”. It was not their debut release. The “Surfin'”/ “Luau” single had been issued in November 1961 by Candix.Before Capitol, Hite and Dorinda Morgan had brought them into a recording studio. The former was a music publisher known by Murry Wilson, the father of Beach Boys’ Brian, Carl and Dennis. When the Morgans first encountered the band, they were known as The Pendeltones. Without being asked, they were renamed The Beach Boys for the release of "Surfin Read more ...