pop music
Guy Oddy
Perhaps it’s because today’s economy often seems to reflect the nightmare of the late Seventies, but recent years have seen plenty of the original punks return to public attention with a renewed vigour. Whereas some, like support band The Rezillos, have reformed after a break of several decades, the Stranglers, despite a few line-up and stylistic changes, have never gone away and aren’t shy about playing a set of tunes drawn from their 40-year career.The Rezillos in fact, were a fine warm-up for the evening with their Banana Splits-like take on punk. Classics like “Somebody’s gonna get their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Simple Minds: Sparkle in the RainPlaying increasingly larger venues throughout 1983 had changed Simple Minds. “In places like that, 50,000 people, there’s just no room for subtlety, and there’s no need for it and there’s no want for it.” The quote from frontman Jim Kerr is telling.When Sparkle in the Rain was released in 1984, it made good on the promise of “Waterfront”, the single which trailed it. This was a new, heftier Simple Minds: a band retooled for stadia. “Someone recently described the record as 'art school rock with fantastic bombast',” says Kerr elsewhere in the book Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
“How will I sing us out of this sorrow?" Björk wails over jagged cello arpeggios, six songs into her string quartet-led break-up album Vulnicura. Though heartbreak may be the theme most often stewed and chewed up by singer-songwriters, optimism - a belief in music's healing power - is the driving force of this nine-track record.Though we might wish Björk cried iridescent neon tears, the album's emotions are familiar enough to imagine her your snotty chapped-cheeked self. Albeit psychologically twisted by an accompaniment of legato strings that collide erratically with squelching beats. " Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
These days, reflections on Madonna’s 30 years at the top of the pop podium may only be framed in terms of the pagan Triple Goddess: maiden, mother and crone – or, at least, that’s what the global reaction to The Fall That Was Heard Around The World® would lead one to believe. But with enough raunch among the 19 – nineteen! – tracks that make up the deluxe edition of Rebel Heart to make all three blush and a track which, guest rap from Nicki Minaj aside, is essentially a blow-by-blow reinterpretation of pop bad girl du jour Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”, it’s clear that the only Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The enduring appeal of Noel Gallagher isn't hard to fathom. His music is brimming with resolution and resolve; it does what we expect it to with a rewarding honesty and an often admirable lack of pretence. This meant that, on 2011’s Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, with its marked shift away from previous (morning) glories – particularly on its most successful tracks, such as “AKA… What a Life!” – there was still that particular sense of purpose and satisfying melodic structure. However, with all the recent talk of space jazz, saxophones and nights out with Morrissey, you'd be forgiven for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Zakary Thaks: It’s the End – The Definitive CollectionGalloping with the urgency of a sweat-flecked horse running a steeplechase, the choppy guitar riff takes early Kinks raunch and filters it through a testosterone-driven sensibility that won’t let up. The drums are unremitting. Then, a solo guitar peels off a berserk fistful of notes which Dave Davies would have been proud of. A key change raises the intensity level even higher. And then, at just over two minutes, the relentless performance grinds to a halt. Sixties garage rock at its finest, “Bad Girl” is 126 seconds of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Had it not been for the fact that Charli “XCX” Aitchison had struggled to find a hit of her own until last summer’s Fault in Our Stars-soundtracking “Boom Clap”, I’d be convinced that she had tapped into some secret formula for producing perfect pop hits. “I Love It”, the rabble-rousing breakup anthem she wrote for Swedish electropop duo Icona Pop and her attention-grabbing hook on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” share a distinguishable swagger, but had little impact on the negligible success of her 2013 major label debut True Romance. In the fickle world of pop music, that should have been enough to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There’s a danger in an artist having their work reinterpreted that the end result will be little more than a rough outline of the original. Look at Metallica’s axe job on the Velvet Underground for instance. Still, on the bright side, at least they increased the band’s "reach" to include jocks and morons.Following a series of live shows over the last few years, Throbbing Gristle alumni and art-dance legends Chris & Cosey were inundated with requests for recordings of the live versions of old songs and ended up complying, dressing up their back catalogue for a night out on the tiles.So, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tyrannosaurus Rex: My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages, Unicorn“I was just reflecting and talking about things most people thought or wanted to hear about at the time.” Marc Bolan’s comment about why Tyrannosaurus Rex became popular so quickly is heard in a brief BBC interview included as one of the extras on this new edition of My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, the summer 1968 debut album.Bolan himself, as the liner notes to the related reissue of Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages state, was astutely Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Meghan Trainor may not yet be a household name, but you’ll be familiar with her feelgood hit of last summer. “All About That Bass” is many things: insistent, catchy, possibly anti-feminist body-shaming – but it also sparked a little debate on my Twitter feed in the hour or so leading up to the Bells on New Year’s Eve. If “bass” is, as is clearly implied from the accompanying technicoloured video, a radio-friendly term for a sizeable arse, then what on earth is “treble”?Before you start to wonder whether Title delves deep into such existential questions, I’d better make it clear: what the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Powder: Ka-Pow! An Explosive Collection 1967–68It’s an instantly familiar sound. Crescendo follows crescendo, and power chord follows power chord. For The Who, “I Can see for Miles” was the apex of this style. But this is not The Who. Instead, it is a band from California called Powder whose shelved album from 1968 was crammed with thrilling, British-influenced gems. Like Todd Rundgren's contemporaneous band The Nazz, Powder filtered a British sensibility through an American outlook.Ka-Pow! collects the surviving recordings by Powder and the band they seamlessly evolved from, The Art Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2014 has seen a fair few late lunges for the line in the race to be my best album of the year (a contest fought more for prestige and honour than hard cash in all honesty). I’m a mild-mannered sort, and hate disappointing the recording artists clearly hanging on my every word for validation, but Theo Parrish, Spectres and Craig Bratley will have to settle for commendations along with Goat, The War on Drugs, Peaking Lights and Klaus Johann Grobe this time. Jane Weaver’s The Silver Globe has taken gold – and done so with clear distance between it and the rest of the pack.Where the concept Read more ...