pop music
Kieron Tyler
Finland’s album of the year, the number one, gold-selling and best-of-2014 poll-topper Pepe & Saimaa, has barely registered elsewhere. Probably not a crime but a damn shame nonetheless as the album, released in May, is undoubtedly an all-time great. Despite being entirely in Finnish, Pepe & Saimaa is crammed with beatific melodies carried by an emotive, warm voice evoking pre-falsetto Bee Gees, David Bowie, Scott Walker and Brian Wilson. The voice seamlessly meshes with music nodding to mid-Seventies Kraftwerk, similarly dated Isley Brothers and The Beach Boys. With full orchestration Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are, probably, two things standing in the way of Against Me! topping as many best-of lists as they deserve to this year: firstly, the January release date, which tends to lead to many fine records being abandoned for the newest and shiniest; and secondly, the tortuous route it found to release at all. Label issues, intra-band politics and the small matter of the additional attention paid to the band's songwriter and frontwoman Laura Jane Grace's first album since coming out as transgender in 2012. However, right from the thudding, drums-only beginnings of the album's opening salvo (" Read more ...
Matthew Wright
At least the concept is more catchy than the title, which won’t be tripping off DJing lips. A mixtape intended to let the band flex its (well-concealed?) experimental muscles, this features collaborations with artists from Haim to Angel Haze and MNEK. It promises intriguing new blends of musical colour and texture, but too many songs are characterised by windy, wailing, reverb-heavy synth and vocals. “Axe to Grind”, featuring Tyde, is disappointingly blunt-edged, with an attractive palette of voices but no shape. “Torn Apart” is another ragbag of wailing synths and vocals. “Fall Into Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With just over two weeks to Christmas, thoughts might be turning to which of the deluge of 2014’s reissues might be suitable as a gift, worth putting on your own wish-list for Santa or even merit buying for yourself. So if help is needed, theartsdesk is happy to provide a one-stop guide to the essential reissues covered so far this year.Normal service will resume next week with a look at John Grant’s old band The Czars. The week after we will consider Millions Like Us, a box set dedicated to, as it is helpfully subtitled, “the Mod Revival 1977–89”. Following that will be a collection Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The subject of The Possibilities are Endless does not appear until 24 minutes into the film. When Edwyn Collins is manifested, it is as a silhouette, as spectral as he is tangible. Collins is bifurcated: corporeal but also removed. The massive stroke he had suffered meant he could not summon the words he needs, has mobility issues and did not recall the connections between the episodes from his life in his memory. Who Collins is has been rewritten yet he remains the person he was, as attested by his partner Grace Maxwell.The Possibilities are Endless charts the iron-willed Collins’ difficult Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The news that keyboard player Ian McLagan had died of a stroke at 2:39pm today at a hospital in his adopted home of Austin, Texas is tremendously sad. McLagan outlived his former Small Faces bandmates Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott, and it seemed as though he would be around forever. Drummer Kenney Jones is the only Small Faces member left with us.Despite having defined a vital aspect of the Sixties with Small Faces and going on to global stardom with The Faces, McLagan was approachable and led a low-key life in Austin. Seen behind his keyboard at the city’s bars and always open for a chat Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1971, the British rock group UFO released their second album. Titled One Hour Space Rock, its cover bore the subtitle Flying and, yes, images of UFOs in the form of flying saucers and a bald, naked and pink humanoid with claw-like fingernails. Musically, although the album had its freaky sections and sported the lengthy tracks "Star Storm" and "Flying", what was on offer was mostly day-to-day blues-rock.Nonetheless, this was an overt acknowledgment that rock music was on a more-than-nodding acquaintance with the concerns of science fiction. One Hour Space Rock wasn’t a bestseller and UFO Read more ...
Barney Harsent
I’m not sure exactly how much it costs to rent out Abbey Road’s Studio 2, the room in which the Beatles recorded all their good stuff; the studio where, now, the “Lady Madonna” piano is shoved to one side to make way, but I’m guessing it’s lots. I, along with 30 or so other people, am here to listen to Listen, David Guetta’s fourth album. Judging by the venue, the opulent decor and the free bar, it’s one that, I suspect, he really wants us to like.David arrives and is, in equal parts, funny, polite and engaging. He starts by introducing “What I Did For Love”, a collaboration with Emeli Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The five lads who comprise the biggest slice of Simon Cowell’s pension fund are back with the follow up to last year’s Midnight Memories. One Direction, are not, in all fairness, canvassing my vote with new album Four. In fact, on the basis of this new collection of songs, they’re doorstepping eight-year-old girls to ask whether their mum’s in.1D have long had a knack of delivering songs that sound, in part, like already established hits, however the reference points here seem less pop and more… well, MOR. Single "Steal My Girl" has a piano introduction that echoes Meat Loaf, before the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you glanced too hastily at the sleeve you might think Bryan Ferry had made another album called Avalon, that epitome of the sleek autumnal heyday of Roxy Music. But no. Avonmore, though it may sound like a single malt whisky, is named after Ferry's studio complex in West London, not far from Olympia which gave him the title of a previous album in 2010.Avonmore is a worthy addition to the string of solo albums (the self-written ones, rather than his parallel stream of covers discs or the peculiar Twenties throwback The Jazz Age) which Ferry has made since the Eighties, with 1985's Boys and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the end, I had to disable every auto-correction feature in my word processing package to complete the sentence. Wiggly red lines and pop-up boxes were swarming all over the words “philosophy” and “Cheryl”. But eventually the machine understood: Cheryl’s fourth album has a philosophy. Not only that, but it also has a philosopher (Alan Watts) intoning worthily on the opening track about the meaning of life, with Cheryl first speaking, then (on subsequent tracks) singing her response.What she says is perfectly sensible at the level, perhaps, of a lifestyle column in a glossy magazine, though Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Love: Love Songs The Red Crayola: The Parable of the Arable LandJust how much messing with a band’s back catalogue is acceptable? Should classic albums only be reissued as stand-alone releases, sometimes bolstered with bonus tracks but still allowed to stand on their own merits? These two reissues of music by prime psychedelic-era outfits Love and The Red Crayola raise these questions and more.Love’s third album Forever Changes didn’t attract a lot of attention or sales when it was originally issued in November 1967, but it’s gone on to be accepted as a classic: the nine songs by bandleader Read more ...