pop
Jonathan Geddes
In just over three years Olivia Dean has gone from taking the stage at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow to selling out two nights at the city’s largest venue. Such a leap up in surroundings in a short space of time did not seem to faze Dean though, the 27-year-old Londoner possessing both a honeyed voice and a Disney Princess smile onstage. She was confident enough, in fact, to drop in a cover of the classic “Movin On Up” late on. It was a risky choice that did not totally work, but you could not fault the boldness of it, and you can understand why she has reason to feel such Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Decades are never neat: they don’t simply go from 1 to 10, or 0 to 9. So it is with the Swinging Sixties, which actually began – like sexual intercourse for poet Philip Larkin – in 1963, the year of the Profumo Scandal, Kim Philby’s defection and the satire boom, all of which signaled the end of deference. Oh, almost forgot, and this is when the Beatles’ first LP, Please Please Me was released, an album whose title has been borrowed by Tom Wright for his play about the band’s manager Brian Epstein. Staged at the Kiln theatre, it is directed by the venue’s boss Amit Sharma.Epstein’s story is Read more ...
peter.quinn
This first full-length album from K-pop sextet NCT WISH – one of a number of NCT sub-units including NCT 127, NCT Dream, WayV, and NCT U – is a 10-track delight, with not a filler in sight.A multilayered, widescreen banger, album opener “2.0 (TWO POINT O)” channels the bassline-driven, vocally rich melodic pop of SM Entertainment labelmates SHINee. The immaculately produced title track is an up-tempo, 130+ BPM anthem with strong UK Garage influences, delicious harmonic motion, and an abundance of ear candy, not least the way in which it reimagines the opening earworm vocal hook from The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Superbloom is the third chapter in Jessie Ware’s transformation, over the last six years, into a self-proclaimed and full-blown disco diva. How does it differ from 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and 2023’s That! Feels Good!? Arguably, it leans further into Seventies stylings, as opposed to the more electronically updated direction of its predecessors. It is also juicy with sex and fleshy queer nightclub shenanigans.Ware is a hugely successful podcaster (Table Manners, with her mum) so she probably doesn’t need to make music anymore. This has clearly freed up her approach and she sounds like she Read more ...
Joe Muggs
theartsdesk’s Thomas H Green has lately been noting a “mellow production flatness” in modern pop and he’s really nailed a ubiquitous tendency there. The pendulum has definitely swung a long way back from the “loudness wars” of the era that trap and EDM crashed in and everything was amped up and ramped up as if to fight for attention in a crowded mall. One might trace the global counter tendency back to the chillwave of the Noughties, and its mainstreaming to the breakthrough of Tame Impala a decade ago, ushering in era where (brat being the exception that proves the rule) everyone from SZA to Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Years have passed since the early days of Gorillaz, when the real musicians behind the cartoon band remained hidden from view onstage. Yet some things never change, and while there was plenty of cheering for the arrival of Damon Albarn onstage, it was dwarfed by the roars for the first appearances of 2-D, Murdock, Russel and Noodle on giant video screens overlooking the stage.Those cheers came from a wildly diverse crowd, from kids with their parents to Britpop stalwarts who have presumably followed Albarn ever since. Perhaps some of the younger fans were drawn by the anime style of the band Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In 1988, in The Manual: How to Have a Number 1 The Easy Way, Bill Drummond wrote: “We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul.”It looks like a reductio ad absurdum Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If you’re supposed to be in touch with pop culture as part of your professional life, there’s not much that can sharpen the lines of your ignorance like having teenage kids. Of course, not everyone can know or like everything, especially not in this era of unimaginable abundance. But my kids reaching the age of proper fandom has really brought me up on how I’ve lazily treated huge sections of the global mainstream as homogenous blocs, when musically and culturally they are really anything but. This has particularly been the case with the arena rave sounds of American EDM, and with the factory Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There was a surreal moment in February when, scrolling through my feed, I became briefly convinced that Sting had cult-napped Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso.The evidence was a deadpan video of the "Every Breath You Take" singer welcoming two traumatised-looking Argentine pop stars into something called the Free Spirits Wellness Centre. It took a sec to work out that this announced the new album from the smooth-voiced, mulleted, snarly-pouting Ca7riel and his friend since childhood, gravelly sounding and perpetually wide-eyed Paco Amoroso. What was going on?If you're not yet acquainted, the duo Read more ...
Tim Cumming
With two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing behind her, and tours aplenty to support them (including a recent trek with Suzanne Vega) singer songwriter Katherine Priddy’s third album is keenly anticipated and deftly delivered. These Frightening Machines is a reckoning with forces beyond your control. It was written and recorded as she enters her thirties, and the machinery in the title is her own body and mind’s workings and malfunctions, as well as the machinery of connections and visions, of friendships and passions, of the systems that we are a part of, and that Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
As a disillusioned ex-admirer – like so many – it’s with a degree of dread that I approach Morrissey’s 14th solo album (the first for six years) not least because of the positively Kafkaesque struggle to actually hear it. But an open mind is necessary.What if there were no axe to grind? What if the hopeless search for love had been answered? What if there were no conspiracy theories? Why, then, there would be no new album (and – let’s face it – we’re all thigh-high in conspiracy theories right now). So we must buckle up and hear what the once-great man has to opine. The hilarious album Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The first time I heard Wuthering Heights I felt a bit like I’d walked into the wrong room – one lit by firelight rather than LEDs. Is this the sound of an artist in retreat? Away from the dancefloor, from self-scrutiny, from the lime-green glare of her hyperpop Brat era? Or a clean break from the terms that used to define her?When film maker Emerald Fennell asked for one song last year, Charli was on the brink of burnout. But the more she got into the creative world of Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights adaptation, the more she realised how much she wanted to escape into someone else’s 177-year- Read more ...