New music
Thomas H. Green
Even in our garish online age, most celebrities and pop stars sensibly obfuscate the details of their private lives.Not so much Lily Allen. She seems to work through her issues by laying it all out there. No tabloid can pull a scoop if you’ve Tweeted everything already (as she did when announcing she’d hired female prostitutes on her Sheezus tour to spike Daily Mail revelations). Her 2018 memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, was eye-wateringly candid. It’s not just the juice she shares, but the way it makes her feel, why she reckons she behaves as she does. Our attention is drawn, but engaging can Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A curious mind, indeed. Outer space, and what may be there. Communicating with those in the hereafter. Spooks, vampires and other horror film perennials. The wild west. Deceased rock ’n’ rollers Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly.Joe Meek’s preoccupations weren’t hidden. The records he produced and the songs he wrote reflected them. Much of his output was a form of musical autoportrait: auditory reportage expressing personal fixations. When he was at his commercial and creative peak in the early to mid Sixties, anyone could latch onto Meek’s obsessions via, say, a hit single like John Leyton’s “ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As the Poppies’ set at Birmingham’s O2 Academy drew to an end on Friday night, co-vocalist Mary Byker barked into his microphone: “Reform is on the rise? Why is that? We shouldn’t be singing this song anymore”. The song in question had their home crowd pogoing like lunatics and howling back at the stage, “Ich bin ein Auslander auch!” at the top of their lungs.Strangely, Pop Will Eat Itself aren’t really thought of as one of the most political bands around, even if they did also play a rerub of their 1994 collaboration with the Prodigy, “Their Law” during the evening. Early in their career the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Witch Fever are a rising four-piece, originally formed in Manchester. Their debut album, 2022’s Congregation, was a raw, sludge-punk howl that represented singer Amy Walpole’s livid rejection of the stridently patriarchal Charismatic Church of her upbringing.Since then, they’ve toured with everyone from Biffy Clyro to IDLES, and gathered a righteous amount of attention (and, of course, they look great). Their second album is less laser-focused on religious subject matter. It’s a match for its predecessor but with greater use of atmospheric effects and electronic trimmings.Opener “Dead to Me Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seven years ago, Soft Cell were about to perform at a sold-out O2, a one-off event they entitled, after 16 years apart, One Night, One Final Time. It wasn't of course. They reconvened instead and went on to many more gigs, the last one just this August, as well as three more albums (if we include a new one, forthcoming).But now, with Dave Ball's passing, aged 66, the duo's career really is at an end. In tribute to one of the great synth innovators of his era, the piece below sees Ball, alongside Soft Cell partner Marc Almond, returning to the fray, excited by what lies ahead but equally happy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Demi Lovato is impressive on many fronts. She’s a Noughties Disney tween star who’s become an outspoken activist in an America where it’s increasingly dangerous to be one. She’s lived a rollercoaster ride of a life, rampantly exploring sexuality, drink and drugs amid chaos, abuse and serious mental health calamities, and she’s overcome the worst of it.Alongside all that, unlike most of her Disney child star peers, she’s maintained a successful career, both as a film and TV actor, and as a singer who, for well over a decade-and-a-half, has consistently taken her albums Top 10 in the UK and US Read more ...
joe.muggs
We are in – it needs to be shouted from the rooftops every day – a golden age of British soul and jazz. It isn’t just about a few quality artists, either, but a movement. Londoner Yazmin Lacey is key within that: in the past year, she’s featured on stupendous albums by both Ezra Collective and that band’s keyboard wizard Joe Armon-Jones.On her second LP she shares producers with Joy Crookes, Little Simz and Kokoroko, all of whom have also recently dropped glorious records – and with Joel Culpepper, who is about to. Many of these acts share other personnel too, a lot of whom came up through Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Their new album may have been born out of a deep dive into Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic reimagining of the post-Manson killings’ atmosphere of late 1960’s Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. However, Solar Eye’s intro music as they took the stage at the Hare and Hounds this weekend wasn’t Charlie’s “Look at your Game, Girl” or “Cease to Exist” but something far more triumphant – the theme from Rocky.Still, these local boys are making good right at this moment, and clearly in a celebratory mood, with the recent release of their sophomore album Live Freaky! Die Freaky! and a handful of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Lemonheads were one of the original punk-pop outfits and have been an on-off going concern for 40 years. However, singer, guitarist, bandleader and loveable slacker, Evan Dando’s well-documented relationship with Class A drugs also made them the kings of underachievement – even if there is plenty of gold to be found among their recordings that did see the light of day.In fact, it’s been almost 20 years since the band put out their last set of original songs, the excellent Lemonheads, even if there have been a couple of unmemorable discs of cover versions since then. However, it seems that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over 1965 to 1968 Brooklyn's Evie Sands issued a string of singles with classic top sides. Amongst them were “Take Me For a Little While,” “I Can't Let Go,” “Picture me Gone” and “Angel of the Morning.” For reasons which are tackled in the essay coming with I Can’t Let Go – the first-ever collection of Sands’ seven-inch A- and B-sides – all either charted low, or not at all.This is extraordinary and, from the perspective of 60-ish years later, inexplicable. These were fabulous soul-inclined pop records, and fabulous songs – as recognised by the extensive assortment of other, subsequent Read more ...
Tom Carr
Anxiety and self-doubt have been constant themes for Kevin Parker, the Australian musician who now finds himself among the highest echelons of modern music. With his project Tame Impala, these themes have provided an almost unending source of inspiration, even while musically the project has transitioned from pyschedelic/Indie rock, and into a pop and a dance-oriented sound.Parker and his project resonated quickly with an audience who were captivated by his profound creativity on the first two albums (2010’s Innerspeaker and 2012’s Lonerism). But with 2015’s Currents, the Pandora's box was Read more ...
joe.muggs
A key part of Chrissie Hynde’s brilliance and longevity has always been her ability to keep multiple musical personas going at once. She’s the grizzled but urbane street poet in the Bob Dylan / Lou Reed mould. She’s the pop craftswoman, always in search of that three minutes of perfect sweetness, even through the punk years. And then there’s the one that creates the real alchemy, that elevates the other characters, and makes something greater than the sum of the parts: there’s Chrissie Hynde the unabashed romantic. That’s been expressed, of course, in her own songs like “I’ll Stand by Read more ...