pop music
theartsdesk on Vinyl 35: Christmas 2017 Special with Pink Floyd, Mariah Carey, ELO, Madness and more
Thomas H. Green
The music business is about to disappear on holiday wholesale and we won’t see hide nor hair of it until mid-January. There’s just time for one last 2017 vinyl celebration. Regular readers should be warned that theartsdesk on Vinyl becomes rather easy-going at this time of year – must be all the Baileys – and prone to making allowances for the odd sliver of cheese and office-party silliness. It’s a Christmas special where, like Christmas itself, truly good music mingles more freely with the “fun” stuff, and music that might just make a good present. Have a top one. Enjoy yourself too much. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s easy to be cynical about Christmas pop albums. This is, of course, because so many of them are awful, hastily cobbled together collections of nothing, and about as much fun as munching your way through a kilo of sixpences hoping to find a tiny nugget of Christmas pudding.The idea that former Keane frontman Tom Chaplin could manage to reverse this trend might seem unlikely, but then this winter has been quite the season for shocks. From the President of the US trying to start a war in the Middle East to distract from his sexual misconduct, to a bungling burglar on a Christmas ad hugging a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sia is a 21st century pop behemoth, an unstoppable figure who, despite no longer wishing to take part in the increasingly visual aspects of our social media age, still maintains a top-flight career. The best of her output hits the Venn diagram sweet spot where ear-bud phone-pop crosses over with wit and canny thinking. She’s not this writer’s bag – with the exception of Katy Perry’s smasher, “Chained to the Rhythm”, which she co-wrote – so it’s all the more of a surprise that her Christmas album proves such an endearing proposition.Everyday Is Christmas was created with another contemporary Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Until now, the easiest non-bootleg way to hear the early Rolling Stones live was via the various home cinema editions of October 1964’s T.A.M.I. show. Otherwise, although they employed backing tracks for broadcast, the American DVDs of their Ed Sullivan Show appearances caught the band in thrilling full flight. The new BBC sessions collection On Air fills out the picture by collecting 32 tracks they recorded between October 1963 and September 1965.Decent Decca-era archive collections of the Stones barely exist due to their poor relations with ABKCO, the organisation which owns their rights Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When Irish rock band U2 marked the release of 2014’s Songs of Innocence by loading it into everyone’s iTunes for free, it was an attempt to find a new angle on the "event release". While it was certainly that, it wasn’t, shall we say… universally well received. Thankfully, for its companion piece, Songs of Experience, the band has opted for an altogether more traditional delivery system. There will be no humanitarian air-drops of WAVs over the shire counties – you can tell the Home Guard to stand down.This, of course, means we're paying for the pleasure this time round – so what do we get? Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Precious to me” is a high-carat gold nugget. A guitar-pop song with cascading, lush Everly Brothers harmonies drawing on The Searchers’ version of “When You Walk in the Room”, its immediate tune instantly lodges itself in the head.Instead of being from the Sixties, “Precious to me” was a US hit in Spring 1981, a period when punk had given way to the acceptable face of new wave. The commercial door for concise, classically styled songs was open. Phil Seymour, the song’s writer and singer, had a pre-punk résumé, knew all about pop and rode the moment. His music fit the power pop profile: the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Óttarr Proppé, the stylish chap pictured above, was appointed Iceland’s Minister of Health in January this year. Last Saturday, when the shot was taken, he was on stage in his other role as the singer of HAM, whose invigorating musical blast draws a line between the early Swans and Mudhoney. At that moment, at Reykjavík Art Museum, it was exactly a week on from the declaration of the first results in the country’s Parliamentary election, the second within 12 months.While rare but not unknown for political office and active involvement in rock music to co-exist, Proppé was in what must have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.“Nights in White Satin” is a staple of oldies radio and, as such, has been robbed of much of its power to astonish. Nonetheless, it was bold. As was its parent album Days of Future Passed. At one stroke, The Moody Blues invented orchestral pop and pointed the way to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In “Look What You Made Me Do”, the tabloid-level diss track that heralded the arrival of Taylor Swift’s sixth album, the one-time darling of Nashville declares the "old" Taylor “dead”. That song, and its follow-up procession of lukewarm singles in desperate need of a chorus, raised a gloomy prospect: had contemporary pop’s cleverest, wittiest, most sensitive lyricist been killed off in favour of score-setting and clumsy Bonnie and Clyde comparisons?Turns out the "new" Taylor is pretty much the same as the old one, albeit with cut-glass EDM hooks in place of teardrops on her guitar. Reputation Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a sense, the air of tedium that surrounds Sam Smith is a wonderful thing. This is a person who can talk about having fluid gender identity and make it sound as if he's simply unsure whether he prefers boiled or mashed potatoes: that is, he's somehow able to dip into one of the spiciest political topics of the age without scaring your gran. It doesn't, though, make him a great pop star.One imagines he'd like to be seen alongside the modern indie/soul likes of Sampha – both came through featuring on early 2010s bass/dance tracks, then emerged as obliquely emoting frontmen. But there's Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When the songwriting partnership of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford returned two years ago, it was with a renewed sense of vim and vitality following nearly two decades away. The Knowledge continues that revival with a collection of songs that often read like short stories, bursting with detail, smart insight and, occasionally, sharp invective.“Every Story” and “Rough Ride” are two such songs. The former feels like classic Squeeze; two voices, one taking the low road, the other the high, both describing a world of scratch cards and big dreams in which “Kids think they’re adults and adults Read more ...
Owen Richards
Who is the real Grace Jones? This is the central question that drives Sophie Fiennes’s documentary, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. After 115 minutes, you might be less sure of the answer than when you go in. The title is Jamaican for a recording booth’s red light and bread, the substance of life. It’s appropriate for a film which juxtaposes the abstract visual feast of Jones’s live show with her modest upbringing in Jamaica. One minute we’re witnessing green lasers dance off her sparkled bowler hat, next she’s playing jacks in the small farmhouse next to where she grew up. The two Read more ...