pop music
Barney Harsent
Singer Jessie Ware has long been considered a bastion of grown-up pop. A natural heir to the estate once tended by Sade; a scenic artist providing the background to relaxed conversations with good company; the eventual recipient of a recurring spot on Jools' Hootenanny in perpetuity.Glasshouse, Ware’s third album, has been preceded by two singles. “Midnight” came dressed in a breathy, wispy outer layer that was soon whipped away to reveal a slow soul stomper, while “Selfish Love” sounded like Amy Winehouse being covered by a bossa nova Portishead covers band. While that might not sound like Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
P!nk is a likably gobby superstar who has consistently maintained her position at the top of the pop tree for an impressive 17 years. Amping up her feisty one-of-the-boys persona, she’s been a template for a generation of girl-pop stars who followed. Her live shows are eye-wowing circus events, setting the bar high for stadium gigs of any type.Unfortunately, though, her seventh album is a fizzle, rather than a firework. In a year when both Katy Perry and Kesha have put out albums containing a decent share of gems – not to mention the extraordinary Lemonade from Beyoncé last year – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before they even step on stage The Pretenders win me to their side. An announcement prior to their appearance tells the audience, “The Pretenders request you keep your phone in your pocket.” Brilliantly, these aren’t idle words. As the gig progresses security quietly but firmly approach anyone with their phone out and asks them to desist. A few songs into the set, Chrissie Hynde has just begun a stripped-down take on her 1986 hit “Hymn to Her”, accompanied only by Welsh keyboard-player Carwyn Ellis, when she stops short. “Would everyone rather watch you take pictures than me sing?” she asks Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Colors, the follow-up to Beck's meditative masterpiece Morning Phase, couldn't come as more of a contrast. It's a glossy, high-energy LP designed to make you dance, not think. The inspiration came partly from Pharrell Williams's mega-hit "Happy". When Beck heard it, in 2013, he was blown away by how exuberant it sounded. It made him wonder if he could write something with the same feel-good factor.For four long years, Beck has been working on the formula. The result is not merely a cheery album, it's a studiously cheery album, full of choppy guitars, smooth synths and complex drums. All Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
High hopes are riding on Dua Lipa. Tonight is the first date of her Self-Titled Tour, but it ends next April. In between, it will travel all over the world, culminating in a series of British stadium dates, the last one at the Alexandra Palace. Such confidence is born of a string of hits across Europe, culminating in this summer’s UK chart-topper, “New Rules”. When she kicks off her show at the Brighton Dome, the near-capacity audience is buzzing, and sing along to one of her bigger successes, “Hotter Than Hell”. This crowd really are onside. They’ve been chanting her name, on and off, for Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When Liam Gallagher turns up with an album in tow, no one is expecting "Jazz Odyssey". You wouldn’t call a plumber to turf your lawn, and you wouldn’t ask ISIS to explain the dynamics of intersectionality. Similarly, you wouldn’t expect the former Oasis and Beady Eye frontman to deliver anything other than Beatles-inflected rock stompers. For the most part that’s exactly what you get. I stopped counting Fab Four references when I ran out of digits, but lyrically, there are nods to “Helter Skelter”, “All Things Must Pass”, “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and “Run For Your Life” among many Read more ...
mark.kidel
Carla Bruni delivers smooth and sophisticated pop. She undoubtedly has plenty of talent, and this latest collection of songs – all of them covers, and sung in impressive English – reeks of good taste, careful artistic choices and a wide knowledge of popular music, from which she has drawn material, as she has said, that "blew her away".She is a wide-ranging pop connoisseur, and the tracks run from the Stones’ “I Miss You” to Abba’s “Winner Takes All”, and from Lou Reed’s “A Perfect Day” to Willie Nelson’s “Crazy”. The production by hit-maker David Foster is flawless, well suited to the Read more ...
joe.muggs
When Miley Cyrus released the deliriously patchy Bangerz in 2013 she was as over-exposed as any pop star has ever been, as I subtly pointed out at the time. Far less so now. Her only album in the interim has been a slightly tedious, flung-out drug folly of a Flaming Lips collaboration in 2015. Other than that, she's steadily edged away from the limelight, meaning this record arrives with less fuss and kerfuffle than more or less anything she's done since her very beginnings as the child star of Disney's Hannah Montana.And it's all the better for it. My first reaction on seeing the title was “ Read more ...
joe.muggs
It was this album's good fortune to arrive on a miserable rainy afternoon. At other times my first impressions might be a bit harsher about its comfortable, retro dad-grooves and easily flowing sax solos, but instead I let it wrap me like a blanket, and by three tracks in it was absolutely impossible to dislike it.But then again, back in the Eighties, The Blow Monkeys were always adept at turning the smooth, super-mainstream and potentially pastiche-y into something rather more interesting – somewhere in the British white soul continuum between the gruff urgency of The Style Council and the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London indie-rockers Wolf Alice’s debut album, My Love Is Cool, made it to no 2 in the charts a couple of years back. It was a bona fide success story and a rare thing, a gold record for a female-fronted outfit who major in grungey, ambitious post-Pixies rock. It was derivative, but also showed a feisty, admirable willingness not to be pigeonholed, especially on songs such as the ecstatic “Freazy”. Its successor initially seems destined to be even more wide-ranging, to reach headier heights, but then settles, during most of its second half, for being simply a decent album.Let us not damn Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In February 1965, Melody Maker asked John Lennon about his personal enthusiasm for Bob Dylan material and Dylan interpretations. “I just felt like going that way,” he said about the new acoustic guitar-based material The Beatles were then recording at Abbey Road. “If I’d not heard Dylan, it might have been that I’d written stuff and sung it like Dominic Behan, or somebody like that.” Despite the non-committal answer, Dylan’s impact on Lennon was clear – the cap he'd recently been wearing was evidence of that.Out of the public eye, Lennon – after being hipped to the album by George Harrison – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Foo Fighters are a global superstar act. And why not, as the late film critic Barry Norman used to say. After seeing them at Glastonbury, they strike me as an irresistible proposition; their Sonic Highways TV documentaries, about music in American cities, are superb; and Dave Grohl, even after decades in the spotlight, still seems like a top fellow. Someone said to me recently they didn’t like him because he was “too nice”. That’s stupid, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to share a beer over a barbecue with him?Concrete and Gold involved a lot of barbecuing. Recorded at a studio complex on Sunset Read more ...