pop music
Thomas H. Green
It catches everyone out that Duran Duran’s version of the hip-hop classic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” comes off so well. Not just affable entertainment but actually fiercely funky, raising a large section of the Brighton Centre to its feet. Duran’s 1995 covers album Thank You – from which the song comes - was once voted by Q magazine as the worst album ever, but looking around at the enthused reaction, including my own, that all seems rather irrelevant. Midway through their set, Duran Duran are a persuasive force.The four Durans – Nick Rhodes (keys), Simon Le Bon (vocals), John Taylor ( Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Can the Hanson brothers ever rid themselves of the shackles of “MMMBop” (the 1997 hit that brought them global renown)? More to the point, should they bother to try? These were the burning questions I armed myself with as I prepared to watch a band whose progress, it’s fair to say, I’ve hardly followed in the last 15 years since their falsetto singing and rambunctious head-banging brought the world such joy. So, having done some serious mugging up, and listened to their back catalogue, I was interested to see where fortune would have taken the clean-cut trio with the flowing blond hair.As Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Asked what attracted her to the music of South America, Catherine Ringer says, “C’est comme ça. Boom-ta-ta-boom, ta-ta-boom, ta-ta-boom-da boom, boom-da-da-boom.” She begins singing. “Boom-da-boom-da-boom, doo-doo-da-doo. It’s the rhythm of rock'n’roll,” she concludes. Ringer still exudes the spontaneity that defined Les Rita Mitsouko, whose first French hit, "Marcia Baïla", was fuelled by Latin rhythms. Yet now, she’s on her own, in London promoting her first solo album, Ring n’ Roll, released here this week. Her partner Fred Chichin died in November 2007.He’s gone, but Ringer says, “There Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although they're beginning to get cold, the winds blowing in from Scandinavia have recently brought enough music to keep anyone warm through long, dark nights. Finnish intensity, pop and introspection from Denmark, Swedish luxuriousness, Icelandic keyboard quirk, Norwegians that enfold - all are here. Along with Estonian haziness.Finland hits hardest with a new EP from K-X-P. theartsdesk has met them before, live and on album. Previously with Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, Easy is their first outing for Manchester’s Melodic. It’s an extraordinary thing, coalescing a vision marrying a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is probably just wishful thinking from the haters that The X Factor is going into meltdown. Pop might be the sound of a bubble bursting, but the Class of Cowell is still having hits. Olly Murs is currently in a chart battle with Rihanna for the top spot with his single “Dance With me Tonight”, so don’t go sobbing for Louis Walsh just yet. In Case You Didn't Know is the second album from oily-haired Olly. I was hoping for something with the intrigue of Will Young. I got something with decent melodies and the lyrical complexity of Jedward.Proceedings kick off enjoyably with the Number One Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Chart music has always been largely about sex, but for me The Saturdays marked a tipping point in pop's pornification when they covered Depeche Mode's “Just Can't Get Enough” in 2009 and turned an innocent electro classic into a gushing paean to insatiable lust. The video has notched up over five million hits, presumably more to do with the strumpets in suspenders than a frankly unexpected cameo from Muffin the Mule.Still, my Meldrewish moans have hardly held them back and the Anglo-Irish quintet’s new album finds them getting a little bit experimental. Calm down, don't expect them to be Read more ...
howard.male
How do you forge a pop career in the shadow of the biggest pop star on the planet? What is perhaps forgotten about Janet Jackson is that not only did she pull this off, but for a while she actually overshadowed her older brother. But this documentary doesn’t really dig deep enough, in that it never even begins to answer the question: how did she remain so - relatively speaking - level-headed and grounded while growing up in this most famous and, some would suggest, dysfunctional of families?Maybe the answer lies in the fact that she spent most of her formative years as an observer rather Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Scratch Massive sound from their name as if they should be a very dodgy hip-hop outfit. They are not. Instead, French duo Maud Geffray and Sebastien Chenaut are a music-based art unit who have worked on sonic projects with Karl Lagerfeld, soundtracked films for Zoe Cassavettes and were once produced by German techno DJ-producer Moritz von Oswald. Their first album, back in 2003, dabbled in hefty rock dynamics but somewhere along the way – possibly that Moritz von Oswald connection - they were persuaded of the power of synthesisers.Their third album is a moody beast that wishes it were Read more ...
joe.muggs
Nova Scotia-born Leslie Feist is the very model of a 21st-century artist: independent in spirit yet able to work the mainstream industry to her advantage, technologically savvy and au fait with all the means to build and sustain a profile and sales while still maintaining some sense of artistry and dignity. Yet she is also resolutely traditionalist in many ways, with the rich traditions of Laurel Canyon rock, Brill Building songwriting and older, rootsier sounds audible in her songs, and a sense of rather old-school Bohemianism to her dedication to music as a lifestyle and the collective of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“I’d had five years of being really, really fucked around personally. That’s definitely where the songs come from.” Kami Thompson’s five years of being fucked around is good for us listeners though. You want to say thanks to all the horrible guy(s) who broke her heart, because it’s resulted in an emotionally powerful and astoundingly assured debut. The assured bit is not totally surprising perhaps, as she is the youngest daughter of Richard and Linda Thompson, and sister of Teddy. As we know, genes don’t guarantee talent, but this is thrilling in its eviscerated, warped pop sensibility.Take “ Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s guitar rock, but not as we know it. Anna Calvi, the Londoner in her late twenties whose debut album created a stir earlier this year and earned her a Mercury Prize nomination, makes music that has all the familiar, recognisable elements of the music that we call “rock” – guitar, vocals, drums – but her treatment of it is idiosyncratic; she exploits the spaces between the instruments as much as the instruments themselves to create a dark mood, an atmosphere of heightened sexual tension.It takes a bit of getting used to. At a sold-out Shepherds Bush Empire, on the London leg of her UK tour Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...