New music
Kieron Tyler
During the first week of February 1982, Theatre Of Hate got as close to the mainstream as they’d ever get. They opened that week’s edition of Top of the Pops with a run through of “Do You Believe in the Westworld?” which was then at 40 in the Top 40 – the highest position they’d reach in the single’s chart.Though the band mimed, frontman Kirk Brandon sang live. So intense, he looked close to exploding. Musically, the song’s spaghetti western guitars voguishly echoed the “Stand and Deliver” Adam and the Ants of the previous year. The lyrics went “The cowboy turned the gun on himself as he sang Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Charli XCX is the pop stars’ pop star. Working with everyone from K-pop megastars BTS to US rapper Lil Yachty to indie-rockers Vampire Weekend, her career arc has a meta aspect, initially personified by her joyously electro-punky second album Sucker, but then given addition human warmth by her COVID lockdown openness. Terms such as “hyper-pop” and “avant-pop” are sometimes used to differentiate her output, but why reinvent the wheel. Her fifth album is pop, pure and simple, well-crafted sonically snappy 2022 pop.The subject matter throughout is love and sex, infidelity and longing, but the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The 19th album from Canadian alt-country rockers, and very beguiling it is too. As its title suggests, Songs of the Recollection is a covers album, but such a description is reductive. Good songs live on, discovered anew by successive generations – think how many singers have stamped their identity on numbers from the Great American Songbook.It's a question of how you choose, and Cowboy Junkies have chosen well, offering up an album of nine songs from across the last five decades, none of them particularly obvious. And each is carefully thought-out and reworked – as Margo Timmins, one of the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
White Lies began their set as many bands would end it, with a familiar hit ringing out and an explosion of confetti over the crowd. Such a tactic made you wonder if the three-piece would peak too soon here, mirroring the band’s commercial fortunes over a now lengthy career. First came a chart-topping album, then a series of mostly well regarded follow-ups that have slipped down the charts each time. Thankfully, and at times, surprisingly, the opposite was true.Although the commercial fervour of 2008’s debut "To Lose My Life" has long faded, the indie group have retained a dedicated following Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pete Doherty became a hunted man as he was falling apart, lent tabloid notoriety by his dissolute romance with Kate Moss. The Libertines were based on more solid ground at first - rickety ideals of old England and intimate rock’n’roll community with fans, fed by a mulch of old Graham Greene paperbacks and Hancock’s Half Hour tapes, Romantic poets and Smiths records.Doherty’s addictions holed that good ship long ago. In the years before The Libertines reunited, I’d seen a Babyshambles gig teeter right on the edge of dangerous chaos – thrilling, because it didn’t quite tip over – and seen Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Born in the bedroom of keyboard player Charles de Boisseguin, bathed in a sleek, quintessentially French tradition of electro-pop, L’Impératrice materialised on the darkened stage at the O2 Shepherds Bush, with glowing hearts beating in unison on their chests. The beat quickened into a single tone to lead into “Off to the Side”, leaping from an intimate, near whispered opening to a snappy, electric chorus.Postponed three times, the gig was initially advertised as the London leg of a world tour for the group’s “Matahari” debut album from 2019. It became instead an adrenaline-fuelled romp Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a period of British club music that deserves to be much better appreciated. Before hardcore and jungle, before the Underworlds and Leftfields and other arena acts, came a generation who were much closer to the most song-based US house music, to considerable success. Between 1988 and 1990 came dazzling records from S’Express, The Beloved, Coldcut’s earliest manifestation, and several Eighties pop acts that evolved with the times: The Style Council, The Blow Monkeys and Boy George with his Jesus Loves You project.Into this milieu came four Brummies known as the Groove Corporation, and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“Maybe it’s just me, but I think you need some weed” chants B-Real on “Come with Me”, just one of the hymns to getting high on Cypress Hill’s tenth studio album of tales about gang-banging and smoking industrial volumes of cannabis. However, while their tunes used to very funny and even inspired, as they forced you to get up on your feet and shake a leg, Back to Black sees the formula start to get a little thin.Things start well with “Takeover”: a statement of intent with a dirty, stoned groove. “Open Ya Mind” is a call for a consistent implementation of weed legalisation across the United Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Britpop-era favourites have been critically buried for the most part, unwelcome reminders, much like a hangover, of a wild party now seen as a regrettable generational aberration. The Boo Radleys were outsiders even at the time, Wirral experimental pop classicists not far off thirty when 1995’s “Wake Up Boo!”, a deliberate hit as atypical as REM’s “Shiny Happy People”, hit the Top 10 and introduced Chris Evans’ hedonistic Radio 1 Breakfast Show. They were gawky, shoegaze-y relics of the old Creation Records now Oasis were its cocky figureheads and, behind the single’s euphoric rush, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2000, Broadcast’s first album The Noise Made By People entered the UK’s mainstream Top 100 and claimed the top spot on the dance charts. Three years later, their second album Haha Sound was in the Top Ten of America’s dance/electronic charts. It also went Top Five on the UK’s dance charts.Although this confirms Birmingham's Broadcast weren’t necessarily outsiders, their third album Tender Buttons did not chart. By this point, in 2005, they had slimmed down from a five-piece to core members James Cargill and Trish Keenan. Tender Buttons was followed by the 2009 collaboration album Broadcast Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a count in, the first lines of album opener "Commune" are “I’ve been away now far too long, lost and alone with no commune.” Fair enough. For the Sake of Bethel Woods is Midlake’s first album since 2013’s Antiphon.The second track is “Bethel Woods”. Eric Pulido sings “I could get rid of it all for the sake of the Bethel Woods, to a time and place where peacefulness was stood.” Upstate New York’s Bethel Woods was the site of 1969’s Woodstock Festival. Midlake’s flute/keyboard player Jesse Chandler grew up in Bethel. The album’s sleeve image draws from a fleeting shot of his now-passed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seems odd now, but there was a time when many Brits found country music laughable. It was a common thing. For instance, when Keith Richards embraced country, Jagger initially thought it a joke. By the time I was coming up in the Eighties, post-punk still a long shadow, my peers and I mostly felt the same; country was corny schmaltz dominated by middle-aged rhinestone blandness. I soon realised the error of my ways, but The Shires’ fifth album reminds me that, back then, we did also have a point.On their debut, The Shires sang, “We can build our own Nashville underneath these grey skies.” The Read more ...