pop music
Bernard Hughes
Into the Groove is Justin Lewis’s follow-up to 2023’s Don’t Stop the Music, in which he traced 40 years of pop history by offering bite-sized facts for every day from January 1st to December 31st, jumping randomly from year to year. I noted in my review for theartsdesk that Lewis was particularly strong on the Eighties, so I was pleased this sequel focuses on that decade, with a similar format, this time going month-by-month through the years that were perhaps the very peak of pop.I am firmly in the ideal demographic for Into the Groove: the 1980s: the Ultimate Decade in Music, having Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The backscreens pop alive. A wall of photographer’s flashguns. On cyberpunk crutches, Lady Gaga stumbles jerkily towards us. She sings her 2009 global smash “Paparazzi”, her arms clad in armour, on her head a metallic skullcap. Her corseted dress has a train that extends, diaphanous, floating back behind her the entire length of the long catwalk into the audience. It disappears into the darkness of an arch.Theatre, yes, but Gaga is committed. Her eyes on the big screen above aren’t smirky or cool. They have a performative, deranged intensity. Lady Gaga is a proper pop star, haemorrhaging Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a fair few bars around the world tonight, bands will be playing “That’s The Way (I Like It)”, “Give It Up” and so many more of KC and the Sunshine Band’s bangers. They’ve filled dancefloors for half a century and Harry Wayne Casey (KC to you and me) has a claim to having written the first ever disco hit with George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” – Benny and Bjorn’s inspiration for “Dancing Queen” no less!He’s a significant figure in the much undervalued history of pop music. His songbook is a strong foundation for a musical. All you need to add are great singers, great costumes and a great Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's a Happening Thing,” January 1967’s debut single from California’s Peanut Butter Conspiracy, is one of the year’s best. Driving, with a full sound, a psychedelic edge, soaring vocal and immediate tune, it sounds like a hit.However, despite being issued by major label Columbia, it wasn’t. As it’s put in the booklet coming with The Most Up Till Now – A History 1966-1970 box set, the single “barely scraped into Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at the number 93 slot.”The band’s next 45, March 1967’s "Dark on You Now” was as great. But, this time, no chart action at all. Their debut album, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Doja Cat is a fascinating one-off. She’s a rap-centric Californian artist whose background dips into everything from new age philosophy to skate culture. She’s the epitome of a 2020s singer who’s as much a social media phenomenon as a pop star (and has also been featured artist on tunes by almost everyone). Unafraid of quirk and wacky throwaway humour, it’s taken her a while to convince the dubious that she’s more than an amusing flash-in-the-pan. Unfortunately, while her latest album initially contains interest, it settles to a set of samey slow-jams.The recent single “Jealous Type” is Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the great moments of Private Eye magazine’s fustiness in recent years was putting Mariah Carey in Pseud’s Corner, for the quote about how she deals with the ageing process: “I do not acknowledge time.” That quip is of course in no way pseudo-intellectual, and in every way fabulous, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of Carey or pop culture would grasp immediately. Of any major star, she is the one who has most comfortably inhabited the diva role in the 21st century, her dry-as-a-bone “I don’t know her” put-down of Jennifer Lopez from 2003 now meme-ified into immortality as the allt Read more ...
ALA.NI
I’ve never thought of myself as a political artist. I write about love. The tender bits, the messy bits, the heartbreak that rearranges a life. That’s where songwriting usually finds me. “TIEF”, from my forthcoming album Sunshine Music, arrived differently. It’s built around an interpolation of “Slave” by the legendary calypsonian singer Mighty Sparrow. Calypso, a music that has lived in my bones for as long as I can remember. “Slave” proposed a question I sought to answer. “If there were a contemporary Part Two to such a statement song, what would mine say?” What does reparation look Read more ...
Graham Fuller
With their second album Altar, the Irish combo NewDad has moved from the love-embittered shoegaze of their 2023 debut Madra toward a worldlier perspective married to a comparatively sophisticated but confrontational style. Some reviewers have suggested it’s poppier, but tunes like "Other Side" (with its deceptively quiet start), “Misery”, “Puzzle”, and “Mr. Cold Embrace” are happily closer to post-punk. Nice and angsty does it every time in my book.It’s still shoegazey, still rueful, but the music made by Julie Dawson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Sean O’Dowd (lead guitar), and Fiachra Parslow ( Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Neil Hannon has been recording and touring as the Divine Comedy since 1989 and has tried a fair few flavours along the way, from chamber pop to Britpop, while sounding fundamentally himself throughout. Rainy Sunday Afternoon, however, sounds like a stocktaking, a deep breath and a meditation on late middle age.Clearly not full of the hormonal rush traditionally associated with classic rock and pop, it is an album that is literate (with nods to both Patrick Shaw-Stewart and Machiavelli, among others) and mature. It is considered and unashamedly oozes a middle-class take on the passing of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, record labels don’t like what those on their roster have recorded. Such was the case with BMG Sweden and Robin Carlsson who, as Robyn, had made three albums with varying success and a raft of home-country hit singles for the label from the mid-Nineties to 2002.She decided that hers would be the reins guiding what would became her fourth album. Up to this point, the credits of her dance-pop records were littered with the names of seasoned producers. Safe hands. Odd tracks had, early on, entered the US charts but that did not translate to a sustained international breakthrough. When Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“It’s a long way up from rock bottom/There’s been times I felt I could fall further.” So runs the opening line of Ed Sheeran’s eighth studio album. It’s delivered with the quavering falsetto-voice-breaking that’s become default for sung emotion. Like much of the album, it’s a “poor me” lyric. A generation has grown up with popular music ruled by solipsistic whining, with Sheeran leading from the front. Meanwhile the world burns.Not his fault of course, the trouble we’re all in. He seems a decent man, likeable, good values. But why do so many relate to this drivel? It deflates the soul. Play Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Quite why Baxter Dury isn't already a national treasure is a mystery to me. Not for his nepo connections but for his perfectly pitched delivery and super-dry observations. He's sardonic, sleazy, sexy and has a cracking dog – what more does any man need? Maybe a bigger profile and some higher rankings in the charts...This is a very different proposition from the last album, I Thought I Was Better Than You (full disclosure, I gave it album of the year on this very site, so this was going to have to work hard to impress). The different tone is down to producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Rhianna, Read more ...