pop
joe.muggs
A couple of months ago, I wrote here that Lady Gaga was the godmother of the new generation of ostentatiously “theatre kid” pop stars – but actually, perhaps I was wrong and Miley Cyrus deserves that title. Ever since her teens, she has consistently gone the extra mile in adding pizazz and razzle dazzle to a gloriously messy discography and personal presence, smashing together her Disney Channel past and country royalty family ties with garish influences from across club and hip hop culture and a punkish, pansexual, psychedelic presentation that, given where she’s come from, makes her perhaps Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Over the years Slade in Flame has been hailed as one of the greatest rock movies (albeit rarely seen or screened), up there with Perfomance and That’ll Be The Day.Like those films, it has grittiness running through it like barbed wire through a stick of Blackpool rock. It’s raw and dark; very dark. Not glam at all. And wrapped up in its singular brilliance is the grim rather than glam fact that Slade in Flame tanked at the box office and almost tanked the career of the band it – sort of – celebrated.There was one DVD release in the Noughties, which now goes for around £200 on Amazon. But Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It is a family affair at Supergrass shows these days. There were plenty of parents and offspring filing onto the Barrowland’s famous old dancefloor, and during the encore a pair of excitable, bouncing teenagers turned around and started bellowing for their dad, off on the sidelines, to join in pogoing. He declined, but was singing along with vigour nonetheless.That’s testament to Supergrass’s strength in writing catchy songs and having material that can resonate across generations. The sheer youthful exuberance of debut album I Should Coco, here being revisited in full, still comes across as Read more ...
joe.muggs
I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t exist before: it’s a mapping out of the modern musical and subcultural landscape on terms defined by the millennial artists who’ve come to define it. That is to say, it elegantly cuts loose from establishment critical discourse that has all too often tried to assess artists and subcultures on the criteria of the late 20th century – Read more ...
joe.muggs
Just the other day I overheard one of my kids watching a YouTuber called Nathan Zed and was instantly gripped. It was called “How Trying Became Cool Again,” and focused on pop cultural moments like Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl show, Doechii’s Tonight Show performance, Chappell Roan’s giant pink pony at the Grammys and Tyler, The Creator’s… well, just about everything.His thesis is that in an era defined by laziness, whether in dating apps or AI generated art, people going the extra mile to express themselves matter more than ever, and this is why suddenly “theatre kids” are back on Read more ...
joe.muggs
Is there such a thing as a boundary between pop and alternative any more? The presence of strange characters like Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish and Lola Young in the mega mainstream suggests not – and so does trajectory of Jessica Smyth aka Biig Piig.The Irish-born, Spanish-raised adopted Londoner came up through distinctly out-there artistic routes: as part of Lava La Rue’s NiNE8 collective, a diverse set of artists working across different media and touching on dance, rap, neo-soul and more, but held together by the very old school factor of physical proximity in shared studios. But the Read more ...
Tom Carr
There are some years where my pick for album of the year is obvious; something stands out so clearly amongst the crowd, something that takes a hold and doesn’t relent for a sustained length throughout the year. For me, 2024 was not one of those years.There are a few worthy contenders that came close to clinching it, each having their time dominating my Spotify listens. There’s Pearl Jam rolling back the years with their highly energetic and driven Dark Matter, a heaping dose of solid, earnest alternative-rock. Or, there’s Bring Me The Horizon and the second instalment of their Post Human Read more ...
joe.muggs
Could melancholia be an elixir of creative youth? Or is it that sad people were never really that youthful, so age suits them? Certainly it seems that there was something in the water for so many of the foundational 80s indie bands who dealt in sadness, pain and existential angst that makes longevity suit them: The Jesus & Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr., Throwing Muses, Ride, Slowdive just for starters have all somehow ambled into the 2020s on the creative form of their lives. And now the daddies of them all, The Cure, have clearly cottoned on and joined the forlorn party, because this album – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many performers, flirting with death is a pose or a distant metaphor, or simply don’t-give-a-damn insouciance. This is not the case with Halsey on her fifth album. She’s been assaulted, in recent years, by a range of serious illnesses and conditions, of which Lupus and a T-cell disorder are the latest. The Great Impersonator spends time staring down the barrel of her mortality, viewed through the prism of motherhood. It is moving and musically impressive.Halsey is a global star who’s used the pop platform to spring in interesting directions. For instance, she created her last album with Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a real bind for Kylie Minogue. Her core audience want disco pop, people like me slag her off if she branches out from disco pop and goes country, she does disco pop well… but it’s really, really hard to do disco pop relentlessly well all the time.She’s done much, much better at it than pretty much anyone else on the planet: her creative longevity and continued cultural relevance has been truly something to behold, she’s proved that being a pop princess isn’t only about providing low-camp fizz and sensation in the moment (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course) but can Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.There has always been a deep strand of outsiderdom, of being the odd one out, of not doing things in the typically correct order, to his music. So it’s no wonder that Read more ...
joe.muggs
This record keeps you guessing. It starts off with “Hybrid Romance”, an ambient piece that’s very pretty but has swooping glassy synths that crack and fracture and could easily be about to break into some super jagged Berlin deconstructed club music at any minute.But less than two minutes later and we’re into “Chlorine”, a song in the modern country-inflected pop style which wouldn’t sound out of place on most daytime radio channels, and you could easily imagine the Californian Ded Hyatt performing as a support act for Taylor Swift or Harry Styles.The thing is, though, “Chlorine” has lots of Read more ...