pop
Thomas H. Green
Onto our seventh Lockdown selection and things are only getting busier out there, with more to see, hear and get involved in. Below are five of the best for this week. Dive in!BBC Radio One Big Weekend 2020BBC Radio One’s annual Big Weekend shindig, a free primary-coloured pop festival-cum-party-cum-promo event, has taken place in a different region of the UK every year since 2012. The COVID-19 crisis will not be stopping it going ahead, and this time artists will be performing from multiple locations. On BBC iPlayer throughout the coming weekend, the virtual show runs from Friday 22nd to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the music industry slips into the rhythm of lockdown, so the spigot slowly becomes untapped and events, livestreams and similar start to flow more steadily. This week a host of big names are up to a bunch of different stuff, all worth checking. Dive in!A Theatre for Dreamers/Von Trapped Family Livestream + Dave Gilmour Live at PompeiiA couple of treats for Pink Floyd fans, from both ends of the band’s career. Most current is the latest home-stream by guitarist David Gilmour’s family. These take place each Friday and partly celebrate Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson’s bestselling novel A Theatre Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music of monstrously successful emo-pop sorts Paramore is globally massive but is far from everyone’s cup of angst-lite. There is something polished and squeaky clean about them, Teflon fluoro-goth with an off-putting whiff of decent boy/girl-next-door niceness. This writer, then, comes to the debut album of lead singer Hayley Williams with Everest-sized prejudices. Unbelievably, these must be cast aside, for Petals For Armor, despite its stinky title (had to get one dig in!), is a vibrantly funky, imaginative and more-ish album.From the writing credits, Williams appears to have put it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we unwillingly become used to lockdown, most of us are regularly looking for juicy tidbits to pass the time online, so here's another selection that should be well worth a look. Dive in.Sea Change Goes OnlineSea Change Festival, run from Totnes record shop Drift and usually based in Devon across a weekend in August, will be running a virtual edition this weekend. The five year old event, which has garnered a reputation for imaginative, independent curation, offers two days of live sets from Billy Bragg, Midlake, Metronomy, The Breeders, dame of folk, Shirley Collins, extraordinary Texan Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The world might have changed drastically in the wake of Covid-19, but thankfully those hyperactive, candy-coloured Trolls haven’t. Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake are back as the delightful odd-couple, Poppy and Branch, for round two of pop-infused peppy animated adventure in the land of felt and feelings, where music can solve a myriad of problems. The first movie was a gleeful delight. Yes, it was slight on plot, but it possessed an infectious optimism and a message of love and acceptance. It wasn’t going to have the bosses at Pixar quaking in their boots, but it was an undeniable Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Purity Ring, the Canadian duo, are purveyors of simple yet sophisticated dream pop. Corin Roddick makes synth tracks at one end of the country, while crystalline-voiced Megan James writes the lyrics and records the vocals thousands of miles away. Perfect music for the age of social distancing, similar in a way to those multi-layered anthems now popping up on the internet with musicians syncing up in quasi-miraculous symphonic harmony.Womb is their third album, and it is, if anything more ethereal than the first two, Shrine (2012) and Another Eternity (2015), both of which stayed closer to the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Dua Lipa's self-titled debut was unmistakably the sound of a musician feeling their way. It had all the flavours of trap, tropical house, autotune and Lana Del Ray-ish triphop introspection you'd expect on a 2017 pop record. The multi-billion-stream single “New Rules” was the most transatlantic-sounding thing there, and it must have been tempting to try and repeat its success by following current generic templates.Thankfully, though, that isn't the way Lipa has gone. Perhaps the success of her features on Calvin Harris's “One Dance” and Silk City's “Electricity” helped encouraged her to free Read more ...
Barney Harsent
At a time when stepping outside your front door constitutes risky behaviour, the short, sharp, shocking tales of misspent youth from Queensland pop-punk trio The Chats are a proper tonic."Short" might be an understatement, as it goes. The debut album from singer-bassist Eamon Sandwith, drummer Matt Boggis and guitarist Josh Price’s features 14 songs, none of which tops three minutes. Half of them are well under two. It’s amazing what they can pack into a minute and a half simply by discarding everything extraneous.These songs start at a sprint, throw everything at you and then bugger off – Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Critical and commercial success haven’t gone to the head of Lewis Capaldi. The 23-year-old opened his first of two sold-out nights at Glasgow’s 14,000-capacity enormodrome – booked when he was yet to release his debut album – with a video montage poking fun of his po-faced reaction to Billie Eilish beating him to Song of the Year at the Grammys in January.Coming mere weeks after his double win at the Brit Awards, the show had the feel of a triumphant homecoming – albeit one in for which the vanquishing hero was constantly rewarding the crowd with profanity-laden gratitude. Almost exactly Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these days. Nevertheless the creative exchange between the two nations has a long and fruitful history – our folk traditions are conjoined twins, after all, and our contemporary musical cultures part of a continual flow back and forth.Imagining Ireland, first mounted to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising back in 2016, the year of the Brexit Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Grimes is hilarious. For all the grandiose conceptualism, apocalyptic visions, high tech sonic manipulation, outré costumes, modish witchery, multiple personas, arch media baiting with her billionaire boyfriend and all the rest, she is still essentially a dork. When she emerged from the weird end of the 00s online electronic music landscape where semi-serious lo-fi genres like “witch house” and “seapunk” abounded, she always seemed kind of goofy with it. And though her musical progression has been a steady accumulation of expensive-sounding production, that same drama student on acid Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Gaz Coombes noted around the halfway point of Supergrass’s Barrowland set “the last time we were here it was to say goodbye”. That was a decade ago, when one of Britpop’s most enduring acts finally headed into the sunset. Nothing lasts forever in pop though, and here were Oxford’s finest, back onstage, and looking in fine fettle.They opened with “Caught By The Fuzz”, and it sounded as breathlessly exciting as ever, an under three minute blast of punky pop dynamism. That was a common theme throughout the set, and one that not all nostalgia tours like this can always offer, in that music Read more ...