sat 05/04/2025

pop

CD: Air - Le Voyage Dans la Lune

A semantic side effect of my longish involvement in music culture has been hearing certain phrases pass from fringe slang obscurity to mainstream acceptance. Among these is the term “chill out”, purloined by ravers from the hippies to describe post-...

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CD: Ringo Starr - Ringo 2012

If The Wombles had made this it would likely raise a smile despite its lame, lazy nostalgic guitar pop. It even goes as far as to include a feeble version of seminal skiffle song "Rock Island Line". The harsh words it deserves, however, are tempered...

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CD: Kathleen Edwards - Voyageur

Although a relatively new name around these parts, Kathleen Edwards has been alt-country’s nearly girl for almost a decade in her native Canada (as well as the doyenne of many campus radio stations across the States). But praise goes much further....

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CD of the Year: Metronomy - The English Riviera

Even in a bumper year for Xmas albums there comes a point where you really don’t “wish it could be Xmas every day”. After the third helping of turkey, and feeling like a cracker that has been well and truly pulled, it’s only natural to long for a...

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CD of the Year: Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes

It could have been Fleet Foxes’s Helplessness Blues, or maybe The War on Drugs’s Slave Ambient, but this is the one that keeps being returned to. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes kept forcing its way to the top of the pile, insisting it had to be heard....

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Example, Brighton Centre

Example seems a most unlikely sex symbol but the four-fifths full Brighton Centre (capacity 5100) contains multiple gaggles of young women in their late teens and early twenties who want a piece of 29-year-old Elliot Gleave (EG = Example). My pal...

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CD: Rihanna - Talk That Talk

Dateline July 14th, 2357, New Oxford Excavation, UK Sector 71. Uncovered a remarkable haul of artefacts from the early 21st century. Most pristine among these is a sonic data disc, theoretically a devotional item related to the contemporaneous...

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CD: The dø - Both Ways Open Jaws

It’s pronounced doh, like Homer Simpson’s favourite exclamation. Although The dø aren’t yellow cartoon characters, they edge towards the caricature with songs like “Gonna be Sick!” and “Smash Them All (Night Visitors)”. Their art pop has a slight...

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Nerina Pallot, Shepherds Bush Empire

It’s been a long-standing source of surprise to me how Nerina Pallot continues to operate a whisker under the radar. From the get-go, 10 years back, she’s had the voice, songs and looks to be a star. Maybe a decade ago was the wrong time for her....

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Arcade Fire, O2 Arena

One of the great pleasures of watching live music lies in witnessing the joy that people get from making it; to experience a great live band in their prime, to see them interacting with each other, feeding off each other, pushing each other on, is a...

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