The many-time Brit Award nominee Jessie Ware has cemented her status as a modern-day disco queen — from the turning point that was her fourth studio album, 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure?, to her sixth, Superbloom.
On Superbloom, Ware leans further into playfulness, not-so-subtly transporting listeners to a time of big hair and light-up dance floors. Her songs, once defined by ethereal, upbeat love ballads, have transformed into sexy, soulful singles about lust. Her steamy, innuendo-laden “Sauna” evokes Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit, “Physical.” “If you wanna / Last longer / I don’t need faster / I need stronger / Take it to the sauna,” she commands over funky synths and heavy breaths.
In her previous discography, Ware has…
Category: pop
The very first release on Frontier Records in March 1980 was an EP by Pasadena’s Flyboys – a power pop/punk band that began in 1977 with singer/songwriter John Curry and Jim “Trash” Decker from The Crowd (and tangentially, Jay from The Simpletones, who would later sign to Posh Boy). Flyboys gigged all over the Southland, paying their dues opening for every national and local punk band from Huntington Beach to Hollywood. They were anything but typical punks with their day-glo clothes, Cuban heels, and maddeningly catchy songs. Infectious hooks and John Curry’s bleached-blonde pompadour were the band’s trademarks.
Lisa Fancher interviewed Flyboys when she was a rock scribe at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The band’s lack of traction…
When deary, the dreampop three-piece composed of Ben Easton (guitar), Dottie Cockram (vocals, guitar) and Harry Catchpole (drums), named their debut album Birding, it wasn’t just as an homage to our feathered friends, they were referencing the sense of expansion, wonder, and abandon their music evokes. They chose the title to draw attention to the direct impact humans have on the world around us, whether that be nature, or ourselves.
“I got really into reading about birds and all these historical stories and poetry about them,” says singer/guitarist Dottie. “You find these beautiful images of birds that represent hope, but they’re also animals. Some of them, like vultures and crows, are a sign of death to some people. They represent all these different…
There’s often a fine line between homage and pastiche, between influence and theft. And all too often, bands fall on the wrong side of that line. Not, however Middleman. The London-based four-piece, who formed just a few years ago, certainly don’t hide who and what their influences are, but rather than crafting a watered-down version of them, they use those influences as a foundation and stepping stone to bring them into now with youthful exuberance and energy.
Caught between power-pop and punk rock, Following the Ghost is the band’s debut LP, and comes off the back of two acclaimed EPs, December 2022’s ‘Cut Out the Middleman’, and 2024’s ‘John Dillinger Died for You’. Raucously unhinged yet simultaneously full of catchy hooks,…
Stevie Nicks had much to prove when she stepped out on her own for the first time and crafted Bella Donna. Despite attaining superstar success with Fleetwood Mac, the singer often took a back seat to the band’s other members — and, due to the group’s approach, faced limitations in getting her songs on an album. Along with Nicks’ status as a significant artistic force in her own right, that all changed with the timeless Bella Donna.
Sourced from the original analog master tapes, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of the 1981 benchmark plays with superb transparency, dynamics, and detail. Benefitting from extraordinary clarity, openness, and separation, it captures what went down in the studio with tremendous realism…
On their first two albums Uni Boys shoehorned together New York Dolls-y swagger, punky attitude, glam rock glitter, and power pop hooks. The fit was close to being right on, but it felt like maybe the band hadn’t quite figured out what they wanted to be and the group’s two songwriters, Reza Matin and guitarist Noah Nash, maybe had different ideas where they wanted to go.
On their third album, usefully self-titled like many an album where the band undertakes a revamp, Matin and Nash are on the same page, the band have landed on a unified approach, and sound better than ever. This time around they’ve jettisoned almost all of the punk and Dolls-y hard rock in favor of a sprightly brand of power pop that’s reminiscent of the tight…
…19-track deluxe album, with four new songs.
The emergence of Laufey, the Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter who has become one Gen Z’s chief flag-waver for throwback pop, is largely attributable to her abundant talent. She has a sculptural alto that easily curves into her heart-on-sleeve lyrics, a knack for marrying 21st-century problems with fishhook melodies that recall standards from previous centuries, and a keen sense for framing those vocal lines in arrangements that highlight the tensions lurking underneath.
She’s also a product of her time, when critical masses in pop can develop away from the expected places. TikTok has the lipsync-showcase app Musical.ly in its DNA, and cuts from old Broadway hits, honky-tonk jukeboxes, and…
“I find the Scritti Politti syndrome absolutely hysterical,” said Duran Duran’s fedora-topped bassist John Taylor, reviewing the singles for Melody Maker in September 1982. “All these… radical Rough Trade bands suddenly deciding they want to be pop stars. They seem to have everything right but the songs. They have no perfect pop writers.” Taylor could speak with commercial authority at least, but the tell was he’d heard about Scritti Politti and their scheme to invade and master pop. Green Gartside’s new doctrine had spread in mere months.
Only in May, Green had laid out his starry ambitions to Lynden Barber, again in Melody Maker. “I think [Songs to Remember] is… a bit of a milestone in British pop,” he claimed.
Listeners could be forgiven for thinking Cold Beat was essentially Hannah Lew‘s solo project. The band’s lineup may have been a revolving door, but her softly compelling voice and fondness for icy electronics were always there. Nevertheless, Lew distinguishes herself as a solo artist on her self-titled debut album. The two albums Cold Beat released before going on hiatus, 2020’s Mother and the following year’s War Garden, were dense, ambitious statements; in comparison, Hannah Lew’s reflections on the opportunity for change that upheaval provides are strikingly direct. Lew describes it as a “wartime album,” and there’s a feeling of liberation from the start.
She begins the album with “one foot out the door/another in the other world” on…
“I hate this country, and I hate this island – but sometimes the people make it all worthwhile,” sings Simon Tyrie on ‘Space un the Cab’, the wonky disco banger that kicks off The Itch’s debut album It’s the Hope That Kills You. The track cuts decadent club euphoria with a general feeling of unease while calling out Britain’s slowly eroding nightlife scene. Across the ten infectious songs that follow, The Itch – Tyrie and Georgia Hardy – push back against everyday rage, disillusionment and frustration with party-starting electro-punk tracks that demand human connection.
The community celebration has been there since the start. After years of making music together, Hardy and Tyrie formed The Itch after taking part in the annual Byrne’s Night gig, which…
Damon Albarn’s perspective seems to be firmly placed on Gorillaz, so the arrival of Uncommon Side Effects fills a gap in the market of rapier-sharp and kinetic pop. The album, fronted by Marc Valentine, could easily have been released in 1996, given its bouncy choruses and soaring guitars. Bassist Richie Poynton unveils his inner Alex James, especially on the hybrid art piece “High in the Underground”. Valentine’s imprints are unapologetically British, splashing and dabbling about London nights based on youthful reverie.
Every song stems from an Anglo-centric mindset. The jangly “NY UAP” is the commentary from an outsider looking at the American landmark. “You Are the Jet” – a celebration, perhaps, of Paul McCartney‘s superlative Wings – forms…
Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral tropical unease, and a fantastic album about working at a nightclub that sounded like a party heard through the wall. His latest endeavor is a rotating collective with a name so florid it makes Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 seem like a perfectly modest moniker, and the theme this time is rock music, stripped of orthodoxy.
Zeisig assembled The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore…
Minneapolis trio Spaceport is back with their second album Cut the Lake, with many missing their first offering Window Seat (2023).
Maybe this time around that initial slip will be corrected, as the band’s creative force, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Arianna Wegley, seems be in full form.
Spaceport’s sound might be in that nether ground many indie bands operate in these days – the subdued guitar rock full of quality melody hooks, with added elements from elsewhere.
Spaceport’s added elements though cover quite a wide ground – on that indie rock base they add folk, classical, and ambient/electronic sounds. Of course, the possibility of a sound mess is there, but Wegley and her band seem to swim…
Poetry and song are related, but they’re not kissin’ cousins, more first cousins at one remove. Composers of art song in the 19th and 20th centuries turned to poets for their song cycles, and rock-era lyrics have often been hailed as poetry, but what happens when a poet – a page poet, albeit adept at performance – combines with musicians and lyricists and adds his own voice to the mix; his reading voice, not a singing one.
In the case of Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, former probation officer and resident poet with LYR, he’s fortunate in his collaborators, singer-songwriter Richard Walters, with his fine and distinctive lyrical vocals, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson, who with Armitage work up a broad palette of…
Wendy Eisenberg has evidently always been a fan of the rhetorical question, but perhaps never more so than on Wendy Eisenberg. “You are the oldest you’ve ever been,” they intone, sweet and clear, on the opening track: “Did you feel yourself change?” Whos, whats, wheres, whys, and hows abound: see “Who was I becoming?” (“Meaning Business”), “What gave me that idea?” and “Where was I when that happened?” (“The Ultraworld”), “Why did I try? Did I try?” (“Will You Dare”), “Is that how I wound up here?” (“Another Lifetime Floats Away”). But, as with all rhetorical questions, there are no answers expected. The asking — or, more specifically, the spacious, open silence that follows in the question’s wake — is the point. After all, absence is itself a kind of presence. Those gaps…
…Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt met while studying at the University of Hull in 1981. Thorn had already formed the DIY post-punk group Marine Girls and recorded their beloved debut album Beach Party. Meanwhile, experimental singer-songwriter Watt’s debut single – ‘Cant’, produced by Kevin Coyne – was released that year on Cherry Red. The pair started a side project, Everything But the Girl, and released their first EP, Night and Day (led by a cover of the Cole Porter standard) in 1982.
After a couple of years pursuing their respective solo projects, Thorn and Watt came together again in 1984 for their debut full-length, Eden, a timeless set of plaintive bossa nova (No 28 single ‘Each and Every One’), shimmering indie-pop (‘Another Bridge’), wee-small-hours jazz…
Slayyyter’s music is vile, explicit, and a threat to common decency. Since her early days as a salon receptionist, the artist formerly known as Catherine Garner has channeled her unbridled id with a head-spinning boldness that would be probable cause for exorcism in most God-fearing countries. Over beats as blunt, chromatic, and gleefully stupid as a Jeff Koons sculpture, the singer has vied to make hyperpop more garish and alarming by being hornier, messier, and more extreme than her peers. Together with producer Ayesha Erotica, she dared listeners to join her Bimbo Summit as she barreled through Y2K hedonism without the burdens of taste or conventional morality to slow her down. The mileage one got out of songs like “Daddy AF,” “Throatzillaaa,” or “Purrr”…
The Beatles are a singularly iconic rock band. While plenty of classic rock groups, like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and, most successfully, Queen, continue to rack up tens of millions of monthly Spotify streams, no other band remains as relevant as the Beatles. Many YouTubers build popular channels by explaining musical theory through their songs or by delving into the supposed mysteries of how their music was created.
That makes it increasingly more challenging to find a new perspective on the group. With a Little Help from My Friends: Covers of the Beatles 1967-1970 may well provide some interesting new points of discussion. Does it make for an equally enjoyable listening experience?
This 3-disc box set from Cherry Red Records…
In this most challenging of times, we need music to lift our spirits and relieve the gloom. Step forward, in all their retro-chic, cabaret-burlesque splendour The Puppini Sisters, with their perfect harmonies and songs that cheer and distract.
Their style, and sometimes the songs themselves, are drawn from the dark days of the 1940s, when The Andrews Sisters filled the crackling airwaves with songs such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, their style heavily influenced by an earlier close-harmony sister act, The Boswell Sisters, who came out of the Jazz Age and enlivened the years of the Great Depression.
The Puppinis aren’t in fact sisters and there have been changes of line-up during their 20-year career, but for The Birthday Party,…
Jess Weiss takes the shadowy intensity of her band Fear of Men deeper into chasms of dark synth pop with Pain Will Polish Me, the debut album under her solo guise, New German Cinema. While Fear of Men have incorporated electronics into their sound at times, the songs of Pain Will Polish Me are built almost exclusively around heavy synth bass, uneasy ambient pads, and programmed drum sounds, creating a foundation of Weiss’ songs that’s sharp and menacing while still making space for hooks. A perfect example of this tenuous balance is “I Become Heavy,” a track made up of tortured verses and exciting dance-pop choruses. Weiss’ ability to take the song from the dungeon-ready atmospheres of early Cure material to club-ready melodies at the flick of a switch is…