pop music
Album: Tune-Yards - SketchyFriday, 26 March 2021
Tune-Yards have been much-feted for bringing an original sound to pop. Quite rightly so. Over the last decade the Californian duo, led by singing percussionist Merrill Garbus, have fired out four albums (and a film soundtrack) that amalgamated... Read more... |
Album: Frida Hyvönen - Dream Of IndependenceSaturday, 20 March 2021
Track two on Dream Of Independence, the new album from Sweden’s Frida Hyvönen, is titled “A Funeral in Banbridge”. An account of attending a funeral in, indeed, Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland, it’s bright, melodically jaunty, piano-... Read more... |
Album: Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails Over the Country ClubFriday, 19 March 2021
Lana Del Rey has turned pop’s volume down, returning hushed intimacy to the music’s heart. Her collaborator Jack Antonoff was also heavily involved in Taylor Swift’s Folklore reinvention, but Del Rey’s idea of Americana remains very different. Its... Read more... |
Album: Black Honey - Written & DirectedThursday, 18 March 2021
Indie rock has taken a commercial back seat, even if the music press still hasn’t quite caught up. Sure, there have been hit-makers, and bands that sell out stadiums, but overall, indie’s tide is very slowly retreating. Like any genre, it will... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Daryl HallMonday, 08 March 2021
Writing something people want to stream one billion times is inconceivable for most of us. But then, most of us aren't Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Daryl Hall. Alongside John Oates, he is behind some of the greatest pop songs of all time: "Maneater... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Sly & The Viscaynes - Yellow Moon The Complete Recordings 1961-1962Sunday, 07 March 2021
The Viscaynes ought to have been a footnote. A minor footnote. From Vallejo in north California, they were one amongst many early Sixties vocal groups giving it a shot. Some were lucky and had hits. The Earls, The Impalas and Randy & The... Read more... |
Album: Zara Larsson - Poster GirlThursday, 04 March 2021
Best known for winning Sweden's version of Got Talent, at the tender age of 10, Zara Larsson is a shining example of a prodigious young female talent being groomed by the music industry into the perfect pop icon.Her third album Poster Girl is... Read more... |
Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, Apple TV+ review - sprawling account of the singer's rise to superstardomSunday, 28 February 2021
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-... Read more... |
Britney Spears (1998-present): The Video SpecialMonday, 22 February 2021
Interest in Britney Spears has not waned. The #FreeBritney movement, the new documentary Framing Britney Spears, and the ongoing controversy around her father’s legal conservatorship have served to put her back in the public eye over the last year.... Read more... |
Album: Maxïmo Park – Nature Always WinsSaturday, 20 February 2021
Composed in the first lockdown, and recorded remotely, the seventh album from Newcastle’s Maxïmo Park was produced by Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Deerhunter). But it is not so much a record of the times as a snapshot of a time in the... Read more... |
Disc of the Day 10th Anniversary: the level playing fieldFriday, 19 February 2021
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But... Read more... |
Disc of the Day 10th Anniversary: Albums We Got WrongThursday, 18 February 2021
Continuing our week of pieces celebrating the 10th birthday of theartsdesk’s album reviews section, today it’s time to ‘fess up! Seven of our regular reviewers reflect on occasions when, in retrospect, their writing did not correctly sum up the... Read more... |
