For those who follow it, Eurovision can be as fickle as it is fabulous; while most of the time the voting public do a fairly good job at separating the candy floss from the gobstoppers, every year they overlook at least one slice of pure pop magic over some gimmicky tosswank and this year was no exception. But, even next to all the wonderful tunes that frustratingly snuffle around the lower end of the score board, I Am Yours can lay claim to being the least deserved nil points in the competition’s history.
It’s a sweet Randy Newman-esque piano ballad swimming with plomping bass guitar and the feeling that maybe flared trousers and questionable facial hair are wise fashion choices. Except this was just one piano ballad in a year full of the emotional bastards. Which is a shame because I Am Yours lilts and coos and swirls like the breeze on a summer’s afternoon.
The story of classic rock, at least by chinstroking MOJO standards, is the story of bands for teenage boys. One after the other… Led Zeppelin, Genesis and The Smiths were all fundamentally teenage boy bands before they turned into groups for men, then old men. And I like The Smiths.
Too often neglected is the history of bands firmly aimed at teenage girls, Hole, Destiny’s Child, hell, both The Beatles and Elvis Presley sang doe eyed at teenage girls way before the boys got involved.
The Prettiots, on Boys (I Dated in High School), weld the two traditions together rather nicely, taking musical cues from (fellow New Yorkers) The Strokes and Lou Reed but stamping their own teenage girl flavour into the mix. Lyrics about shady ex boyfriends and uncomfortable sexuality contrast nicely with chirrupy ukulele and a bassline so New York it’s practically chomping on a Dirty Water Dog. Boys (I Dated in High School) is at the same time wide eyed and chilling and delightful and uncomfortable with a story too often left untold.
For better or worse much Stateside hip hop turned inward in 2015. Earl Sweatshirt put out the sulking I Don’t Like Shit album, Drake’s prolific output only served to bolster his own myth and even snuffling around in the underground we find releases like Kinison by Your Old Droog, an EP all about rock, rap and the frissons between the two. Fine. Leaving criticisms of the great gawp inward to one side for a moment, jonwayne is the master of introspective, moody hip hop and 30 000 is one of the finer cuts off his jonwayne Is Retired EP. Gloopy smears of synthesiser drip all over the sparse beat like molasses leaving jonwayne’s boasts feeling empty like he’s muttering them to himself.
30 000 is aggressively insular, with each part never quite resting comfortably in its own skin. The beat shuffles itchily and the chords drift around at odd intervals like a punchline left a second too long. But all together, 30 000 revels in these difficult, uneasy emotions; a refreshing break from the uncomplicated bravado most rappers daub themselves in.
For some, In Da Club by 50 Cent is the perfect rap song. It has everything; a minor key string section, Fiddy’s playful drawl and an easy going beat made of appropriately tough sounding hi-hats and handclaps.
And then there’s LE1F who seems hell bent on being as far away from this macho puffed up stereotype as possible, swapping endlessly looping strings for trance-y synths, disembodied robot voices and a theremin that sounds like the Radiophonic Workshop trying to approximate bees. SOPHIE, the producer treats the backing like some kind of audible playground.
And of course, it’s very, very gay, revolving around LE1F’s attempts to milk a man for all the drinks he has with no intention of going back to this tryhard’s apartment; the exact photo negative of 50 cents strutting come-ons.
Koi, then, is fizzy, fun and jam packed full of ideas, let’s hope this is not the last time LE1F’s playful rhymes cross paths with SOPHIE’s mad scientist studio skillz.
Earlier this year, I went to a jazz festival and immediately found myself in a sea of middle aged men in tan jackets nodding. And while the music varied as much as it can do at a festival stage, the spectre of the tan jacket and Radio 2 in the Ford Mondeo and the 2.8 children in Penge couldn’t be entirely shaken.
Contemporary jazz, alas, has a problem with sounding contemporary.
Kamasi Washington’s superb Change Of The Guard, however, sounds like it could only be made within the lifespan of an iPhone. While he uses the same jittery hyperactive ingredients as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, there is not a hint of tan jacket or Ford Mondeo or musky old boy yelling “This cat can blow!"
Cleanly recorded, Change Of The Guard has standout spots from caterwauling piano, wailing sax and demonic choirs, all pinned together by the funkiest jazz drummer this side of Buddy Rich. And it all comes together, not as a flurry of dry technique but as a whole with high emotion in the driver’s seat. No apologies and no expense spared.
It was on the back of a bus somewhere in darkest South London when I heard Runnin’ for the first time through an excitable teenage girl’s phone, and even through the tinny speakers and the cloud of cantankerous disapproval from the rest of the bus, it was clear both Beyonce and producer Naughty Boy were onto a winner.
Music off all kinds becomes most exciting when there are contrasts playing off eachother, like in Yeah! when Usher’s smooth as silk voice meets Lil’ John’s guttural, gravelly interjections, Beyonce’s warmth as a vocalist runs alongside Naughty Boy’s jittery, distant production. All of this could, very easily, be a misjudged hodgepodge, and indeed it becomes a mismatched hodgepodge when Arrow Benjamin decides to mawkishly demonstrate his pipes later on in the tune proving that bigger does not always mean better. It is to Beyonce’s credit that her delivery is as well paced as a warm bath and that Naughty Boy has the balls to leave her with only a piano and a reverb trail for company and still keep Runnin’ sounding full and luxurious even when there’s very little in the frame.
For someone who regularly makes a jolly old arse of herself, one of the more redeeming parts of Miley Cyrus is her willingness to skip down Psychedelia Avenue every now and again. And in between the lame peans to pot and fucking getting fucked up, her new album / project contains the tender Karen Don’t Be Sad, floating like a small glowing orb lost in a world of sticky out tongues and multicoloured vomit.
And to help her in this surprisingly downbeat endeavour, The Flaming Lips (sorry, ‘Dead Petz’) generously marry her slight crunch of a voice with Beatle-esque organ, a lilting guitar line and charmingly off kilter production, helping it fit snugly into the world of high class psychedelia. D’aww
It starts with a glorious flurry and soon it becomes quite evident that Angel Deradoorian is in hiding no more!
While her role as backing singer in the Dirty Projectors was always intriguing and occasionally heart tugging, she always seemed fairly dormant next to David Longstreth’s fountain of odd shaped chords and Black Flag covers. He was the giraffe shaped wunderkid, she was a session singer; he wrote the bizarre tunes, she just sang the parts he wrote for her. Until now.
A Beautiful Woman sees Deradoorian fizz like a multicoloured firecracker, keeping the avant garde sheen of her old group, for sure, but marrying it with her own curious approach to melody and harmony. Giant slabs of her voice, layered, flit and buzz into an exciting, jittery whole, the percussion tries to keep it all together but never quite succeeds. But cohesion quickly becomes superfluous on this multicoloured joy ride. Angel Deradoorian has found her voice with no sign of losing it any time soon.
As bloody and lurching and back from the dead as your nearest zombie horde, Poison in the Birthwater represents a welcome return to form for hip-hop veterans Jedi Mind Tricks.
From a beat stuffed with grand oddities to a flow presumably purchased at a crossroads at midnight, Poison In The Birthwater hits all your hard rockin’ hip-hop needs; it’s loud, dense and Vinnie Paz’s flow hits home every. Single. Time.
In an alternate world, Natalia Lafourcade could be the Hispanophone version of Dido, all limp and bland as a damp cabbage, singing easy listening mush. Instead, she takes very smooth edged sounds and absorbs the knowing dignity common to Edith Piaf, the Amelie soundtrack and back room jazz of the finest order.
Para Que Sufrir transports you straight to a Parisian coffee house on a comfortable spring morning overlooking the Seine, with rippling guitars in the background. Natalia Lafourcade’s company is amiable and her voice trickles easily as a friend’s does. One more espresso s’il vous plait…
Most rock bands think melody is for wimps. Surely, gorgeous, expansive, eat your own face off tunes are for GIRLS AND GIRLS ARE STUPID AMIRITE?
Sheer Mag demonstrate rather nicely that, yes, melodies are for girls. Kick ass, don’t-take-no-shit girls, that is. Fan the Flames is the perfect mix of smooth and crunchy, mixing garage band crunch with funky licks and a singer who evokes the power and command of Patti Smith or Sister Rosetta Tharpe but strikes out on her own rough and smooth path
For someone so singular as Antony Hegarty, 4 Degrees has been a slab of wild experimentation long overdue. She’s proudly trans- Atlantic, transgender and the owner of one of the finest singing voices on the planet. Pitched somewhere in between alt disco guru Arthur Russell and opera singer extraordinaire Marian Anderson, Antony’s voice is powerful, vulnerable and rather odd all in equal measure. The piano ballads had to get old sometime.
What we have instead is a wild cacophony of blasting drums and a stern orchestra of caterwauling strings and brass topped off with Antony’s olympic vocal talents swooshing on top. It’s mean and crunching and a welcome departure from the small scale of Antony’s past work.
There has literally been a higher chance of Pete Doherty conking it in a ditch somewhere near the Rhythm Factory than the possibility of a Libertines reunion but here we are. That mythic third album found its way into the world, Pigman and Carlos are present and correct and the good ship sails to Albion!
Except the Libertines left the scene in 2004 as scrappy underdogs in a cloud of bitter feuds and leftover coke and have returned as almighty rock dinosaurs. It’s an underwhelming transition bolstered by mythmaking and stadium shows but Gunga Din makes the best of The Libertines’ new found bombast.
For all the pandering to the indie gods The Libertines revelled in the first time round, their willingness to absorb reggae, funk and Chas’n’Dave still separates them from their old contemporaries and their new pretenders. Gunga Din, unlike some of the other cuts off their new album, continues this trend with lurching reggae flavoured guitars in the verses bolted onto a cleanly anthemic stadium sized chorus.
Gunga Din clearly revels in pressing every button guaranteed to make long term fans, and I would count myself in that number, feel weak at the knees. As well as their continued eclecticism and tighter instrumentation, Gunga Din is really a song of two halves, one belonging to Pete Doherty, the other to Carl Barat, one indulging in doughy vocals, the other with Barat’s trademark snarl. Even for someone who has a hotel full of reservations about their reunion, Gunga Din cannot help but rekindle that pure, teenage love for the Libertines.
Classical music buffs are not often known for their up to date tastes nor would you count on one to make music that sounds like the future, yet Anna Meredith’s R-Type is cut from slightly different cloth and breaks with convention at every turn.
Whereas her fellow composer chums might be more at home regurgitating (sorry, re-interpreting) some pored over dead composer, Meredith melds the living and the dead, Gorgio Moroder rubs shoulders with some of Lizst’s wilder moments, electric guitars from your standard indie rock outfit squall over layers of rhythm more commonly found in a Rio de Janeiro samba band.
Though Anna Meredith’s great leap forward should not be too surprising. Both electronic and classical music value texture and feeling over all else, that’s why Drake could lift chunks of Debussy wholesale if he was so inclined. R-Type is a deliciously textured piece but never sacrifices its good new-fashioned fun.
Around a decade ago, one particular baseball capped kid won a hotdog eating contest, much to the dismay of the American news anchors reporting on the story. This was not out of concern for the boy’s heath nor disappointment at the shoddy hotdogs on show but rather that the boy was resolutely not American. Not even Canadian.
He was a kid from Albania who was bossing the most uniquely American sport, doubly impressive considering he was born into a country where one had to queue for a while in the hope that someone may give you cheese.
Similarly in hip-hop, a genre as American as star spangled shotguns, it is quietly acknowledged that the best MC’s on the planet all call the United States home.
Wretch 32, however, has other plans. Just one of the many world class rappers pouring out of London, his appearance on Charlie Sloth’s Fire In The Booth is passionate, detailed and so slippery with the rhythm it deserves to be spoken about in hushed, reverential tones alongside Jay Electronica’s Exhibit C or Eminem’s closing rap in 8 Mile.
Wretch 32 not only delivers a flawless rap over Charlie Sloth’s delicious reworking of an xx track, but he turns anger into sensitivity, a shout into a mission statement and while doing so, acts as that little Albanian kid chowing down hot dogs. He shows the Americans how its done.
My first introduction to Bring Me The Horizon was hanging round the cool semi-emo metalheads at house parties where Oli Sykes and co. were always present on the sound system. They made music as aggressive and unpredictable as your average moshpit, tapping into that teenage need for something their parents will not approve of one bit.
Years later, and now with a brand spanking new keyboard player, BMTH have calmed down a touch, boasting actual tunes and even a bit of singing. And, while Throne is the number we are running with for now, every one of the tracks on their recent That’s The Spirit album is a sturdily written, dazzlingly played rock juggernaut, marrying their tried and tested schlock with the best parts of Linkin Park, The Foo Fighters and even a bit of Bieber.
But Throne squeezes in just on the strength of its big jaggedy hook, Oli Sykes’ gutteral roar becoming an instrument to manipulate, touching base on the moshpit and the dancefloor in equal measure.
Dance music finds many things stupidly easy; sound tracking wild nights is one, charting new territory into synth sounds is another and perfecting that almighty bass drum thump is yet another.
Taking in looser rhythms, keeping interest for over five minutes and acknowledging music outside the Euro-American is something dance music finds less easy, clambering over itself to ignore all these things. Felix Laband’s Ding Dong Thing is a loop laden, 11 minute odyssey taking in African guitar, blues samples and an account of demonic possession into a dreamy whole as easygoing as a poolside martini. It’s eclectic, grooving and hideously absent from club nights. Maybe he could show David Guetta a thing or two.
A top tip for all you budding musicians out there: if making good music is hard, seeing something of Night Falls Over Kortedala’s quality fade into the ether must be even harder. Just ask Jens Lekman, who earned The Pop Critic’s Best Album Ever prize with that record and has subsequently seen it do sweet bugger all.
Quick, but necessary evangelism aside, Two Young Lovers answers, succinctly, where one goes after making a glistening, gliding, maximalist record about all engulfing, teenage love. On this number, he relegates himself to the fringes, leaving the charming story of two young lovers staring into the future to play out.
As well as including tittersome lines and delicious chords, Two Young Lovers is a love song about love songs. About how fragile, strong, realistic and unrealistic the whole mess of love is.
See also: Society’s Child- Janis Ian,Backa Tiden- Joel Alme
32. What Do You Mean?- Justin Bieber
"Actually kinda cool.”
Eighteen months ago, no number of off the record hand jobs could persuade a magazine to publish a complimentary piece on Justin Bieber. He was in the public eye strictly for racing Lambos and egging houses, leaving his actual music cast adrift like a damp wankrag.
Yet here we are towards the end of 2015 and the NME are lathering him on their front cover out of their own free will with the quality of his recent musical output rightfully taking centre stage.
Make no mistake; Bieber’s music had been growing stranger for years but it was not until What Do You Mean? that his bratty preteen image finally pissed off, leaving a sleeker, sexier model in its wake.
What Do You Mean may be the flagship single for the Tropical House movement but it jumps around and lands with a softened punch just like ragtime. It’s re invention and presentation reminds me a lot of Hello Goodbyeby the Beatles. It’s squeaky clean but rather odd, full of doubt masqueraded as cool swag and all of this has laid out Justin Bieber’s music as the most interesting thing about the guy, arguably for the first time. Let’s hope his winning streak continues.
For all his Craig-David-for-the-Tinder-generation persona, Drake’s music is very rarely at ease with itself. On the one hand, his repertoire bathes in high end gloss but there also plenty of absent girlfriends, lonely nights and jazzy chords.
“You used to call me on my cell phone,” then, is less of a throwaway opening line. It’s Drake’s mission statement. Which is fitting for the Drakiest song to date where the nights are lonelier, the chords weirder and the melodies are just that little bit more fluid, all over a trappy, jerky beat so current, it is practically hammered out of little bits of 2015.
It is like all this time Drake has been trying to figure out where he wants to go with his music. After moonlighting as the pansiest gangster in Started From The Bottom or doing an impression of Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive, Drake has finally realised he is happiest in a plush hotel room with a Moet wondering when his ex girlfriend is going to call. He’s comfortable being uncomfortable.
In a world of confident, goody two shoes pop stars, surely we want one who is perfectly fine with dancing like a floppy Pinnochio and may just wait for us to ring first.
For a style of music that all seems pretty much the same, nausea inducing hip hop can be a surprisingly nuanced genre.
On the one hand, our Eminems and Tyler, the Creators shout obscenities from across the street, their barked threats hitting like jump scares in an Insidious sequel; all gore and gut reactions.
Father, meanwhile, belongs to a second school of nausea inducing hip-hop so snugly he’s practically president. See, on Spoil You Rotten, Father barely raises his voice above a persistent niggling in your ear, his words spelling out, at best, the creepiest profile on Plenty of Fish and at worst, the opening monologue for when you find yourself in his underground lair with no means of escape.
But, hey, with beats and flows this breezy, who am I to resist?
Fresh, fizzing, summery pop music all the way from Norwich! As the summer nights draw gloomily in, Sigala drops this enjoyable, if a bit sugary, ode to the summer as one last hurrah for the beach parties and the cocktails and the woozy summer evenings.
And he does this through the medium of house music which (as discussed by an extremely good looking critic here) doesn’t exactly lend itself to warmth or fuzziness. But instead of being all spooky like much house goes for, with great effect, Easy Love tries a brighter approach. The choppy keyboards sound groovy and warm instead of mechanised hell-pianos emenating from a nearby circus. The euphoric builds are indeed euphoric without being vulgar and the heavily reverbed voice coos and hollers in one big soul stew. Because that voice is Michael Jackson.
The various press tat associated with this single and its promotion make great pains to remind you that it is The Jackson Five that provide this delicious ABC sample going throughout the song. Bollocks. Just like little Michael made the Jackson 5 look like Michael Jackson and The Four Taller Blokes any contribution by Tito, Marlon or Jermaine is steamrolled by their younger brother’s magnificent pipes, that soaring, freewheeling delivery, that tone that hits you like love should, he wasn’t just good for a kid, he was good for anybody.
And Sigala builds this sugary shell just for Michael Jackson to dance on. As a remix, it feels like Cheerleader’s younger cousin, it draws attention to its acoustic elements pretty strongly, whether it be the aforementioned piano or the kooky xylophone sounds. However, the the tricks aren’t quite as flashy, the tune not quite as strong and it relies on the sample a little too eagerly.
But nonetheless, Easy Love is a fine addition to any summer playlist. earmark this for your next beach party.
Somewhere in 1920s Vienna, the American composer of the moment George Gershwin found himself in the home of fellow composer Alban Berg who suggested that they collaborate. One was zippy and jazzy and sentimental, the other wrote blood soaked operas as difficult as the in laws at Christmas. It would be like Taylor Swift working with Slayer. When Gershwin expressed some doubt over the proposition, Berg uttered the immortal words:
“Mr. Gershwin, music is music.”
Fast forward to 2015 and no-one has taken this sentiment more on board than two Chinese singers Sherman Chung and Zhongshu Qi who zip through genres on this track like an excitable bullet train. First, they thrash through the first verse as if they were China’s answer to Ministry and by the time SS14 has come to a close they have lampooned hip-hop, Canto-pop and Queen with equal love and enthusiasm. Exciting and totally madder than your nearest asylum, they demonstrate that boundaries are there to be fucked with.
The Go! Team may look like a bunch of cute little indie kids. They may act like a bunch of cute little indie and some of them may even play that way as well. So far so cute and so indie.
Except these guys make such a pelting racket that it would be remiss not to put it on at full volume and dance like you are a five year old high on jelly. Cute, indie harmonies meet with cute, indie keyboards and a crunchy, ecstatic wall of noise seemingly grafted together with pure bliss.
To deny Kendrick Lamar’s status as Grooviest Dude Of 2015 seems a little flaccid now. In amidst the most turbulent, restless and emotionally charged period for African Americans since the 1960s, one man committed to record what hundreds of African American entertainers simply relegated to their Twitter feed. Black lives matter.
Over the course of his album To Pimp A Butterfly, he did everything in his power to shed light on a community with lives and loves too routinely ignored. He spat and pleaded and eulogised like a preacher possessed, he even invited Parliament/Funkadelic man George Clinton to speak the God-sounding line: "By the time you hear the next pop, the funk shall be within you.” What follows is a mellow stew of funky bass, sultry guitar and the freakiest backing duo on the whole record. Not to mention Kendrick name checking Richard Pryor, homicidal gang members and the yams.
(What’s the yams? Well, depending on who you ask, they allude to material prestige by way of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart novel, knowing authenticity as a black man by way of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or a slang term for clunge. Take your pick.)
Los Angeles, California has been going through a renaissance of late. From Kendrick Lamar bringing the warmth and wit straight outta Compton to Kamasi Washington’s sprawling, and appropriately titled The Epic, using all local musicians, LA seems to be morphing into a city where high class is not the dirty word it was a decade ago. Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon, then, is Los Angeles sized and Los Angeles shaped. Honeymoon has everything from Lana Del Rey has come to be good at; from distinctive Old Hollywood glamour to a tightly 21st century awareness of herself (“We both know that it’s not fashionable to love me…”) to touches of Laurel Canyon, Disney and LA era Morrissey holed away in his mansion. Its strings trickle, her voice crooning lyrics with the immediacy of catchphrases all in a song that’s feels eerily voiceless, all setting the scene up for the most Lana Del Rey album to date.
Right from the start, Deadwater is a tune which gives you options. After a half second of prefabricated fumbling, a steady guitar line places itself in the foreground, knowingly slow but punchy. It could have taken a detour from its rightful home in a power ballad and found itself here, glossy but quaintly independent, like Bruce Springsteen invited to Sunday afternoon book club.
And this is the first option; Deadwater as a straightforward, if slow paced pop song. Offsetting all this is the second guitar line which comes stumbling in a little later. It’s distant, offbeat and tries to interact with the piece at large but instead signals that something may be a bit off. Deadwater, then, may sound all confident and poppy in the foreground but there’s something else going on behind closed doors.
Ambiguity is something that contemporary pop can struggle with. The tone of the music and meaning of the lyrics can differ, for sure, Abba made a career out of it, but Wet’s Deadwater is a little more complicated than that. It can either be read as an ordinary love song to an ordinary partner or…not. “If I could be stronger/ and if you were just older…” It begins, gorgeously sung by Kelly Zutrau. Fine, Wouldn’t It Be Nice has that wish to be older and is about as innocent as a van full of smoothies.
But it continues.
“You said I was my mother’s daughter…” And then the slimier, creepier interpretation comes oozing out from under the floorboards. Add in a sprinkling of quotation marks and Deadwater becomes very eerie indeed.
Which all just adds an extra oomph to this soaring, ghostly, understated anthem.
I’ve often wondered why Rage Against The Machine work so well as a band when Papa Roach, using the same ingredients of crushing riffs, downtuned bass and barked voices, collapses like an undercooked omelette.
It may be that Rage Against the Machine understand why hip-hop is great and try to outdo it on every level, whereas Papa Roach, or Limp Bizkit or any of this boorish nu-metal groups understand the brutish aggression and nothing else. In short, Rage Against the Machine use the outside world as a challenge for rock’n’roll.
Which is exactly what Enter Shikari have been doing for nearly a decade, except their challenge seems to be outdoing club music in all its forms. In the past they have fused their heavy, punishing metal with happy hardcore synths, ravey glowstick melodies and the kind of energy that could power a small town.
On The Last Garrison, Enter Shikari take on big, noisy, Skrillex-y dubstep and somehow chance upon the clangiest, noisiest chord in their repertoire. And bookend it with sweet, butter-wouldn’t-melt melodies so when the dubstep-like drop does hit, it feels like it’s going to rip your head off and eat it for breakfast.
The Last Garrison is not only a filthy, raucous rock song, it understands it’s clubby subject matter so deeply, it cannot help but try and outdo it.
For a long time, Rihanna was a little like Diet Pepsi, always there but loved by precisely no-one, marketed as the Barbadian Bey, blending into her songs like Diet Pepsi at a corner store. But ever since Umbrella came out, Rihanna has shoved her good girl image back into a the dark, dank basement where it belongs and spewed out singles on monsters, S&M and cum guzzling.
And Bitch, Better Have My Money is certainly the most Rihanna single Rihanna has ever Rihanna’d on, it’s glitchy, nasty and flits around the place like a neurotic greyhound.
It must be hard being Little Mix. They may have won the X Factor, they may be doing rather well with their relatable Spice Girls routine but Fifth Harmony, with their wall to wall cool, make the Little Mixers look like pipsqueaks.
Opening with a thrillingly disjointed sax riff, and a passable Kid Ink verse, each member states herself as a mini Beyonce in waiting, some serving up straightforwardly sultry parts, others showing off their vocal ranges in an addictive blend of rapping and singing, made all the more marvellous by the fact that it does not come across as insufferably corny.
Out of all the nauseating phrases in the world, “critically acclaimed pop” is up there with “business studies” or “sexually appealing John McCrirrick" as terms that immediately make me hurl. That said, Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest material is unabashedly "critically acclaimed pop" and should have, by all means, set the charts ablaze with comeback realness on the level of one Frank Sinatra or maybe half a Bieber.
EMOTION is, to my mind, one of the finest pop albums of the last ten years, something myself and every other thirty something has been screaming from the rafters ever since its release. And I Really Like You is its best cut.
I Really Like You is not just fun, it’s jump up and down, sing-into-your-hairbrush fun. It’s not just cute, Carly Rae Jepsen is so amiable on this song that your knees start wobbling. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are some rafters outside and I don’t think I have quite finished yelling my EMOTION review from them yet.
Say, do you like slinky R&B singers? Do you also like dark, demonic musique concrete? Well, for you guys in the middle of that weird little Venn diagram, fka Twigs has produced Glass & Patron just for you. It’s clean and dirty and fucked up and beautiful yet still manages to be catchy and cooler than a cucumber with sunglasses and a Moet.
Diplo has has a very, very good time of it in 2015. Besides reviving the careers of Madonna, Skrillex and Justin Bieber, his day band Major Lazer has only produced the most streamed song of, like, ever with their oddball number Lean On.
It snakes and coos, bubbling like a hotpot of herbs and spices and ingredients from around the world. Jamaican dancehall jives with Europop, London dubstep and Dirrrty South trap all existing together as coolly and naturally as if this mish mashing of genre and style was perfectly normal.
Don’t let Courtney Barnett’s woozy demeanour fool you. Behind her mumbly Australian manner and penchant for grungy guitar riffs we find a writer of intense focus and precision, detailing the problems, hopes and fears of a generation wandering and wondering.
Panic attacks, artist parties and being priced out of the city are all topics Barnett likes to return to but Pedestrian at Best is a real marvel. Succeeding where so many mythic songwriters have failed before, she writes about the internal politics of mid level fame, the hype machine and the ever growing fear that she may just be another impostor destined for the scrapheap for old, mid level indie bands.
Except Pedestrian at Best sports one of the finest, crunchiest, catchiest riffs in recent memory. Coupled with lyrics as grand and splatter gunned as Subterranean Homesick Blues, Courtney Barnett delivers a mesmerising, hard hitting theme park ride of a single with self doubt and a dose of beat poetry thrown in.
Like the best singer songwriters, Courtney Barnett’s exterior does not match her interior. On the surface, she’s a 90’s obsessed dude floating around the Fitzroy, get lost in one of her songs and she reveals herself, slowly, to be quick witted, cosmopolitan and very, very 2015.
In Stormzy’s first three singles, we see a beginning, middle and end. Know Me From was the big bad breakout track where he grabbed gonads and sampled Eastenders with his mum. In his latest single Wicked Skengman 4, every snotty 14 year old from South London has turned out to see Stormzy spit bars, everyone’s hip to Stiff Chocolate and the whole event might as well be sponsored by an insurance firm considering how damp and flat and overblown it has all become. Ugh
Shut Up sits right in the middle, fusing the pent up energy of his breakout with the a touch of the cuddliness we find in Wicked Skengman 4, referencing forgotten strains of UK bass and A$AP Rocky as easy as a nice cup of tea. But more than that, Shut Up demonstrates Stormzy can still slay the competition without bellowing from the nearest tall building. He’s confident enough to tone it down a bit without being schmaltzy and with his mates backing him up, he elevates the hypemen from annoying bit part to
One of the harder things to in this whole pop writing business is to convince a dyed in the wool rock head that this prissy manufactured pop they have been avoiding all this time can be every bit as exciting as Slayer/ The Strokes/ Oasis/ Eric Clapton (delete as appropriate).
And while rock, at its best, may have enough raw power to melt faces, it rarely uses the culture around it as an instrument. At least not as explicitly.
For example, The Strokes are a New York band which means we can link them up to a whole other tradition of New York bands, like the Ramones or Television, names that would not necessarily crop up if they were from Providence, RI or some shit.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that Good For You plays with culture like Joshua Bell plays his violin.
So what do we know about Selena Gomez? Well, she’s Justin Bieber’s hard done by ex-girlfriend. She’s also an ex child actor with an eerily young looking face, trying to make it in the big bad world. Selena Gomez’s public persona has tarnished somewhat but there’s still a strain of innocence running through…
Which she rips apart gleefully on Good For You. Taking cues from Lana Del Rey and Wet, Good For You coos coquettishly using the washed out synths and juttering pace of the worn out and despondent. Its “come hither” lyrics clash with the unnerving spookiness of literally everything else in the track. In short, she’s using her goody two shoes image to turn a catchy, slow pop song into one of the creepiest yet most addictive hits of the year. And it works.
You are being pursued. In the woods. By an axe murderer and his drugged up mate. You hear their squelchy footsteps get closer and closer… and then they strike the fatal blow with a weapon made out of sick flows and wordplay; that is what Six Degrees sounds like.
Six Degrees has everything going on, everything that hip hop does well as a medium can be found in this three minute slice; Badbadnotgood provide the creepy backing, Ghostface Killah slays lesser MCs with his barked voice and far out imagery and Danny Brown…
Danny Brown’s ODB-flavoured verse is so ugly, so sloppy and crude that it deserves its own shrine in the Guest Verse Hall of Fame, it instantly adds a madcap, psychotic vibe to the piece that Ghostface’s bolshy threats only skirt around. Ghostface Killah will shoot you with his fat Glock; Danny will do it laughing.
In a clambering, cut throat world where the The Next Big Thing is some exotic, elusive creature, big record companies often resort to funding a few lesser known artists to test the water; artists that will never hit the big time, but nonetheless sound exactly like where pop will find itself in five to ten years. For example, Iman Omari’s slow, spidery output is a little too downbeat for the radio but his bed of synths finds itself burrowed all over the top 40.
And for a while The Weeknd was the most well known of the underground dwellers and the most open about his dealings with the upper echelons of the R&B circuit. It was no secret that half of Drake’s material came straight from The Weeknd’s hard drive, especially on Drizzy’s masterpiece Take Care album, it was no secret that their mutual love for an old Kanye West record ended mostly in Drake’s favour and it was no secret that despite The Weeknd’s near perfect singing voice and an excellent trio of mix tapes under his belt, that he kinda looks like a tree. But, somehow, the crown price has become king with more than a little help from Max Martin’s wondrous touch on Can’t Feel My Face.
Can’t Feel My Face opens with The Weeknd’s tropes all laid out proudly like family heirlooms. Chords which usually live in hard jazz recitals drift airily across the sonic soundscape with his syrupy, scrumptious singing voice smothered on top. Familiar lyrics equating women with druuuugs chirp merrily along. And then BANG out comes Funk Extraordinaire! The Weekend has demonstrated he can do airy flights of R&B for ages but very rarely could you dance to one of his tunes; here, syncopated rhythms of bass guitar, spooky organ and angelic backing vocals make Can’t Feel My Face impossible to stay still to. It was never supposed to be like this but The Weeknd has poked his head out of the underground and seems set to be top of the pops.
“Why hasn’t this been done before?” giggles Lady Leshurr on her all- female Radio 1 freestyling session. She’s only half joking. With fellow grime MC Lady Lykes spitting gold bars and DJ Melody Kane turning out playful beats at every turn, it’s fair to ask why it took so long for grime to let the ladies in.
It’s also fair to ask why nowhere outside of London has produced a half decent grime MC. Until now. Birmingham’s Lady Leshurr certainly makes the case for casting the grime net further than the S, W, N and E. Coming straight out of a city that inspired actual Mordor, her splattergun delivery and dextrous rhymes are only part of the enormous swagger she displays on Queen’s Speech 4.
For such a sparse, spacey number, Loud Places is sure up for interpretation. For the sniffier among us, it sounds like the underground rave scene getting fucked by a man who had caviar for breakfast. But these people clearly made their minds up well before little Jamie on the decks had spun a note.
For me, the connotations are much greater. It sounds like a cog, slowly spinning through space, a London becoming more and more sure of itself and exactly what everyone hoped The xx’s Coexist album would sound like.
Loud Places swims along like clockwork in honey, showcasing Romy’s breathy voice and Jamie xx’s own deep understanding of rhythm. For me, it’s a joy.
But then again, I had caviar for breakfast so what the fuck do I know?
After hearing it blasted out of yobbos’ beat up old cars for months some time was needed before I could warm entirely to Peanut Butter Jelly. From a distance, and in snippets, it sounded like a beefed up version of Tropical House; like if Felix Jaehn swapped his mocktails for vast quantities of party drugs. Until one day, an annoying jingle transformed into a technicolor dance banger right from the sleepless nights to the last bang of (warped) violin.
Peanut Butter Jelly is an experience best attempted with headphones or at the club, transporting you into another world filled with curious creatures and colours you would expect to find in your nearest tube of Smarties. It glides and quivers and stares back at you with its big googly eyes. It’s dance music for aliens, joining the handful of truly perfect songs tailor made for the club.
Earth send its regards.
See also: Summertime Sadness (remix)- Lana Del Rey, She Wolf- Shakira
Making soul music stand out in 2015 is no walk in the park. Adele managed it because she’s Adele but even Unit Shifting Goddess Almighty found it difficult to evoke anything other than the Deep South some time in the 1950s, no matter how much widescreen gloss was smothered on afterwards.
What You Don’t Do, however, lurches, taking trips to three quarter time and squeezing the piano and pockets of brass through a disorientating filter. Married with her warm, seamless voice, What You Don’t Do hits the soul music sweet spot. It’s lilting and groovy and catchy while also burrowing out a niche for itself, experimenting in a way that does not leave the overall tune any less inviting. Lianne La Havas has been dancing gaily in my headphones ever since her Blood album came out and not for a second has she been anything less than superb.
It seems bizarre calling Scowling Crackhead Ian a love song.
First off, Jeffrey Lewis’ curious croak of a voice and languid guitar playing leave no room for sexuality, and second, it’s all about scowling crackhead Ian, once a school bully and now middle aged man with issues. Who may or may not be a crackhead.
However, it deals with many of the same themes that well worn love songs relish in. Scowling Crackhead Ian deals with forgiveness and wanting to make peace despite a lifetime of not being able to walk down Second Avenue completely relaxed or look at a quarter in quite the same way again.
But the most compelling case for Scowling Crackhead Ian as a love song has barely anything to do with Ian at all; rather that patch of lower Manhattan that both Jeffrey and Ian call home. East 4th Street may just be the coolest place to grow up, harbouring Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many more besides, though Jeffrey Lewis makes it seem like Anytown, Anywhere. It’s a love song to a city and an open hand to an old, ageing frenemy. And if you are unacquainted with Jeffrey Lewis’ work this is a superb place to start.
Everyday by Diane Coffee shouldn’t be a song of the year.
It dropped without making a ripple, pleasing several geeky NPR interns but going completely unnoticed by the wider world.
Even the indie publication Pitchfork, who delights in this sort of quaint rock'n'roll, failed to review Everyday’s parent album Everybody Is A Good Dog upon release leaving even the nerdiest hipster unaware that something very, very special was going on.
Which is a shame because Everyday may just be the best written rock song for a number of years, packing every square inch of its running time with an almighty yes! Everything from Coffee’s punchy double tracked voice to the smooth licks of guitar to the kooky Rocky Horror choir hits the jolly sweet spot; it is soulful without being cheesy and it references mid sixties psychedelia without sounding (here at least) like a tribute act.
But the best part of the whole arrangement is this: it promises a bloody good time and delivers. As rock bands face ever diminishing returns, the temptation is to become serious and introspective and reference the rock bands of the past ever more closely. Which never quite works. Legions of rock'n'rollers in grand attempts to become The Next Big Thing often turn out to be contrived, derivative, tribalist messes, like four to five identikit robots trying to approximate fun.
Ugh.
Instead, as the equally wonderful video for Everyday highlights, part of the joy of this kind of music is the amateurs. The millions of teenagers playing air guitar, forming bands that dissolve in six months but try to capture that joyous forever. It’s this spirit that propels the great bands of yesteryear. It’s in the excited gabble of She Loves You, Bigmouth Strikes Again, Roll With It, I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. And, now Everyday.
It is fair to say that Kanye West divides opinion. His outlandish statements, curious baby naming skills and aspirations to the divine cannot help but create two opposing camps; those who think he is a fame gobbling megalomaniac and those who think he is all that but also a genius.
Having proved he can do maximalist bombast and stripped down aggression with equal pinache, Kanye’s next project seems to follow in the harsh wintry path his Yeezus album furrowed into the ground and while Wolves and Only One are definitely worth repeat listens, it is the strained, icy All Day and its associated Brit Awards performance that has kept the anticipation for Kanye West’s next album bright all the way through 2015.
The scene is set with a silhouetted gang of handpicked grime MC’s, brought into focus by a giant flamethrower, while various members of the MOR royalty look uncomfortably on. Taylor Swift gawps, Lionel Ritchie looks like he has just shat a cactus and Kanye spits out his words, every syllable landing like a hammer blow over Sia’s glacial croons and Paul McCartney’s whistling.
But for all Kanye’s attention grabbing voice and barking antics, his real strength is in conjuring moods. For years now, Kanye West has been the master of the bombastic, manipulating soul samples to sound heroic or regal or just plain freaky, All Day confirms he can go the other way just as effectively, that he can do minimalist as well as maximalist.
In short, All Day is everything I have grown to love about Kanye West; his innovations in the studio, who he chooses to collaborate with, who he chooses not to collaborate with bit most of all, his itchy compulsion to do everything well.
As U2’s recent fuck up of a new album demonstrates, it’s hard out there for the class of 1985. On the one hand the gaudy 80s sound is, in 2015, notably old but on the other it’s not nearly quaint enough to be retro. Various attempts to modernise have fallen spectacularly flat (see Duran Duran, or rather don’t) but standard bearers for the old sound have been met with faint praise, containing more backhanded compliments than your average Kiki ("This is the best New Order album for fifteen years!”=“This is marginally better than your average colonoscopy!”)
Enter Madonna, who has hopped on rubbish trend after rubbish trend with each album, tossing out occasionally entertaining, if fluffy, tunes along the way. Not even a stint playing the Half Time Show at the Super Bowl drummed up much excitement for her last record and this time doesn’t look much better.
For the most part, her comeback Rebel Heart is a damp affair except for this one excellently produced piece of electronic whoknowswhat. On the surface, Bitch, I’m Madonna acts like a regular club banger with sped up guitar samples, snare drums from the nightclub gods and Madonna predictably cooing about jumpin’ bass and just wanting to go out tonight.
And then the beat drops.
The remaining two minutes contain some of the strangest sounds committed to a Top 40 single. The break resembles a dubstep womp filtered through the mind of an E’d up pixie and the ungodly notes at the end sound not too dissimilar to said pixie trying to zip up the underworld. When Madonna asked Diplo for the file marked ‘Weird’ on his computer, she got it in spades. Bitch, I’m Madonna is such a satisfying mishmash of so many different ideas, it is difficult to decide which is more thrilling; the sped up zippy bits or the crazy zonking, barking bits or the fact that both of these elements come together on a song by the hottest producer of our times and the most famous woman on the planet. All I know is that it is a million, zillion times better the most blissful colonoscopy.
I first met Laura Marling towards the beginning of the 2010s in a pub somewhere in the Westcountry and immediately turned into the human equivalent of jelly. “AREYOULAURAMARLINGYESYOUAREGODYOURESOLOVELYIAMJUSTGOINGTOTHATCORNEROVERTHERENOWTODIENOWTHANKS.” And she looked at me in the way you would look at a dementia patient babbling at you about their favourite cheese.
The truth is, at her best, Laura Marling’s music incurs those sorts of babbling, speechless feelings from her nimble fingerpicking to her solid, reliable voice to the satisfying sense of finding a song so easy to listen to but so gorgeously complex that everything seems right with the outside world. The results of which are understandably hard to deal with when you’re 21 and there’s a man outside a pub babbling about how great you are.
The next time I met Laura Marling was in a coffee shop in Brick Lane, London earlier in the year. We were both older and a little less extroverted compared to our early 20s selves, I’d just heard False Hope and she crept into the comfy chair just opposite mines. I’d just heard her new, spunky rocky single and had been devouring it for the past week. Swapping English romanticism for the sleek design and punchy phrasing of beat poetry, False Hope has the determined, metallic feel of a Bond theme (one certainly superior to the one we already have) and features Laura Marling caterwauling through her snarls, growls and half spoken phrases spitting them all out with relish. For someone who swore she’d never go electric, the guitar tones and the almighty crash of drums are treated with the same loving, craftsmanlike attention to detail that flittered through her more acoustic numbers. It’s near perfect.
The same urge to be the same babbling wreck I was when I last saw Laura Marling was still there, so it took all the London sewn resolve I could muster:
“That False Hope song you just put out,” I whispered, “it’s dead good."
Inbetween taking over fancy nightclubs and producing Madonna records, the PC Music gang may not have marched all over the charts in 2015 but instead their ultra synthetic, avant garde take on pop is slowly grabbing public consciousness by the balls. So any sensible record label would smooth the edges of their sound a little bit, as to not scare anyone off. They would pose and smile for the cameras, attend movie premieres, remix a bonus track for some pop starlet’s stupid deluxe bonus album.
PC Music put out fifteen minute sagas about murderous dog babies.
In poorly trained hands, this could go terribly awry, but between DJ Spinee and vocalist GFOTY (Girlfriend of the Year) they concoct a candy coloured temple of fizzy synths, upper class braggadocio ("Walkin’ down the street in my brand new car/ X5 Blacked out Range Rov-ah”) and curious cutaways of dog food related dialogue linking the various parts together. The first part is an oddity, the second part even weirder, tightroping the line between dream and nightmare, introducing some entirely new material from the duo and some eerily familiar GFOTY tunes chopped up and spat out like sour candy. Initially it is all too much. The Dog Food Mixes benefit from being separated at birth but as soon as you are ready, the whole kaleidoscope of colours and noises and psychedelia to make Syd Barrett blush becomes definitely, definitely worth it.
Hip hop has been in a curious situation in 2015. A few notable exceptions aside, American rappers have frustratingly been doing all they can to pretend it’s still a pre-Michael Brown, pre- #BlackLivesMatter world, right when their communities need them most. Figures like Kendrick Lamar or Killer Mike are sadly few and far between in the States, daring to tackle issues from heavy handed policing to whitewashed media not only in their media presence but also in their music.
Rather, that celebratory black music has found its most comfortable home in the outer boroughs of London where the issues of many American cities fall along similarly racial lines. Instead of retreating to the club or spitting out mere shock however, crews of British MCs find themselves with a renewed voice, taking it upon themselves to represent not just their postcode but themselves. A new sense of hope that, one day soon, these bored teenagers from Tottenham and Streatham would take America by storm and tell their Oxfordshire dwelling overlords to fuck off at the same time. And that hope has all come down to Skepta.
From its opening parp to its swift fade out, Shutdown stomps and barks and takes pot shots at everyone from the police to wannabe G’s but Skepta’s ire never steers too far from the comfortable middle class. Aside from offhandly disapproving of the -ism and schisms, he wholesale samples a thinly veiled racist complaint (“A bunch of young men… dancing extremely aggressively") in perhaps the biggest “fuck you” since Johnny Rotten took umbrage with the queen.
But it is easy to conflate quality and importance in pop ( For instance, The Plastic People Of The Universe may have liberated a whole country but that doesn’t stop their music to be second rate hippy bollocks) . It helps, then, that Shutdown is such a stonking banger that Idris “Coolest Man On The Planet” Elba thought it would be perfect to remix in thrilling grimey fashion. Who brought grime back from it’s E3 funk? Skepta did.
Two women lie by the lakeside, staring up into the night’s sky. One is an astrophysicist called Emily Newsom; the other is her sister.
“So the meteoroid is the source of the light…”
Years later that sister would transform that quiet riverside moment into Emily, a 12 minute hallelujah of disjointed strings, tender Americana and long form poetry. All of which sounds as pretentious as someone lodged in David Foster Wallace’s arsehole; what separates Joanna Newsom from the furrow browed composers and the reverential concert pianists of this world is that she cannot help but see the most human side of the driest academia.
Nowhere is this more evident than in her lead single Sapokanikan, a surprisingly contained history of New York City. 20th century mayors act as allegories for old Native chiefs, Australian impressionists and Romantic poets collide to remind you of the 20 000 corpses lying underneath Washington Square Park, there’s even a George Washington quote buried in there somewhere, all dancing around the idea that even the greatest civilisations of the past were full of individuals desperate to be remembered.
Though Sapokanikan is an immaculately constructed piece of literature, the ornate lyrics only enhance the trickly, warm honey instrumentation. Vaudeville and ragtime waltz with twangly country and every inch of Joanna Newsom’s increasingly likeable range.
Everything about Sapokanikan is so meticulously, lovingly in its right place that it makes every other indie rockstar seem somewhat grey and a little sloppy in comparison; the lyrics eclipse the efforts of most professional poets, the instrumentation is as technical as it is joyous as it is delicate, like that small moment with the two sisters trying to figure out the universe.
When she played it at the Hammersmith Odeon this last November she set three thousand cagey Londoners on the edge of tears. I sobbed.
What women are after, at least in their pop idols, isn’t the fantasy of a perfect body, but rather the articulation of the complicated language of emotion. And talent.
