Pop

The buzz band of 2022 sound like they’re from 1982: Yard Act, at Village Underground reviewed

One of the curiosities of modern pop’s landscape is that no one knows any longer how to measure success. An artist can be a huge live draw, but make no impact on the charts; they can be consistent chart-toppers but minnows among the streamers; they can stream by the bazillion, but have no live following to speak of. The metrics of success are so unrelated to each other that anyone can prove anything these days: any band can be the biggest young band in Britain right now. Yard Act are one of those biggest young bands in Britain. Their debut album was a No. 2 hit at the start of

Expectations were met and then exceeded: Arooj Aftab, at Celtic Connections, reviewed

We gathered on a freezing Sunday night, inside a barrel-vaulted church designed in the 1890s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to witness a cresting wave. Vulture Prince, the third album by the Brooklyn-based Pakistani singer, composer and producer Arooj Aftab, was one of the most accomplished and interesting records of last year. A keening song of loss, dedicated to her late brother, Vulture Prince is almost impossible to pin down. It’s a flood plain of merging musical streams, a genre-phobic blend of jazz, minimalism, Sufi devotional music, acoustic textures and torch song. Sung almost entirely in Urdu, its beauty and import are immediate, its emotional pull universal. Following two Grammy nominations

Rod Liddle

Pretty astonishing: Black Country, New Road’s Ants From Up There reviewed

Grade: A+ It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new music being made. Just almost nothing new and almost nothing good. The majority is indeed toxic landfill, rehashes of that least appealing of decades, the 1980s, and performed by pasty-faced, limp-wristed, deluded woke idiots whose chief concern is to tell you their gender. But there are yet pockets of brilliance, just as there were in 1975 and 1995 — and this youngish Cambridge band (the only other place they could have come from is Oxford) inhabit one of those pockets. Upon completion of this, their second album, the lead singer

One of the most exciting hours I’ve spent in ages: Turnstile at O2 Forum Kentish Town

Even leaving aside its origins as prison slang, punk has always meant different things on either side of the Atlantic. Forty-five years ago, in New York, no punk band sounded like the next one: the only thing that linked Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Suicide, Blondie and Television was that they played the same club, CBGB. Over here, by contrast, punk was rapidly codified into people shouting angrily over buzzsaw guitars. These days, it can seem as though the opposite applies. It’s the American punks who stick to a formula, while in the British Isles, the punk label seems to apply to any band with a guitar and a modicum

Triumphant: Idles at the O2 Academy Brixton reviewed

The single thing you don’t want when you are beginning a run of four shows in a prestige venue, with reviewers out in force, is for it all to go tits up at the start. Which is precisely what happened to Idles as they opened their Brixton run. On came the band, up started the throb of the opening song, ‘MTT 420 RR’, and off stalked singer Joe Talbot. Back he came. Off he went. Back he came. Off he went, clearly dealing with some technical issue. The rest of the band carried on, but given that until Talbot starts singing, ‘MTT 420 RR’ is nothing but a monotone drone,

A story of reflection and self-discovery: Anaïs Mitchell’s new album reviewed

Any artist who has habitually written or performed in character — from David Bowie to Lady Gaga — eventually arrives at their Mike Yarwood moment: ‘And this is me!’ With the release of her sixth solo record, Anaïs Mitchell has reached the point of personal revelation. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write in the voice of other characters,’ she says. ‘It felt like after so many years of working on telling other stories — now here are some of mine.’ In 2020 Mitchell was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Nevertheless, she requires an introduction. I’m sure I was one of the first British

Lovely and wistful: Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Barn reviewed

 Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a callow but pretentious 13-year-old. To tell you the truth, the past 27 years have somewhat tested this commitment. There has been a fatal laziness in the songwriting, lyrically and melodically, since 1994’s Sleeps with Angels and the preaching has become ever more tiresome. But I continued forking out in the increasingly forlorn hope that he’d turn out something if not wonderful, then at least reminiscent of wonderful things past. And for lo, the grizzled old troubadour has done exactly that. This is a subtler incarnation of Crazy Horse, helped incalculably

Truly godawful: Ed Sheeran’s =

 Grade: C= My wife’s ill with Covid and demanding inexhaustible libations and difficult meals, which she will leave uneaten. The dog thinks it deserves a walk in the filthy sleet. The kitchen is a tip and the bins need emptying. I have a headache, a runny nose and the ghost of a ticklish cough. Can things get worse? Yes, yes they can. It’s The Spectator on the phone. Can you please review Ed Sheeran’s new album? As in: look, you’re feeling rough and put upon at the moment. So can we come round and smash your spectacles and rub human excrement in your hair? And all this a few weeks

In praise of seasonal chart fodder

Christmas: the most vulnerable time of the year. I heard ‘A Winter’s Tale’ by David Essex on the radio the other day and, oh boy. It was Noël Coward who wrote, in Private Lives, that smart little line about the strange potency of cheap music. It is a truism never more apparent than at Christmas, when we allow the gaudy and sentimental access to our hearts with only the most cursory of security checks. Songs that would never make it past the bouncers in May are whisked directly into the VIP area come December. A quick google confirms that ‘A Winter’s Tale’ was released in the run-up to Christmas 1982,

More mesmerising than it should be – Disney+’s The Beatles: Get Back reviewed

My late friend Alexander Nekrassov loathed the Beatles, which I used to think was a wantonly contrary position akin to hating kittens or blue skies or Christmas carols. What could there possibly be not to like, love and admire about the band that gave us ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘A Day In the Life’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’? Since then I’ve encountered so many Beatles sceptics that it has given me pause for thought. Some think that the Beatles were just mediocre and not nearly as talented as, say, the Kinks; some even claim that they were as manufactured as the Monkees, that like their bad-guy opposites the Stones they were a

A soulful man with a blistering voice: Sipho, at Studio 9294, reviewed

When I were a lad — back when you could buy the entire back catalogue of the Fall for thruppence and still have change to get into a New Order show on the way home — record labels mattered. Well, a cohort of independent labels mattered, because their imprints stood for something. There was Creation, with its dedication to a twin axis of 1977 and 1967 as the only years that counted; 4AD, with its arty sleeves and its wafty, diaphanous music; there was Factory, somewhere between an elaborate practical joke and home to the most forward-thinking musicians in the country. You don’t get many labels like that any longer.

The quiet radicalism of the Chieftains

Pop quiz time: which act was named Melody Maker Group of the Year in 1975? The answer is not, as you might expect, some testosterone-fuelled blues-rock outfit or a hip gang of proto-punk gunslingers, but a gaggle of semi-professional Irish musicians who performed trad tunes sitting down, dressed for church in cardigans, sensible shoes, shirts and ties. The Chieftains were so far from rock and roll they met it coming back the other way. On the cover of Irish Heartbeat, a later collaboration with Van Morrison, they could be mistaken for a loose affiliation of farmers, minor office clerks and earnest ornithologists waiting for a bus outside the town hall.

One of many soul acts looking back 50 years and doing very good business: Black Pumas, at the Roundhouse, reviewed

No musician ever went bust overestimating the public desire to hear classic soul. Slapping on a Motown backbeat has revived many a career and made many a star. At the simplest level, what wedding band are you going to hire: the one playing note-for-note recreations of acid-rock wig-outs from 1968, or the one playing note-for-note recreations of the Motown, Stax and Atlantic catalogues from the same year? It’s hardly evidence of the appalling taste of the music-buying public. If we’re going to play that silly ‘What pop era was best?’ game, then the answer — as any fule kno — is some point between 1965 and 1969, when rock was

Rod Liddle

Decent dream pop: Beach House’s Once Twice Melody reviewed

Grade: B+ Everything these days devolves to prog — and not always very good prog. Where once synths were vastly expensive, difficult to master and hell to maintain they are now in a place beyond ubiquity; every sound you want conjured by the press of a key, your song suddenly washed over with sonics that make it sound more important than it really is. It almost makes you yearn for Yes and ELP — at least they knew they were pretentious dullards using electronic wizardry to elevate the slightest of compositions. Dream pop and its self-harming kid sister shoe-gazing — both genres dating from the mid-1980s and the likes of

The sound of a hunch coming good

Joan Wasser is New York loud. Her resting register is CAPS LOCK, rising to flashing neon when roused to laughter or, occasionally, indignation. ‘I was born a very expressive person,’ says the singer. ‘I was always talking to people in the street that I didn’t know. I’m not super afraid of expressing how I feel, and I take chances very quickly.’ Bold spontaneity has served her well. The Solution is Restless, Wasser’s latest album as her artistic alter ego, Joan As Policewoman, is the sound of a hunch coming good. The record stems from a single day spent extemporising with her friend David Okumu and the late and legendary Afrobeat

Oh dear, Abba’s new album is a bit of a dog: Voyage reviewed

I assume that somewhere on the guided ‘Piers and Queers’ walking tour of Brighton, the participants are enjoined to regard, in awe, the Dome — the venue at which Abba, on 6 April 1974, won the Eurovision Song Contest, thus both launching themselves as a wildly successful band and establishing the town (as it was then) as a mecca (probably the wrong choice of word there) for the UK’s swiftly growing gay community. Hitherto it had been a rather frowsy, Tory-voting seaside resort, best known for dirty weekends and petty villains. The Swedes won with ‘Waterloo’, of course, which may have provided our nation with some much-needed succour. A remembrance

Joyous perfection from a band that’s sure to go far: Gabriels at The Social reviewed

The bigger the next big thing, the smaller the room you want them playing in. You want the people who got inside to be thankful they made it in (not least because the more exclusive the show, the more hysterical the tweets afterwards: ‘You plebs couldn’t get a ticket, but I saw the very future of the planet!’). You want the air so thick with heat and chatter before the band comes on that there is a sense of event before a note has been played. You want everyone there — band and audience alike — to feel they are at the only place that matters, regardless of it being

The death of the live album

Next week The The release The Comeback Special, a 24-track live album documenting the band’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall in June 2018. Meanwhile, Steely Dan’s last man standing, Donald Fagen, has just released two live albums recorded in 2019. Their musical qualities notwithstanding, these releases feel like relics from a lost world. Much like the fondue set, the live album is much reduced from its 1970s and 1980s heyday, when a pretty blonde sideman-turned-solo artist called Peter Frampton could somehow shift eight million copies of the anodyne Frampton Comes Alive! The stand-alone contemporary live album is now an endangered species; MTV’s Unplugged series in the 1990s offered a

A terrible joke gone wonderfully right: Rick Astley and Blossoms Perform the Smiths reviewed

Many of us who grew up loving the Smiths have rather shelved that affection in recent years. Many of us, being lily-livered liberals, have rather taken against Morrissey’s politics and his public support for the far-right For Britain party. Even those inclined to agree with him might have tired of his unrelenting self-pity and his inability to say anything nice about anyone, ever. Yes, we’ve still got lovely Johnny Marr playing the songs in his solo shows, but with the greatest goodwill in the world — and Marr gets granted the greatest goodwill in the world by being such an obviously decent fella — he’s no one’s idea of a

Banal and profound, bent and beautiful: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis at Edinburgh Playhouse reviewed

Nick Cave has always been drawn to parable and fable, but more than ever these days he is engaged in the necessary work of mining magic from the base metal of day-to-day existence. The key lines in this show came early, during ‘Bright Horses’: ‘We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,’ Cave sang in that hollow, sorrowful baritone. ‘This world is plain to see/ It don’t mean we can’t believe in something.’ Cave’s recent songs have a terrible and powerful context: the death of his teenage son, Arthur, in 2015. As an artist he has confronted this personal tragedy side on, acknowledging its profound impact