This weekend sees Soft Cell play the O2, a one-off gig celebrating their era-defining music. It’s 16 years since they last worked together and 37 since their heyday, yet they clearly still have a devoted fan-base: they sold out the gigantic London venue in one weekend.
During their original 1980 to 1984 lifespan as a recording unit, Soft Cell issued three albums, a mini-album, eleven singles and EP. There were also compilation appearances, bonus tracks on discs included with albums or singles (such as the 12-inch of Jimi Hendrix cover versions accompanying The Art of Falling Apart) and extended tracks which appeared on 12-inch singles. Everything could probably be collected on six CDs.
Once pleasingly described on the Flight of the Conchords radio show as "the King of New Zealand", Neil Finn has a new gift for his subjects (and the rest of the world, happily) in the form of this album, which sees him recording with son Liam for the first time.
Lamp Lit Prose is the ninth Dirty Projectors album since 2003, an incredibly prolific output for any artist. All the more impressive when you consider it’s the project of producer/songwriter David Longstreth, who also finds time to collaborate with artists such as Rihanna, Kanye, Paul McCartney and Solange. Such a notable CV befits an act as innovative as Dirty Projectors, and their latest release further demonstrates the talent on show.
It’s three years since Years & Years’ debut album Communion, with its monster singles “King” and “Shine”, put them on the map as major pop stars. Their music was smartly (albeit faintly) flavoured with sounds ranging from LA alt-hip hop to Hot Chip, and in cute live wire Olly Alexander they had a characterful and proudly gay frontman. Their new album has, then, been much anticipated.
It’s hard to know who to write about when reviewing a new Gorillaz release. According to the official line, the band have shorn their usual guests to focus on the core creative team: vocalist 2D, drummer Russell, guitarist Noodle, and new bassist Ace, borrowed from The Powerpuff Girls.
Norwich is remote, out near the Norfolk Broads, doing its own thing on Britain’s eastern-most edge. It’s not renowned as a place that’s contributed much to rock and pop. This may be about to change. The music of Let’s Eat Grandma, 19-year-old lifelong friends Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth from Norwich, could only have developed in isolation, cultivated unhindered by the taste-arbiters of the outside world. They’re a fascinating unit and, happily, also engagingly off-the-wall.
Lily Allen has long been an unlikely inhabitant of the tabloid sphere. She was born into it and her pop career sealed the deal, rendering her a recalcitrant victim of paparazzi fishbowl idiocy, ugly magazines and online sidebars. She is, however, one of the few to undermine this process, offering gritty, poetic response in song. “The Fear”, for instance, was a huge hit that also 100 percent nailed vapid celeb aspiration. Her fourth album is, at its best, her rawest and most revealing.
Allen’s last outing, 2014’s Sheezus, saw her less focused. Lyrically sharp as ever, it was hampered by lesser music and a sense that the singer was drifting along uncharted. On the aptly titled No Shame – or at least its first two thirds - she is on piercing form, excoriating herself, going through the psychological mangler over her collapsed marriage, which she places firmly at her own door. At times it recalls Beyoncé's approach on Lemonade.
“I’m a bad mother/I’m a bad wife/You saw it on the socials/You saw it online,” runs a line in opener “Come On Then” over spaced out drum & bass. And there follow songs about loss, guilt, jealousy, selfishness, and crushing loneliness. The calypso-tinted “Lost My Mind”, for instance, juxtaposes an upbeat tropical house feel with forlorn feelings of abandonment, while “Family Man” is a gigantic, piano-led, Elton-goes-trip-hop ballad, desolate but ever clear-eyed (“I don’t like most people but I’m scared not evil”), and “Apples” mourns that she may be doomed to repeat the relationship mistakes of her parents.
These and others are the songs that make the album. Eventually things cheer up and, unfortunately, slacken off. Her co-songwriter throughout the album’s initial conception was Fryers’ Ben Garrett, who gives it a contemporary pop sheen dipped in woozy downtempo electronica. The last few numbers simply don’t have the same impact, although “Pushing Up the Daisies” has a certain cute charm. The creation of No Shame involved many, from producer Mark Ronson to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig to various guest vocalists, but it’s Lily Allen’s sweet, vulnerable voice that owns the record, alongside her finely tuned, wounded, and ruthless way with a scalpel-sharp pop couplet.
Although a minimalist approach informed John Foxx’s first solo album, the new “Deluxe Edition” reissue of Metamatic expands what was two sides of vinyl to a three-CD, 49-track box set. After leaving Ultravox following their early 1979 American tour, he quickly signed with Virgin Records and began recording with a couple of synthesisers and a rhythm machine.