The term electro-pop has kind of lost its meaning, The Top 20 has, for many years, been full of music created on computers, from Charli XCX to BTS to Clean Bandit. Yet still, as a genre header, it's often used to refer to music that riffs on the sound of the 1980s synthesizer pioneers.
Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes, cottonmouths and copperheads, who were spotted slinking around and through the house her family moved to when she was five: "they were there first, had nature's version of squatters' rights." Instead of becoming accustomed to their silent presence, she developed a deep fear of these long-bodied, scaly creatures.
During the first decade of this century Conor Oberst was critically anointed as a successor to the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. It didn’t seem to make him very happy. His project Bright Eyes, with musical prodigies Nate Walcott and Mike Moggis, twisted and turned through varying musical styles, as if purposefully evading easy definition, while Oberst’s lyrics became increasingly bleak and opaque. Bright Eyes now return, after nine years of absence. Oberst is no happier, but his cryptic, committed, broken-voiced melancholy is a good fit for these times.
The music of monstrously successful emo-pop sorts Paramore is globally massive but is far from everyone’s cup of angst-lite. There is something polished and squeaky clean about them, Teflon fluoro-goth with an off-putting whiff of decent boy/girl-next-door niceness. This writer, then, comes to the debut album of lead singer Hayley Williams with Everest-sized prejudices.
Watching Dark Waters, the latest film from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven), I kept thinking — what’s the opposite of a love letter? The film is based on the work of Rob Bilott, a real-life lawyer who uncovered a corruption scandal so toxic that it was literally poisoning us. Dark Waters stars Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, and it functions as a dignified takedown of DuPont: the chemical giant responsible for the poison.
10 years ago, a wave of exciting femme-pop was cresting, women taking the reins with singular visions; the results were shiny, personally honest, inventive and ebullient, from Gaga to Adele and beyond. A leading light was La Roux, a duo fronted by the androgynous Elly Jackson.
Finding one piece for marimba soloist and string orchestra would tax the powers of many concert planners, never mind coming up with two, so the Northern Chamber Orchestra is to be congratulated on its first Manchester performance of 2020 – especially since they found two concerto-style works from almost the same point in recent time: 2009 and 2010.
18 years ago, Electric Soft Parade, centred around brothers Alex and Thomas White, were the latest hyped hope of indie kids and NME-type media. However, their might-have-been moment imploded when they moved too fast for their fans, rocketing off in wildly creative flourishes rather than sticking to a predictable formula. They – and associated break-away bands – have since produced a fascinating array of musical activity, often boasting an inventive yet old-fashioned feel for orchestration.
Heston Blumenthal, of triple-cooked chips fame, is a mad food scientist. Well, that’s how we’re introduced to him in Heston’s Marvellous Menu. Tonight’s BBC Two programme had a rather theatrical premise: a chef recreating the complete dining experience (menu, team, decor, diners) from a pivotal year in their restaurant’s history.
In the liner notes to the new reissue of 2001’s All is Dream, Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue says it is “a weird astral album musically, and yes the symbolism lyrically runs many layers down and deep – different coloured layers of rock, soil and ash on an archaeology dig.”