Charli XCX is the pop stars’ pop star. Working with everyone from K-pop megastars BTS to US rapper Lil Yachty to indie-rockers Vampire Weekend, her career arc has a meta aspect, initially personified by her joyously electro-punky second album Sucker, but then given addition human warmth by her COVID lockdown openness.
The 19th album from Canadian alt-country rockers, and very beguiling it is too. As its title suggests, Songs of the Recollection is a covers album, but such a description is reductive. Good songs live on, discovered anew by successive generations – think how many singers have stamped their identity on numbers from the Great American Songbook.
White Lies began their set as many bands would end it, with a familiar hit ringing out and an explosion of confetti over the crowd. Such a tactic made you wonder if the three-piece would peak too soon here, mirroring the band’s commercial fortunes over a now lengthy career. First came a chart-topping album, then a series of mostly well regarded follow-ups that have slipped down the charts each time. Thankfully, and at times, surprisingly, the opposite was true.
Pete Doherty became a hunted man as he was falling apart, lent tabloid notoriety by his dissolute romance with Kate Moss.
Born in the bedroom of keyboard player Charles de Boisseguin, bathed in a sleek, quintessentially French tradition of electro-pop, L’Impératrice materialised on the darkened stage at the O2 Shepherds Bush, with glowing hearts beating in unison on their chests. The beat quickened into a single tone to lead into “Off to the Side”, leaping from an intimate, near whispered opening to a snappy, electric chorus.
There’s a period of British club music that deserves to be much better appreciated. Before hardcore and jungle, before the Underworlds and Leftfields and other arena acts, came a generation who were much closer to the most song-based US house music, to considerable success.
“Maybe it’s just me, but I think you need some weed” chants B-Real on “Come with Me”, just one of the hymns to getting high on Cypress Hill’s tenth studio album of tales about gang-banging and smoking industrial volumes of cannabis. However, while their tunes used to very funny and even inspired, as they forced you to get up on your feet and shake a leg, Back to Black sees the formula start to get a little thin.
Britpop-era favourites have been critically buried for the most part, unwelcome reminders, much like a hangover, of a wild party now seen as a regrettable generational aberration. The Boo Radleys were outsiders even at the time, Wirral experimental pop classicists not far off thirty when 1995’s “Wake Up Boo!”, a deliberate hit as atypical as REM’s “Shiny Happy People”, hit the Top 10 and introduced Chris Evans’ hedonistic Radio 1 Breakfast Show.
In 2000, Broadcast’s first album The Noise Made By People entered the UK’s mainstream Top 100 and claimed the top spot on the dance charts. Three years later, their second album Haha Sound was in the Top Ten of America’s dance/electronic charts. It also went Top Five on the UK’s dance charts.
After a count in, the first lines of album opener "Commune" are “I’ve been away now far too long, lost and alone with no commune.” Fair enough. For the Sake of Bethel Woods is Midlake’s first album since 2013’s Antiphon.