Tag: pop
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Celebrity Skin by Hole
This album is indestructible. It wouldn’t be allowed to fail even though everyone and their cat had already written off Courtney Love as a hasbeen widow who had her finest work subcreated by Kurt Cobain. You can’t imagine how much Courtney was disdained in the years before Celebrity Skin was released. The letters page of […]
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The Dreaming by Kate Bush
Madness as music is The Dreaming by Kate Bush. Later, she’d talk about the record in terms of the audience reaction, telling an interviewer that people regarded it as her ‘she’s gone mad’ album. Kate Bush is everything to so many people, but all we really know of her, the actual artist, is the stories […]
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Garbage by Garbage
Nineteen Ninety-Six was a year where I was slowly starting to form myself through music and art. Before that, music was something I listened to for enjoyment, something in the charts I bought because it was popular and catchy. The bands I’d inherited from my dad (The Smiths, The Cure, The Slits, Siouxsie And The […]
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Social Dancing by Bis
Trends change, fashions leap around, forever leaving millions of reviewers and bloggers to catch them. Sometimes, however, it isn’t up to us to catch these trends, but to catch up with them. In the case of Bis, a band whose magpie musical styles made them impossible to categorise outside of ‘pop’ (a whole universe in […]
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Alisha Rules The World by Alisha’s Attic
1996 was a vintage year for my CD rack. Keith Flint stood in a tunnel, monochromatic yet brighter and more colourful than anything else around. Britpop approached a zenith, Jarvis Cocker’s arse made The Brits relevant, Alanis made us reach for a dictionary to check the actual definition of irony, Ash arrived perfect and pure, […]
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Ping Pong Bitches by Ping Ping Bitches
The Sunday Mail seemed to live at the side of the couch until the next edition appeared. At this point in my life, when I was heading to college, the Sunday newspapers felt like a mandatory part of working class life. Everyone read the News of the World and (here in Scotland) the Sunday Mail. […]
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Boomania by Betty Boo
Every kid deserves their own pop star, that one superstar they can adore from a distance. As a child, I wasn’t short of icons to admire. There was The Doctor and Ace, who saved the universe from evil monsters each week on BBC1. Agent Dale Cooper was there for me even though he preferred coffee […]
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Kylie In The ’90s
There are two types of Kylie Minogue song. The type that work and the type that don’t. Being talented as she is, Kylie definitely has more in the former category rather than the latter. Really, an argument could be made that Kylie is the greatest indie popstar ever to work an independent label. Stock Aitken […]
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Bright Like Neon Love by Cut Copy
The second best album of 2004 was also the least likely to succeed. It’s essentially a lo-fi electronic pop record that sounds like it came from a geek’s bedroom. It’s simple, effective, but most of all…affecting. Songs of aching hearts and thwarted love sit snugly alongside each other. This is a Cut Copy that isn’t […]
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