The Listener
Teenage Fanclub: Endless Arcade
Grade: B– Advancing age has smoothed the edges of Bellshill’s finest lads, once — back in the early 1990s —…
Tom Jones: Surrounded by Time
Grade: C Revisionism has been extraordinarily kind to Tom Jones, ever since he barked his way through Prince’s ‘Kiss’ with…
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil… the Art of Starting Over
Grade: Z If you wish to experience the full hideousness of Now, of our current age, condensed into one awful…
Matthew Sweet: Catspaw
Grade: A– The early 1990s were a lovely time for rock music: Beck, Sparklehorse, Sugar, Green on Red and Royal…
The KLF: Solid State Logik 1
Grade: A What a miracle the KLF were: an elaborate practical joke at the expense of the music industry, seemingly…
Paul McCartney: McCartney III
Grade: A- The greatest songwriter of the 20th century, or just one of the top two or three? Who…
AC/DC: Power Up
Grade: C The fear is this: you’re wearing a leather jacket and hipster jeans and think you look cool, but…
Respighi’s Roman Trilogy: Sinfonia of London/ John Wilson
Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…
Disco: Kylie Minogue
Grade: B– Uh-oh. Might have to be careful here, pull my punches a little bit. The editor is a big…
A.G. Cook: Apple
Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a…
Yusuf/Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2
Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME…
The Pineapple Thief: Versions of the Truth
Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has…
Deep Purple: Whoosh!
Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished…
Taylor Swift: Folklore
Grade: A- This is worrying — like listening to a speech by David Lammy and finding yourself, against your better…
Neil Young: Homegrown
Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly…
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which…
The 1975: Notes on a Conditional Form
Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg.…
Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song…
Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus: Songs of Yearning
Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only…
Green Day: Father of All…
Grade: B+ It is an eternal mystery to me why Britain has never had much time for power pop, seeing…
Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
Grade: B The old axiom no longer applies. In modern popular music, it is possible not only to gild a…
Justin Bieber: Changes
Grade: D– For my first review of popular music releases in 2020 I thought I’d deposit this large vat of…
The cult of Trifonov is doing the pianist no favours
Grade: B– Deutsche Grammophon have decided that Daniil Trifonov’s new Rachmaninov piano concertos with the Philadephia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin…
Woke slogans welded to incompetent grunge: Neil Young’s Colorado reviewed
Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band…
Patently insincere: Kanye’s Jesus is King reviewed
Grade: B– Kanye West has found Jesus Christ. Lucky old Christ. If I were Christ I’d have hidden out a…
