albums
Can everyone please shut up about Maria Callas?
Rupert Christiansen on the cult of Callas
The case against re-recording albums
In 2012, Jeff Lynne released Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra. Except it wasn’t. It was…
Being Dead: When Horses Would Run
Grade: A– The point of a sudden, abrupt change in the time signature and instrumentation of a song is to…
Heaven knows they’re miserable now
Bands that have hung around, or gone away and come back again, occupy an increasingly sizeable percentage of pop’s bandwidth.…
Nepo daddies
Rob Grant releases his debut album, Lost at Sea, this week. A 69-year-old millionaire and former ad man, furniture exec…
Back to black
Michael Hann on the most enduring of pop subcultures
Sad-face emoji
Whether by accident or design, the mathematical theme of Ed Sheeran’s previous album titles (+, ×, ÷ and = respectively)…
Keep on truckin’
Sam Kriss on why country-pop is the most modern music there is
Black Midi: Hellfire
Grade: A+ The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them,…
Nick Cave: Seven Psalms
Grade: B There has always been a seriousness and intelligence about Nick Cave quite at odds with that which usually…
Father John Misty: Chloë and the Next Twentieth Century
Grade: A– In which Josh Tillman reimagines the whole back catalogue of 20th-century American pop music (except for rock), tilting…
Toxic testosterone
Squaring up to the prospect of a new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m reminded of a vintage quote by…
Band of Horses: Things Are Great
Grade: B That thing, ‘indie rock’, is so well played and produced these days, so pristine and flawless, that it…
Oxxxymirin: Beauty & Ugliness
Grade: A+ I was going to review hyperpop chanteuse Charli XCX’s album this week, but it was such boring, meretricious,…
The Weather Station: How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars
Grade: C– Anyone remember that TV advert for Canada from the 1980s – a succession of colourful images, including a…
Avril Lavigne: Love Sux
Grade: B Yay, life just gets better and better. World War Three and now this. More petulant popcorn pre-school punk…
Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There
Grade: A+ It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new…
Jethro Tull: The Zealot Gene
Grade: C+ I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brickfrom a secondhand shop when I…
Mike Yarwood moment
Any artist who has habitually written or performed in character — from David Bowie to Lady Gaga — eventually arrives…
Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Barn
Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a…
The potency of cheap music
Christmas: the most vulnerable time of the year. I heard ‘A Winter’s Tale’ by David Essex on the radio the…
Ed Sheeran: = (Christmas edition)
Grade: C= My wife’s ill with Covid and demanding inexhaustible libations and difficult meals, which she will leave uneaten. The…
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Grade: B It must have been an interesting day in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s press office when Blair Tindall’s memoir…
