A God-awful Small Affair

Rating: 0/10 Artwork Watch: Charming. Up next: Alanis Morissette

It's testament to the brilliance of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Kanye West's singular executive control over that project that I greet the news of another collaborative project of his with a mixture of disdain and hope. 2011's Watch the Throne was one example of such a project really getting nailed on the head, but it did possess one or two imperfections despite all of its brags and pomp. Since then, he's released one-off singles and returned to that 2007 phase he had where he's pretty much inescapable - I've personally lost count of the DJ Khaled productions. The real purpose of Cruel Summer could be said, however, to showcase the talent available on the G.O.O.D. Music label. They've all had their own brushes with fame and brilliance - Big Sean entered the top 10 in the US with the Nicki Minaj collaboration Dance (A$$) , Pusha T's parts on Kanye's Runaway were excellent, and 2 Chainz is all but inescapable - so it'll be inter...

Tonight I was at a pub quiz, and the final question of the music round was 'Skin is the lead singer of which band?' An hour or so when marking, the room collectively shrugged "who?" when presented the two words Skunk Anansie. The review prior to this talked of the fickle nature of pop music, but angst-driven rock music seems to suffer from the same fate. Recent "dark" bands like AFI, Billy Talent and Placebo seem to have been thrown to the side in favour of new Kerrang! and NME scene-darlings You Me At Six, Black Veil Brides and Bring me the Horizon. The capacity for alternative rock to succeed in the charts has totally dried up, but only 15 years ago Skunk Anansie were loitering on the outside of the UK top 10 singles chart positions on a regular basis. Part of their longevity and continued relative album success must be down to the band's incredibly distinctive nature. Skin, of course, is about as enigmatic and fun (see: fierce) as you can get a fr...

In the six years that have passed since Loose , the whole world of Timbaland-produced R&B-pop has completely disintegrated. The birth of eurodance with the likes of Ke$ha and Lady GaGa, coupled with the continuing hipsterfying of hip hop (The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Drake), has kind of left the world of autotune a bit forlorn. Unless you're backed by a stomping beat, you've got no chance. So how did the English comeback (let's ignore 2009's Mi Plan on account of there never being a good song recorded in Spanish than Santana and Shakira's material.) of Nelly Furtado go? A little disastrously. It's a fickle world. Only half a decade ago Furtado was commanding: Maneater a pop single most current females would kill for, All Good Things (Come to an End) a magnificent ballad. Since then, there were brief flashes of brilliance - a demo version of Girlfriend in this City showed real promise but was then stripped of its strings and disappeared. Where do we ...

2009's Yes saw the return of the Pet Shop Boys' no-holds-barred love of disco pop. The lead single Love Etc. was one of the band's most European-sounding of dance tunes, and featured Neil Tennant in a slightly holier-than-thou light. "Don't have to be a big bucks Hollywood star", he drawled, as though frontman of an anarchic outfit at the grass-roots stage of his career, and the whole result was a little bit silly. The Pet Shop Boys are typically famed for their amusing, dry, poetic lyrics and Yes quite missed the mark.  In substituting their more bombastic sound for a collection of string arrangements and quiet little synths, the duo here focus on their alter ego that they so aptly described with the release of their double-disc greatest hits collection PopArt : one side dancefloor fillers ( Always on My Mind , What Have I Done to Deserve This? ), the other more reflective and genius ( Being Boring , Left to My Own Devices ). But given that in their ...

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Since the dawn of time P!nk has been releasing albums that consist of an introductory "FUCK YEAH I'M INDEPENDENT NOW!" anthem and is then followed with two or three "Oh christ I'm so lonely" ballads. The world still laps them up. Why? I'm not sure, but I'm guilty of it too - I own CDs of Try This and Funhouse - and the more I think about it the less I consider it a crime. For all of international pop's permanent mainstayers in the public eye, P!nk is one of the most tolerable. She's not as talentless as Britney or J-Lo; she's not as much of a self-righteous prick as Christina or GaGa, and she's not absolutely everywhere like Rihanna or Katy Perry. Despite her very samey promotional formula over the past ten years, she's taken risks and been unafraid to wear her heart on her sleeve without resorting to overly upfront sex or celebrity tittle tattle. Her pop music seems to actually posess venom; where others might allude to an...

Of the very few remnants that I have from Shaun's music taste circa 2005, the Killers were, up until now, the most unwavering and unlikely to falter. I was even patient with the, in retrospect, shaky Day + Age (it did, in fairness, boast some beautiful songs [ A Dustland Fairytale ] and some daring, hella catchy risks [ Joy Ride; Neon Tiger ]) and there were still those staple "anthems" in the shape of Spaceman and Human . After the most drawn out and tiresome of media-driven hiatuses - not to mention a couple of iffy side projects and solo albums - the Killers return with their fourth (proper, ignoring Sawdust ) album and are faced with the difficulty of getting back in their stride. Because at their most confident of stride, the Killers are fantastic. I don't care about the negative reviews for Sam's Town - actually that's a lie, I'm still fucking appalled by them - it was a brilliant album. The much more warmly-received Hot Fuss of course boaste...

It's not often that you'll see me download an album off the back of one single from 2010, especially since I've markedly decreased my reviewing output now I've enrolled at university, but Mark Ronson's fantastically daft French-tinged Bang Bang Bang has done just that. Introducing MNDR, the deceptively solo NYC duo comprised of performer and only recognisable entity Amanda Warner, and background man Peter Wade. Think the twenty-tens' Goldfrapp, if you will. The problem is that, since 2010, so many indie-pop boy/girl duos have come and gone. Cults, Cat's Eyes, Purity Ring, Beach House, Best Coast and Sleigh Bells have all made some ripples in recent years, and that's overlooking the two giants of that particular field (Goldfrapp, Saint Etienne). What exactly will make MNDR stand out from the crowd? Apart from the glasses, apparently. Feed Me Diamonds - the first collective piece of material from the duo since 2010's E.P.E. - opens with...

Once upon a time, I thought nothing of Danny O'Donoghue. I had a small appreciation of the singles Talk You Down and, in particular, Breakeven because they were pretty little pop songs and the world's always got time for those despite what the internet will tell you. Then The Voice happened. Never has my blood escalated in temperature so quickly - the TV show that promised to be an alternative to the X Factor proved to be nothing of the sort, and in the meantime demonstrated a masterclass in how to be a total douchebag. Everything, from his leg-slides in the group performances, to the smug grins with which he fist-pumped during his act's shows, just totally unravelled any sort of quiet tolerance of the man I may have had, and now I'm going to express those 8 or so weeks of bile in a few paragraphs. Beginning as we do with wooooo-ooooh! s and attempts to bring gritty tales of addiction and abuse into otherwise cheery lyrics (see: Ed Sheeran), 'Good Ol...

As predicted, the UK's incessant need for a hot new band led to the Vaccines being 2011's most wildly exaggerated phenomenon. Admittedly the singles were fine in a a catchy, brief little fling kind-of way, but in that debut album, What did You Expect from the Vaccines? , there was about as much depth or ingenuity as you might find in a box of stale Cornflakes. There's also a slight concern in that, prior to reading up on them, I'd completely forgotten the names of the band, including the frontman. I reviewed their album last year, so this doesn't really vouch for their individuality. Ever the gauge of quality, then, the UK teens lapped them up and the band dominated just about every music television channel and programme going. Thanks for that. The idea of rock reclaiming TV of course doesn't entirely suck: but the willingness of all of this country's media to just settle for the most condensed form of the genre as long as it's successful is a littl...

Yet another cog in my wheel of 2009 flavours returning with new material, the Noisettes had that brief period where Don't Upset the Rhythm was everyone's favourite advert song. This accolade, of course, isn't all that - for most UK recipients it either results in irritation (see: Here Come the Girls ) or one-hit-wonders (see: Room 5/Oliver Cheatham). The Noisettes, however, offered a little more promise; an enigmatic and stand-out frontwoman in Shingai Shoniwa, and an album with more than one potential hit. Whilst they were arguably an indie-pop band back in those days, that claim can be rather summarily tossed out of the nearest window now. Contact , their third album, even from its garish artwork, is unashamedly pop - and sees Shoniwa veering a little from her traditional soul vocals to a range of hooks and gimmicks that'll irritate as many as those it'll please. some of the songs are nice some of them are boring none of them are as good as Never Forg...

There're fond memories of the breakthrough of Mika. Grace Kelly was an amazing pop song. Relax, Take it Easy was an amazing pop song. Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) was a not-so-amazing pop song. Despite its very much uneven nature, the Lebanese/French/British gentleman's debut album Life in Cartoon Motion was full of promise (even if Pitchfork and the Guardian seemed to have a tragic lapse of joy) and for a brief moment it looked like British pop music, in answer to Amy Winehouse and Adele, had its male equivalent. Skip forward two years to 2009 and his sophomore effort struggled to set the world alight. It wasn't exactly terrible - and lead single We Are Golden was just as euphorically catchy as anything - but it led to the fear that he was a one-off. Maybe it's third time lucky then. Following a soundtracking duty with Kick-Ass, The Origin of Love sees Mika team up with Nick Littlemore (Empire of the Sun), Benny Benassi, Klas Åhlund (Robyn) and Pharrell Wil...