A God-awful Small Affair

I wanted to ease back into my groove with a relatively easy person to tackle; someone who's almost inescapable at this point and about whom there is much to be said. The world is currently Ariana Grande's in a way that it is hard to remember anyone else claiming it. As a UK national, it isn't easy to connect the dots with hers and Mariah Carey's impact, because whilst across the pond Mariah racked up the #1s like tennis serves, over here the effect wasn't quite so bombastic. There've been other contenders since Carey's heyday, sure, but even the huge stars like Britney Spears, Beyonce and Katy Perry never really clung onto chart domination in the way that Grande and her boosted Spotify streams have. Perhaps that's a problem of current music consumption. Perhaps Ariana Grande is just that good. The music has almost played second fiddle to her star-power this past five years and that's presumably something Grande is desperate to avoid: sh

It's been a while. I don't imagine anyone who subscribed to me almost ten years ago is still using Blogger under the same account, and gave up on any chance of a review of the 2016 opus '24 Hrs' by Olly Murs, but I've been... well I haven't been busy at all, actually. Whatever reasons I had with originally starting up this blog were sort of obscured by my own insecurities: "no one's going to read this anyway", "you're not a good writer", "proper music critics are far more compelling", and so on. If I may be candid for a second, I suppose this hiatus was mostly due to depression. I tried to write it off with a pithy excuse that I found music critique largely pretentious and mean-spirited (and to be fair, with some establishments, it is) but I have certainly been more than culpable in adding to that in the past. My apologies, Rita Ora.  I've still been compiling end-of-year lists for friends and other sites but