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 ...

There was a brief time - around two weeks or so - back in 2013 when Get Lucky received its first play on radio and was uploaded to YouTube, where there was the (now laughable) concern that maybe this excellent comeback wouldn't be quite so warmly received by the single-buying public. There are hundreds of examples of falling addictively in love with a pop song that didn't quite turn out to be universally shared - I still get sleepless nights over the lack of chart success for Tegan and Sara's Closer - but, thankfully, Uptown Funk was not one of them. OK: it's now tipped over to the other side of the scale (like Get Lucky ) and getting the eyeroll treatment that comes with every above-average anthem, but we'll always have that brief period between "Fleur East covers the song on the X Factor" and " Uptown Funk spends its third week at number one". Because it did come as a bit of a surprise: Record Collection, Ronson's third album, didn...

Purity Ring are probably second only to CHVRCHES in that list of bands that literally everyone I talk about music with - from the puritanical Smiths-fan best friend over short bursts of Facebook messages (evening, Admiral) to the swathes and swathes of monsters and beyhives and whatevers I encounter online - is super enthusiastic about. I mean sure, both acts have a super-cute voice accompanying each and every track, but that's probably where the similarities end. The Canadian pair dazzled everyone in 2012 with Shrines , even managing to chart respectably on the Billboard 200 in the process. However, if you head over to any discussion page about the band (let's use this example) you'll find a mass of complaints that what made Shrines unique has since been reduced into a poppier format, as though accessible music is the devil and forever trying to make something unlike anyone else in the world is a fruitful endeavour. I'm reminded of last year's hilarious...

There was a brief period when the music video for Break the Rules emerged that I entered a fit of token hipster eye-rolling. Here was an excellent talisman of pop music reducing herself to the most banal of teenage, rebellious Americana and at the height of her crossover from indie darling to certified, chart-dominating success story. I understand how awful it always sounds. I'm not quite so bitter as some (seriously, what a fucking douchey closing paragraph), though, and if I'm going to go forward with any gripes about this album it's the fear that its ridiculous pushbacks and rescheduled release dates might dent its chances of coming anywhere near the top of our charts. Atlantic's potential failure to strike whilst the iron is hot may of course be endemic to the many , many stars that I tend to take to my heart, and it shouldn't by any means change the fact that Charli XCX is enjoying a fantastic lifestyle right now, but I don't know. Sometimes the wor...

I don't know, maybe all of the best albums made are now going to be dropped, unannounced (or rushed by leaks) on iTunes some day. Maybe year-long promotional campaigns seem silly in retrospect. Don't they, though? Who has the attention span nowadays to wait 5 months for an album from Charli XCX, let alone when it's been sprung across the Atlantic those same five months ago? We'll come to that gripe in my next review (which, coincidentally, shall hopefully not be five months down the line. I really shall try this year to review at least one album a week). So: Björk. I assume we are all familiar. We're nine albums in now so that makes her a bit of an institution, although one would suppose that many have made a marked impact with many fewer. When it comes to analysing the works of Björk, however, it soon emerges that few - if any - actually rival her when it comes to a collective, frightening, beguiling, challenging, revolutionary musical output. Overanalysis ten...

Looking over the list of the potential recipients of the same award that launched Sam Smith into the unstoppable chart force that he is (although terrible album sales all around mean that basically anyone with a strong marketing campaign can remain in the top 40 for a month or three), I sort of feel sorry for them. Years and Years (probably the most likely, considering the award's not gone to a group before) ( news just in informs me I was wrong ) , James Bay ( this is why ) and George the Poet are all of the hallmarks of what you'd usually hear about a Critics Choice winner: safe, carved for the mainstream and about as soulful as a cup of tea (with milk, obviously). A telling interview near the start of the year in the build up to his album's launch told us that Sam Smith had never actually been in love: "On Latch I was singing about love... but I've never physically experienced it. And I'm kind of sick of listening to albums about the turmoils of re...