fri 11/07/2025

pop

CD: Paramore - Paramore

Paramore’s fourth album picks and chooses from so many genres that, first time around, I thought that I had accidentally begun to play it on shuffle. Its opening two tracks make an incongruous pairing: the seemingly light-hearted “Fast in My Car”,...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Simple Minds, Klaus Dinger, The Primitives, Transvision Vamp

Simple Minds: Celebrate – The Greatest Hits +Of all the bands which surfaced in 1977 in response to punk, Simple Minds occupy a singular status. Despite line-up changes, they have never split up. After their 1982 success with “Promised You a Miracle...

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CD: Justin Timberlake - 20/20 Experience

You really don't need the context on this, do you? Event album, comeback, cheesy title, blah blah – it's all there splattered all over the internet if you really want it. I'll just cut to the chase and say: I love Justin Timberlake's music, and I'm...

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Farewell Kenny Ball, 1930-2013

The death today at age 82 of trumpeter Kenny Ball makes him the first of the big three chart regulars of Britain’s trad jazz boom to pass away. Both Acker Bilk and Chris Barber are still with us. It’s easily forgotten, but trad actually was bigger...

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CD: Petula Clark – Lost in You

“Cut Copy me”, the opening track of Petula Clark’s first British studio album in six years, is beautiful. It could have been created by Saint Etienne at their most melancholy. Her voice almost a whisper, it’s the sound of shadows and uncertainty...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Factory Records, Dave Edmunds, Keith Whitley

Crispy Ambulance: The Plateau Phase/The Durutti Column: LC/The Names: Swimming/The Wake: HarmonyPre-Madchester and before New Order’s breakout single “Blue Monday”, Manchester’s Factory Records was hard to penetrate. This quartet of reissues does a...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Conny Plank, Pied Piper, Jean-Luc Ponty, Cliff Richard

 Various Artists: Who’s That Man – A Tribute to Conny PlankThe list of acts Konrad Plank worked with is a Hollywood Walk of Fame of Krautrock. As an engineer or producer he was behind seminal albums by Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, La Düsseldorf and...

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CD: The History of Apple Pie - Out of View

A confession: for much of this debut album from London fuzz-pop fivesome The History of Apple Pie, I have little to no idea what vocalist Stephanie Min is on about. Sweet and half-whispered, floating above crunchy bass and tuneful guitar riffage, it...

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CD: Solange - True

Writing about True without naming the elephant in the room was always going to be a challenge, even if the younger Ms Knowles’ next move had built on the more experimental sounds of her earlier work or “Stillness is the Move”, her 2009 collaboration...

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Art Rock: The best and worst songs about artists

That ultimate art rocker David Bowie is 66 today. The Victoria & Albert Museum is opening with a major survey of Bowie the style icon this spring. What’s more, he’s just released a new single, with an album following in March. Fittingly, for an...

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Reissue CDs: The Best of 2012

Can’s The Lost Tapes towers over any of the other reissues theartsdesk has covered this year. Although not strictly a reissue – it collected unheard recordings from tapes which had lain in the band’s archive – it rewrote the story of the seminal...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The House of Love, The Clarke & Ware Experiment, Interpol, T. Rex, The Smashing Pumpkins

The House of Love: The House of LoveKieron TylerAfter The Jesus & Mary Chain, The House of Love were Creation Records’ next most-likely sons. Their melodies had an epic sweep, they had a top-notch songwriter in Guy Chadwick and, with Terry...

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