Commissioning Rod on pop was easy. I’d email him a list of eligible albums and he’d ignore me and offer to review something completely deranged such as Cradle of Filth’s The Screaming of the Valkyries (‘plenty to admire’, B+). Within a few hours I’d receive a flawless little column.
He started doing a monthly Listener in 2017. His musical interests were vast and unpredictable. He reserved his highest praise for albums by Beyoncé, FKA Twigs, A.G. Cook, Rosalia, Wet Leg, M.J. Lenderman, Pwr Bttm, Snoop Dogg, Fat White Family. He much admired the Tuareg desert blues band Tinariwen and wondered if I might fly him to Austria to hear a Philip Glass recital. When I asked him to review Brat, he thought I must be referring to the New Orleans grindcore band. He wasn’t as much of a hater as you might imagine, but when he did hate on an album (see: Kylie, Sam Smith, Billie Eilish) it usually produced a thing of great beauty.
He was pretty relaxed about us tweaking his copy to fit the tiny space we had for The Listener. Except the time I removed half a line from his piece on Fat White Family’s Forgiveness Is Yours. I tried to blame the subs. ‘Sack them and kill their families’. I said I’d check with HR.
Snoop Dogg, Neva Left
The problem Calvin Broadus has is persuading the rest of us that he still a baaaad muthafucka. Snoop is now 45 and a rather avuncular figure in the US, with his own reality TV show in which he comes across as, God help us, likeable. Those days of running with the Crips in Los Angeles are long behind him, a testament to the redemptive power of huge amounts of money.
On his day, there is no one in this marvellously profane genre who can touch him. The mask slips a little from time to time – in one song he talks about riding a bicycle with his grandkids in the park. And on the lead single from the album, ‘Mount Kushmore’ – a clattering homage to Snoop’s favourite thing of all, marijuana – he mentions an intention to ‘slip my dick in your daughter’. At your age, Snoop,that comes across as just a little bit pervy.
Craig David, The Time is Now
He’s hauled in supposedly talented people. But they haven’t helped much with the tunes and still less with the truly cretinous lyrics. So, from the agonisingly repetitive and execrable ‘Brand New’ we get ‘Señorita, every time I meet ya.’ And the uplifting chorus from the slightly worse ‘For the Gram’ is: ‘Blah blah blah blah/ Yah yah yah. Baby.’ The songs go on and on and on. And he has nothing interesting to say in any of them.
But it will be there, at the top of the charts, on every radio, seemingly for ever. Frankly, I’d rather listen to Diane Abbott reading out my own death certificate in front of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
AG Cook, Apple
The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a spoon and digging in. A mash-up of everything – largely very sickly EDM, but also trance, house, power ballads, industrial techno, soft rock, winsome acoustic guitar. Meticulous to the point of almost derangement, endlessly inventive both musically and rhythmically, full of arch puns. Such as the album’s title here – Apple. Mr Cook is the boss of the record label PC Music. Geddit? Sides splitting? That’s the other thing – the future also promises to be very irritating.
Kylie Minogue, Disco
The monotonous clump-thump of the nightclub drums makes you yearn for Harold Melvin or Sister Sledge to start singing, but this being a Kylie album all you get is Kylie.
There are tunes, though – ‘Magic’ is a piano-driven soul stomper, ‘Dance Floor Darling’ is kind of cute Europop and ‘Monday Blues’ even veers close to an approximation of funk. Elsewhere she chucks in a couple of gobbets of modern EDM to spoil the party and show she is au courant. She seems to be enjoying herself back in her old milieu and only occasionally is her voice vocoded into inanity. I have heard worse things – the death rattle of a close relative, for example. I hope Fraser appreciates this magnanimity.
Tom Jones, Surrounded By Time
Time has been extraordinarily kind to Tom Jones, ever since he barked his way through Prince’s ‘Kiss’ with the kind of subtlety you might expect from someone who is about to nut you in the mouth. That enormous fruity bellow is one part threat, one part music hall. He was repackaged as someone whose roots supposedly lay in R&B, but I don’t remember Sam Cooke singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’ or ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’. What Tom does, with everything, is belt it out, with bombast and bravado and the faint whiff of faggots and peas. He is as nuanced a vocalist as the late Revd Ian Paisley.
Billie Eilish, Happier Than Ever
Time to get the razor out again – Billie’s back. The slurred and affected can’t-be-arsed-to-get-out-of-bed vocals. The relentless, catatonic introspection, self-pity and boilerplate psychological insights. The queen of sadgurls has a new album – and yes, of course, the title is the closest Billie has ever come to making a joke. Of course she’s not happy – that would be her schtick sold down the river. If Billie ever professed herself really happy her fans would quickly go elsewhere to slake their misery jones.
Adele, 30
The problem I have is that I thought she was pretty awful before – when she was just fat and from Tottenham. Now that she has been marinated in SoCal for six years, she seems to have become even worse: a kind of Meghan Markle with a larynx. It was cheap schlock all the way back then; it’s expensive schlock now – that’s the only difference.
Sam Smith, Gloria
You will never hear a song more boring than ‘Gimme’: it makes ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ sound like the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The single ‘Unholy’ is unabashed Europop, while ‘I’m Not Here to Make Friends’ (with its obnoxious video) is a four-second ad jingle fleshed out for eternity.
The lyrics are the usual lachrymose self-pity and inane grandstanding in equal measure. On the gospel-tinged ‘Love Me More’, he sings: ‘Every day I’m trying not to hate myself.’ Then stop trying, Sam, and join us.
Charli XCX, Brat
I was taken for a moment by the opener, ‘360’, which is a cute modern pop song – and reawakened about 15 minutes later by the rather beautifully languid ‘I Might Say Something Stupid’.
But the rest left me so stunningly bored I began to gnaw at my wrist and, hours later, the bitemarks are still visible. Charli maintains on ‘360’ that she doesn’t care one jot what people think of her, and I don’t doubt that for a second. But will anyone remember any of this synthetic dross? I really don’t think so.
FKA Twigs, Eusexua
Every song has a melodic point to it: this is pop music, essentially conservative – and yet it seems from another genre, another planet, altogether.
Beauty runs through this album and it is certainly her best yet. The lyrics? Forget them. Just enjoy a unique sound and hope she wises up about Palestine. And everything else.
Cradle of Fifth, The Screaming of the Valkyries
Satan’s devoted groupies Cradle of Filth are back with their shrieking, howling, portentous, Exorcist-style incantations, 30 years after effectively inventing the loser-boy goth-metal offshoot, black metal. They’ve got quite good at it. Rapid-paced minor-chord hard rawk, much as AC/DC might have churned out if someone had shown them some Edgar Allan Poe and told them who Wagner was. Except I’m not sure that AC/DC could manage heavy metal so relentlessly intricate, so utterly precise.
Black Country, New Road, Forever Howlong
As you might have hoped – if you know the band – some of these off-kilter melodies take a while to resolve themselves and on one or two occasions lose their way entirely, such as on the Nick Drakeish ‘Nancy Tries To Take The Night’. Then, just momentarily, they begin to sound like fey, well-bred, proggish folk-jazz refugees from the late 1960s Canterbury scene, a kind of a dislocated Kevin Ayers. But for the most part these are cleverly constructed and astonishingly well executed baroque-pop songs, the best of the crop being the dream-pop of ‘Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)’, the aforementioned ‘Besties’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ with its cute Mick Ronson guitar. Some of the songs stretch to nigh on seven minutes, but even so, rarely outstay their welcome. There is not much in the way of, uh, rocking out, it has to be said. So I would pay good money to hear them cover Quo’s ‘Paper Plane’.
Rosalia, Lux
Welcome to the Andalusian cadence, the minor fall and the major lift, the descent from Am through G and F to E. Welcome also to Rosalia Vila Tobella, who is not Andalusian, but Catalan, but uses that cadence an awful lot, much as Status Quo prefer to stick to C, F, G. She has been much praised for the depth and ambition of her compositions – and commercially much rewarded when those compositions, sometimes appended to fairly straightforward EDM, get the kind of downloads you would more usually expect from Ariane Grande.
Kanye West, BULLY
Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain.
But songs such as ‘Heil Hitler’ and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me.
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