Pop

Grade: C I don’t doubt the ingenuity. The mastery of a technology which now exists as a substitute for melody, heart, soul, rhythm and meaning. I get the manifesto, too – a pop music that in a certain shallow sense reflects the modern predilection for meta-fiction: novels which mash up all the genres, so that your detective story suddenly becomes magic realism and a little later, sci-fi. I understand, too, that this is probably the closest our Gen Zers have to a music which they can call their own, given that the technology required to produce it would cause an embolism in a Gen X listener or a Boomer. So I get all that. The trouble is, what if, when all is said and done, it’s basically rubbish?

The other day, I went to see a nouveau riot-girl band called Claire Dance play in a disused factory in Bagnolet on the edge of Paris. They were great: the kind of sonic kick in the nuts I’d been waiting more than a decade for an all-female band to deliver. I half-wondered whether it was just my own imperfect command of French that left me clueless as to their message. ‘C’était tout een eenglish,’ came the response from the guitarist afterwards. How come they never considered accompanying such emotionally charged music with lyrics in their mother tongue? ‘It’s considered cringe,’ she replied. ‘We only like English music.

Grade: A If you enjoy the sensation of having warm, jangly syrup poured directly into your ear, then this is probably the summer album for you. You might think that syrup cannot, by definition, be jangly. But imagine treacle with popping candy in it – poured into your ear in a kindly manner by a smiling young man. This Long Island sibling duo have been honing their pastiche for eight years or so and here reference almost every power-pop band that ever existed, from the Byrds via the dB’s to Teenage Fanclub, but also taking in the winsome pop which dominated our charts before the Beatles came along (but post the advent of rock’n’roll) – as well as many less cool contributors to the genre, such as Herman’s Hermits and, gawd help us, Wings.

When a major artist releases a new album, the first thing to follow is the onslaught of think pieces. And when Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter earlier this year, the tone of these think pieces – especially on this side of the Atlantic – was one of slightly baffled congratulation. Here, at last, was a pioneer who might drag this hidebound genre – of sequins and satin, of lachrymose, middle-aged songs about drink and divorce – into the modern age. ‘Modern country is like punk for the Hannah Montana generation’ The only problem is that Beyoncé was not leading; she was following. Beyoncé pivoted to country not to make it cool, but because it’s become cool – and more of a commercial powerhouse than it has been for years.

Beatles lore has long held that the film Let It Be was a depressing portrait of the band falling apart. According to the same lore, that’s why Peter Jackson’s Get Back was such a revelation. Revisiting Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s footage of the group at work in January 1969, Jackson discovered there was far more joy around than anyone suspected – including the surviving Beatles. Yoko remains a darkly brooding presence (the revisionism that sees her as benign needs its own revision) All of which, it now turns out, only goes to prove the ever-reliable power of suggestion. I vaguely remember seeing Let It Be on TV in the 1970s, before it disappeared until last week – and finding it as miserable as I already knew everybody said it was. Except that it really isn’t.

The hip end of the folk spectrum is in rude health right now. Dublin’s mighty Lankum lead the way, but plenty of other interesting artists are following in their wake, Brighde Chaimbeul among them. If a Gaelic-speaking trad musician from Skye reinterpreting Philip Glass for the small pipes sounds like your thing – and why on earth wouldn’t it? – then Chaimbeul is worthy of exploration. At 17 she won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award. Her 2019 debut, The Reeling, released via Rough Trade, cross-pollinated traditional with experimental electronic music. More recently, and still in her early twenties, she has collaborated with American avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson on the album Carry Them With Us.

You could very well sum up their differing approaches to American roots music from how they were dressed. Both wore cowboy hats and both wore trousers, but Adrianne Lenker’s were faded denim, while Lainey Wilson went with shiny brown leather. Lenker, looking austere and speaking and singing softly, played music plucked from eternity, demanding you concentrate on her stillness. Wilson, on the other hand, was here to make the crowd feel good; a little melancholy on the big ballads, sure, but she’s an entertainer in the grand tradition of country music.

How to explain the supercharged star power of Taylor Swift? An undeniably gifted artist, Swift’s albums 1989, Folklore and Evermore, in particular, are excellent. She has written a battery of terrific pop songs. She is a generous and skilled performer. To suggest she is overrated is not an insult, therefore, but simply a comment on the absurd critical mass of her popularity, in which every lyric, scrap of artwork, cultural reference and personal tit-bit is weighted with a monumental significance which, it is becoming apparent, does her work few favours. Anybody listening to Swift’s new album without prior knowledge of the layers of gossipy context surrounding it might well wonder what all the fuss was about.

How is it that a group that sounds like the Hives are selling out the Apollo? In a world configured according to expectation, the highlight of their year would be an appearance at the Rebellion punk festival in Blackpool, probably high up the bill on the second stage. They’d headline their own shows at places like the Dome in Tufnell Park to an audience made up of three-quarters old blokes and a quarter skinny young kids, suited and booted like it’s 1966 and Antonioni’s about to shout ‘Action!’. Afterwards, a DJ would play the Sonics and the Electric Prunes and the Chocolate Watchband.

When the trailer for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, first landed, her fans were gracious. ‘This,’ they said, ‘is going to be terrific.’ I’m winding you up. They were horrified. It’s too soon, they said. It’s exploitative and trashes her legacy, they concluded, from having watched two minutes of footage. I can only say that, one, fanatical fans are like that whatever you do, and two, this is better than I expected (although my expectations were low). It does seem softened at the edges, and one can never forgive a falling-in-love montage set at London Zoo – ever – butI (mostly) didn’t cringe and it is respectful, if painful.

Sensible prog-rock bands try to ensure no one ever realises they play prog. What happens when you are deemed a prog band is that you are condemned to the margins – little radio airtime, few TV appearances, barely any coverage in the mainstream press – because it has been decided you exist solely for the delectation of a tribe that baffles the rest of the world. Once non-proggers have decided you are prog, that’s it. There is no way back for you. Just collect your Campaign for Real Ale membership card, go home and practise your drum solos. Once non-proggers have decided you are prog, that’s it. There is no way back for you Hence Radiohead – absolutely, indubitably a prog band, right down to the tricksy time signatures – don’t bang on about Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Grade: B+ Cheekface are apt to divide opinion rather sharply. There are those who believe that the Los Angeles indie nerd-rock three-piece dissect late capitalism and the American psyche with an uplifting and insightful laconic wit. And then there are those who want to punch them repeatedly in the face, especially the singer Greg Katz – punch them and punch them until there is nothing left but broken teeth. I get that. I swing between both camps. In this respect, and several others, they are rather like Weezer, except a little less cute. In the end people decided that a punching was probably the right option for Weezer and they may, after time, decide the same for Cheekface.

Bob Dylan is heading into the new year with a reduced property portfolio, having sold his Scottish bolthole, Aultmore House in Speyside, for a shade over four million quid. Though the spec looks grand – 16 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a folly (to complement his Christmas album, presumably) – only one aspect interests me: did Dylan ever write anything notable there? Is some piece of the Cairngorms National Park forever preserved in a line – perhaps the one he cribbed from Robbie Burns about his heart being in the Highlands – that came to him while gazing out enigmatically over the croquet lawn?

Peter Gabriel is terribly fond of a Big Idea. With Genesis he would sing in character as a lawnmower, a fox and as ‘Slipperman’. His final work with the band, in 1974, was The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a double album driven by what we might kindly describe as a ‘kaleidoscopic’ narrative involving a Puerto-Rican protagonist on a voyage of self-discovery in New York City. Since going solo there has always been plenty of stuff whirling around each new Gabriel project. His Real World HQ in the West Country is part recording studio, part hi-tech hippie lab, encompassing conceptual technological probing, multimedia collaborations, NGOs and various foundations.

You won’t see two more contrasting shows this year than Corinne Bailey Rae performing her album Black Rainbows and Brian Eno presenting work with a symphony orchestra. One had music that did everything; one had music that did very little. But both were overwhelming and filled with joy of rather different kinds. When Bailey Rae last made an album, in 2016, it was gentle, tasteful, soulful R&B, the kind the young professional couple in a prestige Netflix drama listen to before their lives are overturned by a vengeful nanny. Black Rainbows,by contrast, from earlier this year, was an abrupt embrace of everything: from scuzzy garage punk to psychedelic soul to American show tunes, all inspired by the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago and its exhibits on the black experience in America.