The Cure’s Robert Smith isn’t seen as the most happy-go-lucky guy. On occasion he has confounded expectations and crafted superior pop confections like “The Lovecats”, “Inbetween Days” and “Friday I’m In Love”. However for the most part, his band are associated with dark emotions, a foreboding sense of doom, drowning […]
Post-Punk was the moment where punk got weird. No longer was it just three chords and the truth, but in came attempts at genre fusion, minimalism and experiments in electronica. However not every band got the sales or respect they deserved at the time, whether it was a case of […]
In the 80s, the biggest British boyband was Wham! 5 UK Number Ones, they broke America and then broke up. Afterwards George Michael went on to be a very big popstar, and other Wham! member Andrew Ridgeley did not. It set in the pop-consuming public’s minds that only one member […]
Demos have an alluring quality, sketches of what a song could be, scrappy drafts filled with potential, completely free from overplay. That energy, that naivety is very hard to recapture. There’s a term used for when musicians get too attached to the demo versions of their songs: dem-oitis. And The […]
Sometimes it takes a while for a band to find their audience. Maybe their sound isn’t quite refined. Perhaps their debut doesn’t quite connect. Could be their hometown crowd aren’t receptive. For Violent Femmes, right out the gate their debut was a perfect encapsulation of who they were: snaking basslines, […]
Michael Bay is a pretty big deal. A director with a style instantly identifiable by even the normie-ist of film goers, a reckless tangle of CGI, vrooming cameras and ADHD editing all together forming something that is subjectively ‘Dynamic and Epic’. This odd mix has made him one of the […]
Pop punk bands aren’t too fond of their hometowns. It’s almost a cliché at this point, as much as songs about “friends” and “falling”, but how did this particular trend become such a staple within the genre? I totally do not claim I thought up that beginning bit, see the […]
So lowering my punk credibility a bit, I adore Taylor Swift as a musical entity. She produces regularly high quality nuggets of pop fluff. There may not be any greater substance to them, they may not change the world, but you can dance and singalong with reckless abandon. Perfect pop […]
Why has all the seminal rock music disappeared from the charts? Rock is dead. Or at least that’s what the music press have been telling us for the last half decade. There’s not been a genre-defining rock act that has gripped the public consciousness in forever. Crunching guitar-based music is […]
Second albums are hard. For every Nevermind or Led Zeppelin II, there’s dozens of follow-ups that did not have the same level of success of their debut. The term is “Sophomore Slump”. There are many reasons why a second album becomes an issue, and a shit-hot debut is top of […]
