British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972

“Sunday morning, up with the lark,I think I’ll take a walk in the park,Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …”Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972

British bubblegum pop, c[…]

CORNELIUS – “Perfect Rainbow”
He plays games. And nothing else. And your tolerance of Keigo Oyamada’s tactics depends entirely on your tolerance of artists whose entire raison d’etre is to play about with past music an[…]

MADONNA – Music
First things first: Garry Mulholland’s Guardian review of this album that Tom blogged last week was absurd and unintentionally hilarious, exemplifying all the worst aspects of the paper’s pop coverage. Familiar by n[…]

VAN DYKE PARKS – Song Cycle
I’d heard so much about this album that I was actually nervous about hearing it, some years after it acquired a personal status as a kind of masterpiece of the mind. And the thing that immediately strikes me a[…]

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant
So it’s my turn. And what strikes me about the album as a whole is that the closest B&S get to their own favoured classicism – however much they can sound is[…]

Greg, I see all your points. Maybe I’m obsessed with national differences (I was once told that my specialist subject, as it were, was “national identity seen from the perspective of a diehard internationalist”, which was spot on) b[…]

Is there some connection between the enjoyably overblown and absurd “concept” for this record and the bizarre way it sounds from time to time like late 60s acid rock at its most self-indulgent, with organ reminiscent of the Doors? Probab[…]

I’m as keen as Greg to see UK Garage get exposure in America, but I can’t realistically see it happening – because (and I know this will seem like a sweeping and, to some, offensive statement) it just doesn’t fit into the port[…]

For so long, as a matter of moral principle, I despised DMX. Hated the blatant simplicity of his music’s production values, hated the way his every emotional response was intoned as a blood-red tabloid headline, hated the way he played into th[…]

I don’t know why I find myself listening so obsessively to Max Tundra’s skittering electro-jazz, since its air of aimlessness and slight self-satisfaction clash with my current aesthetic of self-promotion and self-belief. It has overtones[…]