The Listener
AC/DC: Power Up
Grade: C The fear is this: you’re wearing a leather jacket and hipster jeans and think you look cool, but…
Respighi’s Roman Trilogy: Sinfonia of London/ John Wilson
Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…
Disco: Kylie Minogue
Grade: B– Uh-oh. Might have to be careful here, pull my punches a little bit. The editor is a big…
A.G. Cook: Apple
Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a…
Yusuf/Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2
Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME…
The Pineapple Thief: Versions of the Truth
Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has…
Deep Purple: Whoosh!
Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished…
Taylor Swift: Folklore
Grade: A- This is worrying — like listening to a speech by David Lammy and finding yourself, against your better…
Neil Young: Homegrown
Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly…
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which…
The 1975: Notes on a Conditional Form
Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg.…
Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song…
Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus: Songs of Yearning
Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only…
Green Day: Father of All…
Grade: B+ It is an eternal mystery to me why Britain has never had much time for power pop, seeing…
Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
Grade: B The old axiom no longer applies. In modern popular music, it is possible not only to gild a…
Justin Bieber: Changes
Grade: D– For my first review of popular music releases in 2020 I thought I’d deposit this large vat of…
The cult of Trifonov is doing the pianist no favours
Grade: B– Deutsche Grammophon have decided that Daniil Trifonov’s new Rachmaninov piano concertos with the Philadephia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin…
Woke slogans welded to incompetent grunge: Neil Young’s Colorado reviewed
Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band…
Patently insincere: Kanye’s Jesus is King reviewed
Grade: B– Kanye West has found Jesus Christ. Lucky old Christ. If I were Christ I’d have hidden out a…
Imagine ZZ Top stuck in a lift with Gary Numan: Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury reviewed
Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent…
Proggery beyond parody: Iggy Pop’s Free reviewed
Grade: D+ Pleasant memories — of hearing ‘Raw Power’ for the first time and later the amiably shambolic chug of…
Great title – shame about the songs: Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell reviewed
Grade: B+ Get the razor blades out, Ms Misery is back. Only the truly affluent can immerse themselves in such…
Needed a shot of Stolichnaya: The Tchaikovsky Project reviewed
Grade: B+ I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t those what ageing rockers produce, in a haze of sedatives, when their…
Reliably odd but the deranged proggery grates: King’s Mouth by The Flaming Lips reviewed
Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and…
Hideously tasteful elegies to useless country singers: Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars reviewed
Grade: B– The first Springsteen song I ever heard was ‘Born To Run’, back when I was 14. I clocked…
