Photo Credit: Jack Grange Could the timing possibly have been worse when Jessie Ware released her disco tribute What’s Your Pleasure? during the COVID-pandemic? Probably, yes. In fact, the album became a big success, giving people an excellent excuse to shake their hips indoors during the lockdowns. The album reached the Top 3 on the… Read more
Photo Credit: Harry Langdon / Bettmann Archive Singer, actress, and Oscar-winning songwriter Irene Cara died on November 25th at age sixty-three. Although she would only have a few major hits over a relatively short period, those songs would leave an indelible stamp on the early part of the ’80s and have since proven to be… Read more
Photo Credit: Meredith Jenks Back in 2012, online dating and sharing cell phone numbers were still relatively new things, so there is no wonder that Carly Rae Jepsen’s ridiculously infectious guilty pleasure “Call Me Maybe” would go on to become the best-selling single of the 21st century by a female artist and one of the… Read more
Photo Credit: Mason Poole for Parkwood Entertainment The story of house music is one of liberation; of marginalized communities carving out a space where they could unapologetically be themselves. As a genre, its roots are radical – its formation can be credited to Black and Queer individuals who refused to conform to a society that… Read more
Photo Credit: AB+DM Every generation needs an artist who is unafraid to write cheesy, feel-good, uplifting anthems; an artist who would rather risk being saccharine than sour. Natasha Bedingfield (“Unwritten”), Kelly Clarkson (“Stronger”), and Katy Perry (“Firework”) have all alternately held this title and fulfilled their role dutifully. It would be unfair to dismiss Lizzo’s music… Read more
Photo Credit: Hayley Louisa Brown Open up the UK Top 100 albums chart on any given week and among the new releases and classics, you’ll likely find a handful of albums that you’ve never heard of that have spent months upon months – even years – on the charts. These are the sort of albums… Read more
Photo Credit: Tom Oxley I rarely had so little to say about an album as Oxford band Foals’ seventh album Life Is Yours, so let’s hear what the band has to say about it. “We wanted to write music that would be a forcefield against the darkness, rather than try to proselytize people,” singer Yannis… Read more
Every now and then you might wonder what the ten biggest-selling albums of all time might be. As it turns out, it’s not an exact science: while we’re pretty sure a couple of people did buy Michael Jackson’s Thriller, different outlets have different ways of measuring overall album sales, say nothing of the fact that with the… Read more
The Top Ten Best Songs of 2021 (So Far) #10. “ACTION” — CHAI Photo Credit: Yoshio Nakaiso “ACTION” finds CHAI rejecting all the weight of self-seriousness (not that the band had much of that to begin with). Black Lives Matter protests inspired the Japanese quartet to think about what a call to action would look… Read more
Cher ‘Do You Believe?‘ World Tour at the First Union Center Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Photography by: Steve Trager