Last year, fans were surprised when Neil Young agreed to perform at the private birthday party of Canadian billionaire, and founder of Canada Goose, Dani Reiss. For somebody who had always stood proudly against big cooperations, it seemed like a strange move – until he got on stage that is. Rather than play the familiar hits that the crowd were expecting, Young instead performed his relatively gnarly and obscure 1989 album ‘Ragged Glory’ in full (albeit, out of order). ‘Fuckin Up’ is a live document of this event and it captures the noisy, surprising antagonism he is still able to conjure on any stage.
There’s no doubt Young sounds more grizzled than he used to, and Crazy Horse are somehow even less technically proficient these days, but as a certain ramshackle quality has always been a central part of the band’s appeal, that hardly seems like a drawback. Everyone knows the role they have to play: the rhythm section are as steady as ever; Nils Lofgren, who has performed on and off with the Horse since ‘After the Goldrush’ has officially taken over axe duties from Frank Sampedro, while Micah Nelson incrementally provides piano accompaniment. It all clicks into place somehow and if it ever feels clunky or under thought then that’s part of the charm.
‘Ragged Glory’ was hailed as Neil Young’s comeback album after a series of very 80’s flops that saw him experiment with synth-rock, country music and Rockabilly. The album had an energy and relevancy that made it a touchstone for emerging alternative acts like Sonic Youth and Nirvana. The record topped 1990’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll which gives you an idea of the high esteem it was held in almost instantly. But nothing on ‘Ragged Glory’ was particularly novel – instead the record tapped into the same well that the group had drunk from on ‘Zuma’ and ‘Rust Never Sleeps’. Songs like ‘Days that Used to be’ and ‘Over and Over’ remain intense distillations of ideas Young had been reckoning with since the early days: Nostalgia, grief, inequity, heartbreak… now that he was a bit older and a bit wearier he imbued the songs with a wisdom that replaced the nativity of old.
In a live context these songs sound even more raw and off the hook. The players In Crazy Horse are so attuned to each other at this point that they sound like a single body; and here they really stretch their legs. ‘Love and Only Love’ is spread out to 15 minutes of glorious, impulsive, unexpected rock n roll. Other songs like ‘White Line’ and ‘Farmer John’ are more direct and dissonant shots to the heart. There’s no on stage banter and any applause has been edited out, giving the record an uncanniness that recalls the kind of live, kind of not, atmosphere of ‘Rust Never Sleeps.’
The record is a lot of fun for a die-hard fan but on some small level l I can relate to the disappointment Reiss and his rich chums must have felt as Ragged Glory deep cut followed Ragged Glory deep cut on that cold, Canadian night. I saw Young at the O2 in 2016 where five of the last eight songs were taken from ‘Ragged Glory’; as much as I like ‘Fucking Up’, ‘Love and Only Love’ and ‘Mansion on the Hill’ etc, they’ve always felt baggy and indulgent In comparison to his very sharpest work. And he tends to lean even more into those qualities when he performs these songs live. As good as it is, ‘Ragged Glory’ is no ‘After the Goldrush.’ But if nothing else ‘Fuckin Up’ is the latest testament to Neil Young’s fiercely defiant attitude and singular obtuseness. Here is an artist who does what he wants to do, even if it drives everyone else in the room a bit potty.
Iconic Scottish indie-pop group Camera Obscura are back after a decade away, though in a sense it feels like they’ve never been gone. Tracyanne Campbell‘s style of writing – literate but direct, sensitive with a sense of humour – has been subtily influential on a whole generation of artists. Alvvays have cited the band as a key touchstone and, through them, a whole sub-genre of wirey, love-struck indie bands have carried the torch lit by Camera Obscura. And would it be too much to connect them to Taylor Swift as well? After all, they have been writing stinging putdowns of ex-lovers since Taylor’s childhood (they will be celebrating their 30th anniversary as a band this year). Campbell remains the undisputed champ in this arena with zingers like ‘You act like a man who’s cross with any woman he’s never had’ and ‘your pain’s gigantic but it’s not as big as your ego’ still surely ringing in the victim’s ears to this day.
‘Look to the East, Look to the West’ is the band’s 6th record and their first since 2013’s ‘Desire Lines’. Shortly after that release the group’s keyboardist, Carey Lander, passed away and for a while it seemed like the group would disband. But in 2019 Belle and Sebastian invited them to perform as part of their ‘Boaty Weekender’ festival where Donna Maciocia filled in for Carey, convincing Campbell that there was a way to reconcile the band’s future with her absence.
They address Carey’s passing on a song called ‘Sugar Almand’ where Campbell reckons with her grief alongside nothing more than a piano (Cary’s instrument). It’s a moving ballad that asks some of the biggest questions you can ask. ‘I liked who we were together, not sure who I’ll be apart’ she sings in a voice that is clearly close to breaking. As previous records have made abundantly clear, Campbell is used to overcoming heartbreak but on ‘Sugar ‘Almond’ she wonders how she will get over the permanent loss of her closest friend.
‘Look to the East, Look to the West’ contends with grief as one of the many disrupters that life throws at you with increasing regularity as you grow up. The stunning opening track ‘Liberty Print’ elliptically tackles the passing of Campbell’s younger brother, the ‘blue eyed baby’ with broken dreams of becoming a footballer. The song feels quite blunt in its lack of closure, ending in frustration more than anything else. ‘What a terrible waste of a young man’s time, you never did find peace, oh it’s no fun / I had to visit your mother, you were her only son.’ The song’s tickling melody evokes classic Camera Obscura but the more Spartan arrangement feels different. Icy synths and a programmed drum pattern predict some of the subtle ways that ‘Look to the East…’ will challenge our expectations.
Where once Campbell was animated primarily by love-sickness, here she writes about all the accruing emotional debris of a life well lived: as well as grief there are songs about parenting, nostalgia, sexism, fading friendship and a friskiness undeterred by middle age. She still sings about love, but it’s a more muted feeling these days. She interrogates the little ways it can poke and prod at your daily routines; It no longer overwhelms as it once did. ‘Don’t make eyes at me’ she scolds on the brilliant ‘Pop Goes Pop’, ‘we’re not free to do just as we please.’ Later on she tells the love interest to ‘get a grip’ and seems bemused by the attention. ‘The chaos of summer has died’ she reflects on ‘Baby Huey’, which is evidently true, but what does it mean for her band? My favourite Camera Obscura songs have historically been the ones that feel in the midst of that chaos; emotions on the brink of boiling over, emotions that can’t be contained or controlled. A kind of despair so all encompassing it blinds you to everything else going on. This newly measured mode may take a bit of getting used to.
That same sense of steadiness is reflected in the music. The sound is generally familiar – that splashy mix of Motown, doo-wop and Sarah Records era indie-pop – but the group’s arrangements are not as volatile or tempestuous as they used to be. The record feels intimate – sonically more similar to the band’s early independent releases, rather than their more bombastic late 00’s records. They are reunited with producer Jari Haapalainen who produced the band’s two best albums (‘Let’s Get Out of the Country’ and ‘My Maudlin Career’) but he doesn’t augment the songs with strings, saxophones and stacked harmonies. In particular, ‘Sleepwalking’ and ‘Baby Huey’ feel so stripped back, they could almost be demos. A new emphasis is placed on Kenny Mceeve and Gavin Dunbar’s guitar and baselines, which generally do the musical heavy lifting, weaving in and around Campbell’s always lovely melodies. Just occasionally though you feel something is missing; the more grandiose tracks such as ‘Big Love’ and ‘The Night Lights’ feel a little underdressed when you remember the likes of ‘French Navy’ and ‘Honey in the Sun.’
Camera Obscura have always conveyed the sense that any emotion worth feeling is worth feeling intensely. But here there is also the implied knowledge that not every light will burn as brightly as it once did. Heartbreak is sometimes best understood from a distance of time and passion is tempered as maturity is gained. Where once Tracyanne Campbell was the one in need of some good advice, she ends the album by dispensing some of her own. ‘Look to east, look to the west, be a good girl, try your best.’ Wise and world weary they may be but It’s really good to have Camera Obscura properly back.
Hovvdy are a duo comprising of Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, who trade lead vocals and instruments intermittently. I’ve been a fan of Hovvdy for five years but I’m still not able to tell who is who, which I think is sort of the idea. Hovvdy make music by bros of a certain age for bros of a certain age about bros of a certain age. They say things like ‘I’ll clean up the kitchen, take it easy’ and ‘get together with my friends, been a while, been too long.’ They worry about not phoning their uncle back and whether they have time to take the long road home. Appropriately for a band who sing about such things, they have been labelled ‘pillowcore’, which is not meant, or taken, as an insult. ‘Hovvdy’ is the kind of sleepy you feel at the tail end of a hot summer afternoon after a couple of beers. Its all breathy falsettos and softly glowing acoustic guitars. Things come together slowly but surely, like a photograph developing. It’s pleasantly blissful.
8/10
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Dua Lipa ‘Radical Optimism’
Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker seems to have made quite an impression on Dua Lipa, who has built her third album ‘Radical Optimism’ around his presence. Unfortunately his work here is reminiscent of his contributions to Lady Gaga’s ‘Perfect Illusion’ or Mark Robson’s ‘Find U Again’, which is to say, disappointing. He dilutes the pop maximalism that Dua Lipa is known for and can’t transplant enough of his own psychedelic intuition to make the trade off worthwhile. ‘Radical Optimism’ is full of watery songwriting given a vaguely alien sheen. It’s perfectly listenable but too tentative to be considered a real success. You wish it was either weirder or funkier or vibier or something. And after the likes of ‘Dance the Night Away’ and ‘Don’t Start Now’, the likes of ‘Houdini’ and ‘Training Season’, with their oddly Eurovision vibes, feel especially forgettable.
6/10
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Kings of Leon ‘Can We Please Have Fun’
I’d encourage you to revisit Kings of Leon’s 2005 classic ‘Aha Shake Heartbreak’, one of the best sounding Rock records of all time. Seriously, I don’t know the tricks that producer Ethan Jones used to make those songs come alive in the studio but it’s such a perfectly judged recording; so atmospheric and raucous. It makes Kings of Leon sound like the coolest men alive. Which juxtaposes sharply with ‘Can We Please Have Fun’, the band’s 9th record, a plodding and laborious thing where instruments blur together and bland electronic textures disrupt any sense of spontaneity. Across ‘Can We Please Have Fun’ Kings of Leon sound proficient but washed. Capable but anonymous. It’s all patient build and no sparkle. They have ditched any pretensions of becoming the new U2 and seem happy to lean into a kind of easy listening soft Rock. Drained of any excitement, tension or ambition, Caleb Followill’s lyrics are left exposed to the inevitable criticisms that have plagued him from the beginning. It begs the question posed in the title – can we please have fun?
5/10
This image released by Capitol Records shows “Can We Please Have Fun” by Kings of Leon. (Capitol Records via AP)
Cindy Lee is the performance project of Canadian artist Patrick Flegel, who until now was best known as frontman of post-punk band Woman. ‘Diamond Jubilee’ has catipulted him to indie-notoriety in a way that feels endearingly old-fashioned; a pitchfork rave and some blog attention and suddenly Cindy Lee is the name on everyone’s lips. This dizzyingly ambitious double album is only available through YouTube and a Geocitoes website, and yet it’s quietly becoming one of the most acclaimed indie albums of recent years.
‘Diamond Jubilee’ will remind different listeners of different eras. Some will be directly transported back to the golden age of pop: the doo-wop chord changes, girl group melodies, British Invasion guitars and sense of melodrama etc. the lo-fi aesthetic and almost ghostly quality will remind others of early 90s alt-rock (there is something a little bit Guided by Voices about it all). For me personally, the record is reminiscent of the nostalgic and brittle indie pop I fell in love with in the late 00s – Girls, Ariel Pink, The Drums, Washed Out. The album’s presentation, and the context around it, is also suggestive of a time before algorithms and social media. In a world of protracted album roll outs and overzealous PR, it’s refreshing to stumble across a record the old fashioned way.
Flegel has created a whole world. An ode to romanticism and memory. A mood. This is an album you can put on and get lost in. Individual tracks, valleys and peaks, become part of a greater whole. It’s a journey. He constructs songs that have a classic sensibility, and in many respects feel straightforward enough. They take simple conceits – a break up, a dream, a memory – and pair them with catchy melodies. But there is something uncanny pulling at the edges. The inherent classicism is filtered through a distinctly modern queerness. The songs generally bloom into expansive instrumentals where Flegal’s tasteful and often caustic guitar solos take on the emotional heavy lifting. Feedback disrupts and disrupts just as you find things getting a little too quiet.
Across 32 tracks, the highlights are spread fairly evenly. There are some groovy diversions (‘Olive Drab’ locks into an orchestral funk, ‘Dracula’ offers soulful disco and ‘GAYBLEVISION’ is like a long lost theme tune to an 80s cop drama) but I personally have more of a soft spot for the introspective ballads. These are songs that most directly invoke a ghostly longing for somebody or something beyond arm’s reach: ‘Always Dreaming’, Dreams of You’, ‘All I Want Is You’ – you get the idea. The highlight is Kingdom Come’ which filters a ‘Strawberry Swing’ guitar-line through chambers of reverb until it sounds like something plucked from your most obscure memories. At the song’s end Flegel sings ‘I miss you dear friend, I heard your music playing far away’ which sums up the feeling of being so near, and yet so far removed, from a time and place; the feeling of bittersweet remembrance. It also evokes the sensation I feel when listening to ‘Diamond Jubilee’ as a whole; of hearing something both alien and familiar. Old and new. Comforting and challenging. You don’t come across this kind of record very often anymore.
Taylor Swift has always been kind of insufferable – and I say this as someone who hasgonetobat for her many times. In the early days i deemed that insuffarbility to be an inevitable consequence of the same traits that I found so endearing: her unguarded sincerity, her youthful precociousness, her ambition. If she sometimes over-egged a metaphor or came across as a little try-hard then that was part of her charm. But as time has passed, Taylor’s more grating qualities have become harder and harder to see past; mainly because she is seemingly absolutely everywhere all the time. Aside from the sheer quantity of music she has put out over the past five years (nearly 220 tracks, including the re-recordings) there is the never ending, economy boosting-‘Eras’ tour, the Movies and Disney+ making-of’s, the magazine covers and gossip columns, the streaming records and university courses etc. Escaping Taylor swift has become impossible and, even for a fan like myself, it’s incredibly cloying.
Weirdly, this has all coalesced with some of the most disappointing music of her career. The various ‘Taylor’s versions’ that have come out have paired great albums with an abundance of unnecessary outtakes and bonus tracks. Her Grammy award winning ‘Midnights’ was a salty synth-pop record that left me completely unmoved. All of which recently prompted Neil Tennant (of Pet Shop Boys) to ask ‘what is Taylor Swift’s ‘Billie Jean’? Shake It Off? I listened to that the other day and it is not ‘Billie Jean’, is it.”Which… he’s not wrong.
You can have too much of a good thing. And in recent years we have had too much of a Taylor Swift thing. And this album is CERTAINLY too much. ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is being billed as either a one disc or double disc album, depending on which edition you buy. Either way, it’s too long; It just depends whether your version is four songs too long or fourteen. There are plenty of peaks here spread across two hours – some of her best all out pop songs since ‘1989’ – but the dips are just as plentiful. Ultimately they all start to blur into one long slog anyway. The mood is introspective and bitter to a fault so It’s hard to imagine anyone comfortably sitting through two hours of this stuff (though the numerous reaction videos popping up across social media seem to suggest that some people have indeed experienced it that way).
The record chronicles the demise of two relationships and the start of a third. Matty Healey, Travis Kelcee and Joe Alwyn feature prominently in some cryptic, and some not so cryptic, ways. For a fan of both Taylor Swift and The 1975, I find it captivating; the references to The Blue Nile (Marty’s favourite band), a ‘tattooed golden retriever’, chocolate, typewriters and Jehovah’s whiteness suits… it‘s funny. Maybe a bit of Matty has seeped into Taylor’s writing style too – at one point she rhymes ‘Aristotle’ with ‘touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto’… yikes.
For me personally, it’s clear to hear the slight improvements over predecessor ‘Midnights’. It has a tighter lyrical focus for a start, and identifies a definite itch to scratch. As much as ‘Midnights’ did well to manoeuvre away from heartbreak, there’s no doubt Taylor Swift sounds more at home singing about this stuff. It’s still thrilling to hear her find new ways to articulate the blessings of new love (‘Tortured Poets Department’), how it stagnates (‘loml’) and the peculiarly devastating effects on day to day living (the description of breaking down at the gym on ‘Down Bad’ is perfect). On top of which you’ve got plenty of the kind of vindictive put downs we found on ‘Reputation’ and ‘Midnights’ as well as the more mature and distant reflections she experimented with on ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’.
A large chunk of the record is completely forgettable, but, and this is something of a music writer cliche, there is a great twelve track album in here trying to get out. I love the moody sleeze of ‘Down Bad’ and the playful melodrama of ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Own Toys.’ And I love the moments where Taylor seems genuinely uninhibited; the crunchy alt-rock of ‘So High School’ and the decaying disco of ‘I Can Do it With a Broken Heart.’ And, mostly, I appreciate the moments where she just says it exactly as it is. No subterfuge, no metaphor, no irony. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’ on lead single ‘Fortnight’, which says everything that needs to be said. Or that moment on ‘LOML’ where she sounds positively broken – ‘you said that I’m the love of your life like a hundred times.’ These lyrics prick through the pretence; they speak to something more deeply felt. She’s still funny, too – ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith, this ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots’ – which is as good a critique of Matty Healey as I’ve ever heard from a music journalist.
There’s a moment on the reasonably riveting ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ where Taylor exposes her greatest fear (which also happens to be an actual reality): ‘So tell me everything is not about me… but what if it is?’ For someone who built an identity around being an underdog (‘Mean’, ‘You Belong to Me’, ‘Tim McGraw’) it must feel like a blessing and a curse to be the literal Time Person of the Year TM. Everything is about her; it’s boring for us and must be exhausting for her. But at moments across ‘TTPD’ you hear the real human being behind the accolades struggling to make herself heard. You hear glimpses of the old Taylor.
And let’s not get it twisted – Taylor Swift still knows her way around a simile. Some of my favourites from ‘TTPD’ include: ‘I crash the party like a record scratch’, ‘the smoke cloud billows out his mouth like a steam train through a little town’, ‘you look like Stevie Nicks in ‘75’, ‘quick, quick tell me something awful, like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy.’ Ok, maybe that last one was a little goofy. But that’s always been part of Taylor’s charm; she risks goofiness in the pursuit of greater truth. If anything, there’s not enough of that coming through this time around. Like ‘Midnights’ (and arguably even ‘Evermore’ and ‘Folklore’) ‘TTPD’s seriousness ultimately feels suffocating. That’s amplified by the unadventurous production which generally emphasises steely beats and melancholic piano accompaniments that grow in intensity before snapping back like slingshots. Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’ is currently number one and it’s a great example of how silly pop music can afford to be. Taylor Swift knew that when she wrote ‘We are Never getting back together’ and ‘22.’ No longer.
Remember when she rendered her experiences in brightly coloured, felt tip pen? Her songs felt less like poems and more like doodles written in the margin. Her writing was unselfconsciously diaristic. You felt like you were being allowed access to a secret stash of love letters. That’s rarely the case here. There is a self-conscious importance placed on songs that can’t handle the weight; she writes like she knows we will be listening and expecting. The second half in particular is crippled by this: ‘Cassandra’, a self pitying piano ballad about ‘burning the bitch’, ‘The Bolter’, a self pitying piano ballad about the girl whose friends laughed behind her back, ‘The Manuscript’, a self pitying piano ballad about a torrid affair… you get the idea. It eventually feels turgid. There is such limited musicality expressed across the record, and such unimaginative production from Jack Antinoff and (particularly) Aaron Desnor (both of whom should really be challenging her more), that the record lives and dies by the quality of writing.
The things I initially responded to coming out of the mouth of a teenage girl are considerably less charming now that she’s a 34 year old woman with the world’s eyes fixed upon her every move. That Taylor was un-self conscious, this Taylor is almost smugly self aware. That Taylor knew how to have fun, this Taylor is a bore. That Taylor didn’t hit the ceiling because she didn’t know how high it went. This Taylor hit it years ago. She spends so much time on ‘TTPD’ second guessing our expectations, laying out clues for online sleuths and playing to the gallery that it starts to feel claustrophobic. The passion has curdled and soured in all the wrong ways. There’s a sense in which Taylor Swift is no longer writing love songs – she’s writing punchlines.
Pop goes the Weasel 