Top 10 albums of 2018

Better late than never... These are the records that went on repeat at Discopop Towers^TM in 2017. Which was a week ago.

10) Muna - About U

When you're beaten and a friend unexpectedly comes to your defence. When you're silently hurting and someone notices. When you just need to be understood. That's what this album is, but songs.



9) Billie Eilish - Don't Smile At Me

Technically an EP, but longer than most Beatles' albums, so I'm allowing it.

Billie Eilish has a faultless ear for melody, a lean-closer voice and a bucketful of acidic lyrics. Everyone, including me, goes on about Bellyache, where she fantasises about killing her friends. But my favourite (because I actually lived it) is Party Favor, where she casually and callously dumps her boyfriend on his birthday. "I hate to do this to you on your birthday," she coos. "Happy birthday, by the way".


8) Wolf Alice - Visions Of A Life

Good luck summing this one up. Ellie, Theo, Joff and Joel sound like they've raided the musical pick'n'mix counter, grabbing handfuls of grunge and dream-pop and punk shoegaze and anything else that takes their fancy - Ellie even borrows Neil Tenant's deadpan vocal "stylings" on Sky Musings. But somehow it works. You can holler along to Beautifully Unconventional, you can spit at Yuk Foo, you can swoon to Don't Delete The Kisses.

"I think hummus is quite a good analogy for our album," Ellie told me in September. "You get all these different varieties but at the end of the day they're all hummus."

Told you it was impossible to sum up.


7) Kendrick Lamar - Damn

The fire, the fury, the blood, the piss, the faith, the doubt, the humility, the false humility, the Rihanna duet, the breezy, casual competence of it all. At this point, he's basically showing off.



6) Paramore - After Laughter

Paramore's technicolor fifth album completes their transformation into pin-sharp pop stars - but not, like, Katy Perry or anything. ("I can't imagine getting up there and playing a Max Martin song – at that point we might as well just stop," guitarist Taylor York told The New York Times in April).

Instead, they take their cues from the angular elbows and polyrhythms of Talking Heads and Cyndi Lauper, while Hayley Williams picks at the scabs of her depression in a procession of unflinchingly stark lyrics.

My favourite track is Rose Colored Boy - where she rages against an irritatingly glass-half-full acquaintance. "And oh, I'm so annoyed," she hisses, "'Cause I just killed off what was left of the optimist in me". Sad-dancing hasn't been this good since Robyn last released an album.



5) Lorde - Melodrama

Too clever for its own good, Lorde's second album suffers from a surfeit of ideas. When they work (the conspiratorial tongue click on Perfect Places, the submerged vocal samples of Sober) it's glorious. But other tracks threaten to collapse under the weight of their ambition. It's telling that the standout moments are the simplest: Liability and Writer In The Dark.

But you can't argue with Ella Yelich-O'Connor's facility with melody, nor her gothic, awkward, evocative lyrics - somehow cool in their lack of coolness.

"We're the greatest/ They'll hang us in the Louvre / Down the back... but who cares? Still the Louvre" is a stand-out, but my absolute favourite is "I'm closing my teeth around this liquor-wet lime".

A flawed masterpiece.



4) Dua Lipa - Dua Lipa

Was it groundbreaking? No.
Did it rewrite pop history? No.
Was it an unimpeachable collection of pop songs? Yes.

New Rules was the standout, naturally, but you get six other singles for your money, from the self-descriptive Hotter Than Hell to the ridiculously danceable Blow Your Mind (Mwah). And check out Dua's sultry, husky vocals on Thinking 'Bout You for proof that she's set to be the UK's finest pop star.


3) St Vincent - Masseduction

All seedy glamour, giddy highs and unsettling lows, St Vincent's fifth album is as sticky and messy as real life gets.

Over crunching programmed beats, her stories invariably deal with loss of control ("I cannot stop the airplane from crashing," she sings on the title track), with references to mood-stabilising drugs, and a soul-crushing break-up ("how can anyone have you and lose you and not lose their mind, too?" - Los Ageless).

Annie Clark's most personal album to date, it's also her most pop-fuelled. She's ably assisted in this by Jack Antonoff, who also produced Lorde and Taylor Swift's latest albums, but never surrenders her wit, her inventiveness or her fury.


2) Kesha - Rainbow

When life gives you lemons, make a defiantly bonkers hillbilly pop record.

Kesha may not have won her freedom from Dr Luke, the producer and label boss she accuses of drugging and sexually abusing her (claims he denies) but she was finally free to make the music she wanted.

Out go the vocoders and retrospectively creepy lyrics about being drunk and out of control. In come throat-shredding vocals and revelatory songs about resilience, compassion, independence and, er... dating Godzilla.

The back story makes it compelling, but it's the songs that keep you coming back.

1) Laura Marling - Semper Femina

Acres of newsprint were wasted discussing how Laura Marling wrote about femininity from a male perspective. For a start, she abandoned that conceit half-way through (although the record is broadly about female archetypes, from the wild child to the artist's muse). But worse than that, it steers your attention away from the mesmerising beauty of these songs.

The album opens with Soothing, whose prowling, sensuous bassline suggests all kinds of sex, until Marling kicks her lover out: "I banish you with love". On Wild Fire, she channels Lou Reed, while shaming a plonker who tells her "you're at your most beautiful when you don't know you're being watched". "Maybe someday when God takes me away," she drawls. "I'll understand what the fuck that means."

Musically, she's never sounded more relaxed. Under the watchful guidance of Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple) she lets in all sorts of new musical textures - backmasked vocals, sweeping strings, even a guitar solo - that add to the dramatic acuity of her lyrics.

Beguiling and brilliant, it's the best album of her career.

Here's a playlist of tracks from the Top 10 albums. You can see numbers 11 to 20 below.

FYI: The next 10:
11) SZA - CTRL
12) Taylor Swift - Reputation
13) Lana Del Rey - Lust For Life
14) Stormzy - Gang Signs & Prayer
15) J Hus - Common Sense
16) Haim - Something To Tell you
17) Niia - I
18) Feist - Pleasure
19) Jessie Ware - Glass House
20) Jay-Z - 4:44

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Top 10 singles of 2017

So it's been... er, five long months since I last updated the blog. But I couldn't resist compiling my Top 10 singles of the year.

This year's list is extremely pop heavy, even for me, but the choices are determined by my iTunes play counts, which means they represent the songs I actually listened to over the last 12 months.

So here we go... in reverse order, with a playlist of the videos at the bottom of the post.


10) Lorde - Green Light

Max Martin called Lorde's comeback single "incorrect songwriting" but to my mind, that's a compliment. Green Light's awkward lurch from verse to pre-chorus encapsulates everything that's brilliant about Lorde - a pop star who's not afraid to embrace her weirdness (cf her performance at this year's MTV Awards).

Green Light isn't the best song on Melodrama, but there's something graceful about its clumsiness that kept me coming back for more.



9) Don't Kill My Vibe - Sigrid

Rae Morris made it into my Top 20 with the sublime Do It, a song about falling in love with her producer. Don't Kill My Vibe tells the opposite story - of how pop-star-in-waiting Sigrid Raabe was patronised and demoralised by an obnoxious studio boffin. Working with more sympathetic collaborators, Sigrid poured her scorn into this undeniable pop banger - and unwittingly set the scene for the song at number eight.



8) Praying - Kesha

Kesha could have come back swinging - she'd spent years in legal limbo, fighting her boss and mentor Dr Luke, who she accused of psychological and sexual abuse. But her response was much more compassionate than anyone expected.

The star doesn't hide her anger ("we both know all the truth I could tell") but turns it into a plea for redemption. "I hope you find your peace, falling on your knees, praying," she sings. If only we could all be so forgiving.



7) Little Of Your Love - Haim

AKA the song that saved Haim's second album. As Este confessed earlier this year, "There was a time where I was like, 'OK, why is every song I’m writing sounding like the theme from ‘Jurassic Park’?'"

Little Of Your Love broke that curse. Commissioned for (but not used in) the Amy Schumer movie Trainwreck, it relieved Haim of the pressure of following up their first album, allowing them to write a joyous, freewheeling True Blue tribute that's become a highlight of their live set. It also has one of the best videos of the year, which you can see at the bottom of this post.



6) Mistakes - Tove Styrke
Tove Styrke released two absolute corkers this year: Say My Name and Mistakes are cunningly detailed songs, employing multiple vocal layers and pixel-perfect production to embellish Tove's seemingly straightforward pop melodies.

Mistakes is my favourite of the two, thanks to that slap-back snare drum and a delicious portamento in the vocoder refrain. But it would be remiss of me not to mention Say My Name's "wear it out like a sweater that you love" lyric.


5) Lust For Life - Lana Del Rey ft The Weeknd
"My boyfriend's back and he's cooler than ever". Lust For Life is Lana's most radio-friendly single since Summer Sadness, and one in which she invites The Weeknd through the airlock of her interplanetary spacecraft.

It's a curious duet. Despite the chorus's demand to "take off all your clothes" the singers perpetually circle one other - mesmerised, rather than ravenous. But there's something beguiling about their soft-focus sensuality that keeps me coming back for more.



4) Hard Times - Paramore

A fluorescent, upbeat pop song about plumbing the depths of depression. "All that I want / Is a hole in the ground," sings Hayley Williams. "You can tell me when it's alright /For me to come out."

The counterpoint is the point. Taylor York's triangular, new wave guitar hooks and Zac Farro's creative drum fills make the bleakness of Williams' lyrics all the more stark. Radiohead, take note.


3) Bellyache - Billie Eilish
The best debut of the year? 15-year-old Billie Eilish fantasises about killing all her friends and going on the run - only to get an ulcer from the guilt.

Reviews rightly focus on the lyrics, but the music is equally ambitious - switching from peppy acoustic balladry to the gut-churning bass drop of the chorus. Billie Eilish is going places in 2018, and not just to escape the law.


2) New Rules - Dua Lipa

How often does someone come up with a new lyrical conceit for a break-up song? Almost never, that's how often. But Dua Lipa found a new angle with her step-by-step guide to avoiding your ex - and it became her proper breakout hit.

New Rules was the first single to really capture the star's witty, approachable Twitter persona ("It's so cold outside my nipples could key a car rn") but it also benefitted from a super-smart video; which saw Dua being supported by her girlfriends as she struggled to stick to the four-point programme.

The video rightly became a viral success... and not just for its gif-tastic choreography and themes of female solidarity. Someone "in the know" told me the pastel palette was deliberately chosen to reflect the most popular colour schemes on Instagram. How 2017 can you get?


1) Bad Liar - Selena Gomez
The way it interpolates Talking Heads' Psycho Killer. The way the lyrics spill out like an infatuated teenager's love letter. The line "just like the Battle of Troy there's nothing subtle here." The nuance in Selena Gomez's delivery - alternately awe-struck and assertive. The way she tries to deny her feelings ("you're taking up a fraction of my mind"). The melody in the chorus. The counter-melody in the chorus. The line "every time I watch you, serpentine".

The whole damn thing is perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

FYI: The next 10 would have been:
11) St Vincent - Los Ageless
12) St Vincent - New York
13) The Killers - The Man
14) Kendrick Lamar - Humble
15) Laura Marling - Wild Fire
16) Tove Lo - Disco Tits
17) Dagny - Love You Like That
18) Foo Fighters - Sky Is A Neighbourhood
19) Camila Cabello - Havana
20) Rae Morris - Do It

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Kesha's hot streak continues

All the evidence suggests that Kesha's comeback album, Rainbow, is going to be a triumph. After Praying and Woman, she's just posted a third song, Learn To Let Go, which has one of the best videos I've seen all year.

It's nice when people who've been dragged through the shit have good things happen to them, isn't it?

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Kesha is a motherfudging woman

Last week, Kesha poured all the anguish and horror of the last five years into a (frankly stunning) new song called Praying. You can read about / listen to it here, should you desire.

With that out of her system (in song form, at least, the mental scars will be with her for life), she's free to make a gargantuan, ball-busting pop song. And here is that song.

Woman is powered by the same brass section who played on Amy Winehouse's Back To Black; and it shares some of that album's "don't give a fuck" attitude.

The lyrics are all pretty boilerplate "I'm a strong independent woman" stuff until Kesha gets the giggles in verse two and fluffs her lines. It's a brilliant, humanising moment - one in which the singer becomes three dimensional. She's not just a female warrior, she's self-aware, capable of levity. She's Just. Like. Us.

Whoever made the decision to include that outtake instead of the other, more polished, vocals Kesha undoubtedly recorded is a genius.

Incidentally, can you think of any other songs where the narrator breaks character? Michael Stipe does it in The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite. Janet Jackson has a giggle in Runaway. Any others???

UPDATE: According to Popjustice, this whole song was inspired by Donald Trump's "Grab them by the pussy comments."

"That made me so infuriated, as a hardcore feminist," said Kesha at a recent playback event I couldn't go to because I had to pick my children up from school.

"Ever since I was a kid and knew what a feminist was, I was a feminist. [I was] raised by a feminist. Once I heard that [comment] I was like, okay, well, I’m going to write this song about being a badass motherfucking woman who you don’t want to fuck with."

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Pitbull's latest music video stars a pig, swimming in the ocean

And that is all I have to say about that.

Pitbull ft Ke$ha - Timber

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Why pop stars need to be likeable

Remember the Lady Gaga vs Katy Perry chart battle? It only happened three weeks ago, but that was before Miley Cyrus stuck her bum in the air and her tongue in a camera, and pop imploded.

So if you've forgotten, here's what happened: Applause and Roar were released in the same week, after a leak prompted Gaga to bring her single forward. Then Katy Perry won - massively.

In fact, Roar outsold Applause by a factor of 2:1 in the US.

People were surprised - but Buzzfeed's Matthew Perpetua had a fantastically insightful, concise explanation.

Part of the reason Gaga’s song is leaving audiences cold is because, like most of her material, the song is entirely about being Lady Gaga. To fully enjoy Applause you need to buy into her stardom and be invested in her increasingly elaborate mythology.

Perry’s Roar, on the other hand, is a thoroughly generic song about self-affirmation and triumph over adversity, and though you can map the details of her personal life on to it, it’s just as easy to imagine the song being about you. Perry consistently aims for universal sentiments in her songs, and this is a big part of why she’s had significantly more success on the charts. Her hits have less cultural baggage, and far more utility.

It seems so simple, doesn't it? Be likeable. Be relatable. But artist after artist gets it wrong.

Perhaps it's not their fault. We're trained, in a post-Madonna era, to think that pop should be edgy, shocking, exciting. But it's easy to forget Madonna's career hit rock bottom when she extrapolated the success of Justify My Love (naughty, sexy) into Erotica (joyless, debauched).

A colleague at Radio One told me last week that they have trouble playing Ke$ha's music because her trashy image "puts off" a large section of their audience. That's not just an assumption - the station relentlessly tests its playlist with focus groups of real listeners. So when their drivetime host Greg James calls Miley Cyrus "ludicrous", you have to wonder if he's been getting similar feedback on her latest career moves.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the Not The One - the new release from indie-pop kid, and Capitol Records signing, Sky Ferreira.

The song is absolutely excellent: A gritty, scuzzy electro-pop smash, with a guitar line chopped out of Duran Duran's Girls On Film. But she looks unkempt, stand-offish and wasted. She stabs a man in her video. And, with appalling timing, she's just been arrested on suspicion of possession of controlled substances.

The arrest aside, it all seems calculated to make her seem "cool" but instead she comes off as haughty and unlikeable. I hope I'm wrong and Sky, who has a truckload of pop gems in her possession, can sustain a mainstream career. After all, Rihanna shows it's possible to combine rebellion with mass appeal (although I still find her a difficult person to warm to). But somehow, sadly, I doubt it's going to happen.

Sky Ferreira - Not The One

PS: I know all of the examples above are female - but the argument applies equally well to Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke. Their lyrics are broadly similar (ie misogynist), but Thicke comes off like a creepy sexpest, while JT does everything with a cheeky tip of the hat. The point stands: People want pop stars they can relate to.

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How the cops found Ke$ha and some other songs you may have missed

A semi-regular round-up of videos and songs I haven't had the time or inclination to write about during the last seven days... This week's cover stars are.

1) Ke$ha - Die Young
A great chorus let down by a "rap" that is the sound of a thousand nails on a thousands blackboards processed by a broken auto-tune box.

I particularly like how, in the narrative of the video, the produce placement results in Ke$ha's downfall. "We made it South of the Border" she texts on her shiny new phone - leading the cops straight to her door. Idiot.




2) The Staves - Dead & Born & Grown
This is the title track of the Staveley sisters' debut album, which is out on Monday. I beseech you to buy it (here's a link) - you'll fall in love with it slowly, but irrevocably, and that's a guarantee.




3) Josh Kumra - Waiting For You
You might not know his name, but you'll recognise the voice from Wretch 32's number one single Don't Go last year. Josh Kumra's solo debut is very much in the Ben Howard / Ed Sheeran sensitive-boy-with-a-guitar "genre" - but the sumptuous backing vocals and insistent drums will win you over despite it all.



4) Two Door Cinema Club - Sun (Alex Metric remix)
With their roots on the Kistuné label, Two Door Cinema Club have always been up for a good old club makeover. Their new single is no exception - Alex Metric takes a rather weedy track and soups it up with scratchy hip-hop loops and laser-blast synths that can only be described as "twiddly".





5) Icona Pop - I Love It (feat Charli XCX)
I'm massively behind the curve here, because Icona Pop have been cropping up on my Twitter feeds and pop alerts for months and I never quite got round to checking them out. What did it take to spark my interest? A computer game...

I Love It, which originally premiered in May, features on the excellent soundtrack to racing game Need For Speed: Most Wanted, produced down in Guildford by Criterion Games (creators of the Burnout series, for racing fans). It sounds INCREDIBLE in surround sound, as does the woofer-straining Killsonik remix of Calvin Harris's We'll Be Coming Back.

Sadly, the song isn't out in the UK yet... So you'll have to buy the game if you want to hear it outside the confines of YouTube. My PS3 ID is (somewhat predictably) mrdiscopop if you fancy a race over the weekend.

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Cheryl Cole, Thom Yorke... and three other songs you may have missed

It's a run down of some songs that have been on put the internet this week, in no particular order. Roll on the tunes...


1) Cheryl - Screw You
Yes, Screw You a song about having your heart broken and coming back fighting but it is definitely not autobiographical. Even though all the lyrics have a direct parallel to Cheryl's life, she didn't write them and the whole thing is a merry coincidence. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. HAVE I MADE MYSELF UNDERSTOOD?

OK, then. You can watch the video.




2) Atoms For Peace - Default
Atoms For Peace is the Thom Yorke's new project, featuring producer Nigel Godrich and Flea from Back To The Future III.

They came together as a live band a couple of years ago and, according to Yorke, "discovered loads of energy from transforming the music from electronic to live, and so afterwards, we carried on for a few days in the studio and decided to make it a loose, on-going thing - Immersed in the area between the two... electronic and live."

If comparisons are necessary, and they are, Default walks a similar path to Everything In It's Right Place from Kid A - a complicated, skittering song with a menacing swell of keyboard noise.





3) Ke$ha - Die Young
I don't hate this, and that alone makes it noteworthy in the cannon of Ke$ha. Best bit: "I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums" [massive thump on the kick drum]. All songs should do this.




4) Night Engine - I'll Make It Worth Your While
A PR emailed me about brand new London quartet Night Engine earlier this week. Instead of exclaiming "Huw Stephens has tweeted about them!" or "they've played two sold out gigs in a shit pub in Shoreditch!", she explained in 100% ACCURATE terms what the band sounded like: "Talking Heads jitters, Bowie style ice cool and Funkadelic groove."

This is the song in question. A toe-tapper, as my Granny might say.




5) Foxes - Echo
The best video about the romance between a grown woman and a crash test dummy you will see this week, and that's a guarantee.

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"There's a place in France..."

It almost seems unfair to sit here and criticise Ke$ha. With that dollar sign in her name, and the crass nasal drawl of her singing voice, it's already safe to assume she's not aspiring to credibility.

Nonetheless, it's astonishing to witness the lack of effort that's been put into her latest single. When pop is often misrepresented as "kids' nursery rhymes", it takes a certain audacity to simply recycle a playground chant for your chorus.

Warning: The following song plumbs so far into the depths that it has discovered seven new species of sub-aquatic life, all of which pose an imminent and terrifying threat to humanity.

Ke$ha - Take It Off


Everyone sing along with me...

"There's a place in France,
where the naked ladies dance
and there's a hole in the wall
where the men can see it all
Their minds go blank
'cause they're dying for a wank
And the mice play snooker with their balls!"

(I never understood that last line.)

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