At its best, Selena Gomez’s new album is absolutely brilliant, at least as good as anything she’s ever done. Selena Gomez has always seemed remarkably poised and careful in her public appearances, which in my mind has always given her an air of melancholy, and the best tracks here express that. The run of tracks from “Hands to Myself” to “Good for You” is particularly good at showing her strengths. Read more↴
I hear grime has been having something of a revival recently, but I haven’t been paying a huge amount of attention to it, at least not compared to 2004/5. I remember back then hearing Logan Sama on the radio playing a track featuring Shola Ama and saying something like “Shola Ama on a grime track? This music must be getting respectable.” I guess if Sama’s doing a mix for Fabric, then grime must be getting respectable again. It’s a good mix, too, ominous beats and energetic MCing. It’s maybe, though, a little bit one-note? Perhaps I’m just romanticizing the grime of ten years ago, but what I remember making it so exciting was its omnivorous influences. Read more↴
I guess Danity Kane were kind of the American Girls Aloud, in that they were a group that came together on a reality TV show but ended up being way better than that might lead you to think. Danity Kane never had the success of Girls Aloud, either commercially or in terms of their music, which was good but not life-changing. Since the band split, Dawn Richard has been making some great records, and now two other ex-members (Aubrey O’Day and Shannon Bex) are releasing music under the name Dumblonde. Read more↴
As it seems like no-one with more theological training is interested, it falls on me to consider the religious significance of Black Jesus. The curious thing about the show is that its biblical references are pervasive but ambient, half-meant rather than specific analogies. Much of the first season involves Jesus and his friends attempting to establish a community garden, and of course there are many biblical gardens this could be referencing, but the show never settles on any particular one. Or, maybe more obviously, one of Jesus’s friends is called “Fish,” and the one woman in his circle is called “Mags,” but the show is never clear on how far it wants us to take the analogy with Mary Magdalene (she’s not a prostitute, but she does get involved in a lot of Instagram beef; are we to read that as making her a sinful woman?). Read more↴
I wasn’t going to listen to Ryan Adams’s 1989 cover album, obviously, but then I started reading people saying it sounded like Bruce Springsteen. I really like Springsteen, and, actually, if any guy could cover Swift successfully it might be him (they both manage to present self-conscious story-telling as sincerity). Sadly, Adams’s version sounds almost nothing like Springsteen. I can just about hear the similarities between Adams’ version of “Shake it Off” and “I’m on Fire,” but his vocals have none of the dark yearning of the Springsteen track, and anyway the style of “I’m on Fire” isn’t a fit for “Shake it Off” at all. But that pretty much exemplifies Adams’s record; what’s baffling is just how incompetent it is. Why has he transposed the songs into keys that take them outside his vocal range? Why has he altered the rhythms of tracks without paying any attention to what effect that will have on the stress patterns of the lyrics? Read more↴
New Demi Lovato! The first 10 seconds are fantastic, and I’m not sure the rest of the record quite lives up to it, but still, that imperious bass noise is great. Read more↴