The Listener
Teenage Fanclub reissues
Still got your record player? Dig it out. The crunchier the music, the better it sounds on vinyl: a broader…
Ignore Lily Allen’s sub-adolescent politics – her new album is brilliant
Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against…
The best album of the year so far, by some margin
Grade: A+ While the young bands plunder the 1980s for every last gobbet of tinny synth and hi-hat, the singer-songwriters…
More immediate and even more vacuous than before: Chvrches’ Love Is Dead reviewed
Grade: B Another load of SJW moppets keening over 1980s synths. ‘It only takes two seconds to say: I don’t…
A Bowie tribute album: Arctic Monkey’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino reviewed
Grade: B+ Oh, terrific — a concept album about a 1970s hotel somewhere in space, plus an attack on our…
Belly, the band responsible for one of my favourite 90s songs, is back
Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town…
Kylie’s latest album is truly appalling: Golden reviewed
Grade: D– Kylie has a place in my heart for having made the second-best single to feature the chorus ‘na…
Thank you, West Midlands, for the blind alley of heavy metal – blues without rhythm, wit or soul
They’re still alive, then. Chuggedy-chug, grawk, screech screech, chuggedy-chug. First mention of demons — line one, song two. Song one…
Vince Staples is Christian, yet it’s hard to imagine Jesus singing along to GTFOMD
Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record…
Nils Frahm is clever with textures – but it’s the melodies which drag you in
Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has…
Franz Ferdinand take disco and make it rather glorious: Always Ascending reviewed
Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on…
Why do sweet, tender young lefties like MGMT love the decade of Reagan and Bush Snr?
Grade: B Horrific memory, flooding back, halfway through the track ‘TSLAMP’ (Time Spent Looking at My Phone). It was the…
Rod Liddle finds his inner SJW listening to Justin Timberlake
Grade: B– Hey, here comes Justin, the ‘President of Pop’ and ‘one of the greatest all-around entertainers in the history…
R&B landfill: Craig David’s The Time is Now reviewed
Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you…
A recording that makes you realise Les Troyens is one of the greatest operatic masterpieces
Grade: A- Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is…
Why does James Purnell think radio needs to be ‘reinvented’?
Grade: A A dimbo pop reviewer for one of our national newspapers suggested that on this album, her ninth, Björk…
Like a Melanie Phillips column set to bad music: Morrissey’s Low in High School reviewed
Grade: B- It is truly painful to criticise someone who greatly enrages the Guardian and the leftie music press, and…
She is a severely limited songwriter – and singer: Taylor Swift’s Reputation reviewed
Grade: D+ I was suckered in by the brio of Taylor Swift’s first big single, ‘Love Story’, despite the clunking…
Oh dear Jesus… Liam Gallagher’s As You Were reviewed
Grade: C+ There was a certain thrill to be had from that first Oasis album, Definitely Maybe. Liam’s yob howl…
