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Showing posts from 2017

Billie Eilish is a girl on fire

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If you haven't heard of 15-year-old pop prodigy Billie Eilish yet, you're missing out. The LA native has lit up my "most played" list this year with a handful of smart, dark pop songs, in which she fantasises about things like killing her boyfriend and burning his car. You know, typical teenage stuff... Her new single, Watch, came out last Friday and it's packed with more Melodrama than Lorde's entire album. "Go ahead and watch my heart burn," she trills, "with the fire that you started in me". Listen below. If you want to know more about Billie, here's some highlights from her first forays into the media. Billie wrote her first song when she was four. It was about falling into a black hole [ Interview ] Her neighbour asked her to star in his homemade horror movies when she was six, which isn't creepy at all. [ Vice ] For the last eight years, she's been a member of the fancypants Los Angeles Children's C

Selena Gomez may be a bad liar, but she's a great pop star

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There is so much to love about Selena Gomez 's new song, Bad Liar: The way the lyrics trip over themselves like a lovestruck teenager; the brazen lift of Talking Heads' Psycho Killer ; the borderline ridiculousness of the lyric: " like the battle of Troy, there's nothing subtle here. " Oh, and the post-chorus hook " all my feelings on fire, guess I'm a bad liar, " is an early contender for pop moment of 2017. Selena has never been a big belter in the vocal department but, like Janet Jackson before her, she's turned that into an asset. This subtle, sultry groove has an whispered intimacy that, say, Adele could never hope to achieve. It's great to have her back.

Top 10 albums of 2016

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Better late than never, here are my top 10 albums of the year just passed. As always, the rankings are based on my iTunes play counts - so these are the records I actually listened to, not the ones I appreciated on an intellectual level (nb: I don't have an intellectual level). So, without further ado... 10) Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool Depending on your point of view, Radiohead either rediscovered the joy of melody on this, their ninth album, or simply released half a dozen forgotten songs from "when they were good". Who cares, though, when the results were this magical? Boosted by Jonny Greenwood's cinematic string arrangements, the album feels epic and intimate at the same time, from the low flying panic attack of Burn The Witch to the grieving melancholy of True Love Waits - a track written as a love letter almost 20 years ago, only to be released as Thom Yorke's relationship fell apart. 9) Tove Lo - Lady Wood Tove Lo is the pop equivalent of Just 17