David Quantick
Elvis Costello conjures up echoes of his excellent past as the excellence continues on The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories).
4y
Surrounded By Time is an often intriguing and always successful collection that ranges from the surely-he's-done-this-before balladry of The Windmills Of Your Mind to I-can't-believe-he's-done-that choices like The Waterboys' This Is The Sea and Michael Kiwanuka's I Won't Lie.
5y
Making few concessions to 21st-century noise but equally never sounding old, Egypt Station is up there with Paul McCartney’s best solo work.
6y
Despite a lot of autotune, the songs float in melody and nostalgia like every great Beach Boys song since Surf’s Up or Do It Again.
6y
The Liberty Of Norton Folgate--a title which makes sense in context but is otherwise unlikely to be jamming up the ringtone sites--is Madness in both their pomp and their prime.
10y
This is an excellent album that manages to be both a mature summary of an artist’s career and something completely fresh and new.
9y
It could be Iggy Pop's country album or Bob Dylan's Lou Reed tribute. Certainly, the most common point of reference is the Velvets of `Jesus' and `I'm Set Free' melancholia rather than violence.
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2y
Love Deluxe may not be the best album ever made, or even the best Sade album ever made, but is a good thing in a wicked world and, quite literally, the soul of subtlety.
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3y
Even the constant battering we get from the word "I" on this record - scarcely a second goes by without a pronouncement on the state of O'Connor's self - is muted by the groovy music.
11y
A brilliant, thoughtful, startling and joyful example of popular music.
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3y
ABC had been industrial dance act Vice Versa, but a love of ’60s pop and romance caused Martin Fry to hire Trevor Horn and a string section, buy a gold lame jacket and croon his way into the charts.
5y
It's the most honest portrait of a band breaking some limits and banging their heads against others.
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2y
There's a case to be made that the Beatles went on to do Sgt. Pepper's because there was nowhere else to go but too far. With Revolver, they had mapped out the pop universe so perfectly that all they could do next was tear it up and start again.
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5y
It's where pop begins to blossom from black-and-white into colour.
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2y
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