What once seemed Queen's greatest liabilities--a preening flamboyance and pompous, overwrought theatricality--have ironically become their most enduring charms in a grey, postmodern pop-music landscape. While it eschews the glammy, pre-punk hard rock of live faves such as "Stone Cold Crazy" and "Tie Your Mother Down" for the band's more quirky club-beat string of latter-day hits , this 51-track ...
Anyone looking for the key to ABBA's enduring appeal should look no further than "Voulez Vous" and "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" for their answer. There was an innocence to the Swedish quartet, even when they were singing about one-night stands and the invitations to them. Gold establishes that the band, while appreciated as campy, were actually multifaceted in their ...
Don't call Santi White an R&B artist: on her debut album Santogold, this former music biz A&R and pop songwriter for hire is challenging race stereotypes and playing fast and loose with genre, mashing up dub, punk, and electronics to make an energetic, anger-fuelled music that blurs the lines between the dancefloor and the moshpit. Comparisons to MIA hold some water, especially on the ...
This lavish holiday set has been called the greatest rock & roll Christmas album of all time. That's an opinion that's tough to argue with when you find yourself immersed in the massive sounds painstakingly crafted by legendary producer Phil Spector. His "wall-of-sound" technique is perfectly suited to the music of the season, as he proves with layer upon layer of piano, sleigh bells, buoyant ...
Slick and earthy at the same time, Live from Wembley Arena picks up where Live in Europe left off. In this case, Pink, looking like Wendy O. Williams in black eyeliner and blond crop, is captured in one London show, circa December 2006, rather than in highlights from several. Since the first live DVD, she released her fourth album. There is, naturally, some overlap between the two ...