Clash

boygenius – the record

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It is Dacus who claims the album’s most gorgeous moments though, dripping in the kind of heartache that arrives charcoal-black in both its sorrow and humour. ‘True Blue’ and ‘We’re In Love’ find her lingering over the incidentals that puncture her lyrical scenes: leaky faucets, trash TV, pink carnations pinned to lapels, Octobers yet to come. Across an album that attempts to corral three distinct talents into one cohesive statement, it’s here that ‘the record’ truly shines: neither entirely sincere nor tongue-in-cheek, but a piece of art that elevates their points of collision.

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Taylor Swift – Midnights

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A diary entry always exists at a point of compromise: it is made to be read, and it is made to be never read. It bursts at the edges where stories relayed to friends and confidantes merely swell, a hush gathered in pages rather than whispers. For Taylor Swift, an artist who has always worn her heart on her sleeve and her sleeve on her limited-edition vinyl, it may come as little surprise that ‘Midnights’ feels both voyeuristic in its exposition and brash in its execution.

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The Dream Lives In Me: St. Vincent Interviewed

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Annie Clark needs oat milk. The request arrives quietly and politely just before we speak, a hushed nothing off-handset before she picks up the phone and greets me brightly. Does she need any of mine, perhaps?

“Oh, it’s crucial,” the 39-year-old riffs back to me from her studio in LA. “Could I borrow some? Would you do that? I need to reach my maximum caffeination, and I haven’t met my quota for the day. Oat milk’s an integral part of it.”

If it seems like a wholly unremarkable exchange between a musician and a journalist, you may be unfamiliar with the various tales of Clark’s mercurial attitude to press interviews over the past decade or so. Previous set-ups have included requesting interviewers crawl into a small space to “challenge” both parties, playing pre-recorded answers to boring questions, asking the interview if they “enjoy doing this,” or simply refusing to answer at all. The result has largely been a proliferation of beard-scratching discourse about who or what constitutes the ‘real’ St. Vincent, or the ‘real’ Annie Clark, and how much one might inform the other.

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Live Report: Treefort Music Fest 2022

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Festivals are upon us once more, and, like the number of celebrities willing to cross a picket line to share wellness tips and vicarious drama with Beyoncé, some things in life remain exhaustingly predictable. Workshops on subjects ranging from lock-picking to 3D printing; artists performing in venues that include the local bus and a retro video games arcade; live-action Dungeons & Dragons, wherein someone successfully punches a fire; and of course, a procession of drag acts with show-stopping choreo sequences, including one ‘Ship To Wreck’ performance that involves someone dressed up as an actual boat.

Okay, so perhaps they do things a little differently in Boise.

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Cate Le Bon – Pompeii

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Across gardens, harbours, invisible towns and fountains that empty the world, Cate Le Bon’s sixth solo album charts out territories beyond the locked-down rooms of Reykjavik and Cardiff where it began life, beyond even the mercurial world outside of them. While certain records from this era will no doubt bear the mark of the zeitgeist more than others – Charli XCX’s ‘How I’m Feeling Now’, Sleaford Mods’ ‘Spare Ribs’ – ‘Pompeii’ will be better remembered as an excursion from the banal than a documentary of it.

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Mart Avi – Vega Never Sets

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Mart Avi hasn’t explicitly denied being at large in 18th century Japan, but let’s not rule anything out. After all, not only does the Estonian musician carry the air of a foppish time-traveller – the belted coat and sweeping fringe of a man who once declared he was “born in 1991, but it’s as if I come from the 50s” befitting a Tallinn-based Doctor Who remake – but he’s evidently familiar with Samurai philosopher Yamamoto Tsunetomo.

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Dear Past Self: Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz Interviewed

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Fall Out Boy Pete Wentz

Credit: press

Pete Wentz is driving around LA, speaking to me over the phone about his newly-launched range of jewellery and apparel, Ronin. As far as rock star business enterprises go, it’s certainly extravagant, and the website’s description of the rings, pendants and hoodies held therein – “born out of the idea of wandering, a samurai without a master, and the free dreams that accompany facing the world on your own” – adds to the initial sense that Wentz’s professional career may have ballooned into parody, the kind of project Connor 4 Real from Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping might have signed off on. “We would go and sample products in the jewellery district in downtown LA, learning why one gold looks more yellow than the other,” he tells me when I ask about it. “It’s been a really interesting learning experience.”

But then Pete Wentz, to borrow Lana Del Rey’s favourite American poet Walt Whitman, is large; he contains multitudes, and some of those multitudes just happen to involve samurai-themed lockets. Among other projects, he owns a clothing company, a film production company, a nightclub, and a minority share in American USL soccer team Phoenix Rising. “It scares me sometimes, watching him,” Patrick Stump once joked. “The two seconds you’re not with that dude he’s made 30 decisions that are going to affect our band for the rest of the year.”

Ah yes: he’s also, you may recall, the bassist in Fall Out Boy.

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A Flower Bloomed: Conan Gray Interviewed

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The pop star has barely been on stage for a few seconds before the screaming begins. At the front of the venue, diehard fans have cast off any prior nerves about seeing their idol in person; now all that tightly coiled energy is sprung into cheering, crying, jumping up and down, singing every word back to every song.

I close my eyes and picture the scene: BTS at Wembley, perhaps, or One Direction at the San Siro. When I open them again, the small stage is dominated by a slightly awkward young man, school tie wrapped around his head, occupying an early afternoon slot at Brighton’s 140-capacity Komedia Studio.

And it’s sensational.

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Erland Cooper – Sule Skerry

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Returning to the Orkney Islands of his childhood, Erland Cooper instinctively sought to map out the nooks and crannies of life there as organically as possible. When it came time to record ‘Sule Skerry’, the second album in a triptych sketching the region, the musician didn’t merely seek out standard field recordings and local commentary, but impulse responses – the sonic capture of a specific acoustic environment, echoes marked with as much prestige as the call.

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Hold On Tight, Darling: Amanda Palmer Interviewed

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Photo credit: Khan & Selesnick

“I’m not gonna match you,” Amanda Palmer once sang on ‘Ampersand’, a paean to the importance of retaining your own identity, “’cause I’ll lose my voice completely.” On the 16th June 2015, the day that Donald Trump announced to the world that he would be running for US president, Palmer was already anticipating a new voice shaping the next chapter of her life. Her son would be born exactly three months later.

It wouldn’t be the last time that a major political event juxtaposed with personal events in the artist’s life; more recently, her new album ‘There Will Be No Intermission’ was recorded as the Kavanaugh trial was playing out across the world. “We were literally glued to our phones in between takes, watching this cosmic battle of the sexes play out in Washington DC,” she tells me over the phone from upstate New York. “I’ll never be able to separate those events, the way I’ll never be able to separate the arrival of my child and the arrival of Donald Trump in my life; they showed up in my life at the same time.”

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