About Kieran Baddeley

Dua Lipa kick-starts her second album with the line, “you want a timeless song, I wanna change the game.” Seemingly a manifesto for the album ahead, it suggests a mould-breaking album, a complete departure from the pop-sphere and a playground of experimentation. What’s ironic is how far from the truth this opening salvo actually is. On Future Nostalgia, instead of forging a new path, Dua Lipa presents a set of 11 songs which perfect the game instead of changing it. The album is front-to-back pop perfection, not so much a landscape of experimentation but instead one of perfect honing of the 80s revivalisms she emulates; in the process, curating a set of timeless songs she originally chides the listener for wanting.
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At what point does music become lifeless? Could it be commercial pandering? Indeed, one could spend hours reeling off artists whose music has come across as a blatant cash grab. Whose time spent on their music was looked over with the vague haze of dollar signs clouding their vision. The sort of music whose sole purpose is to sell, sell, sell often comes with an aftertaste of lifelessness, a kind of coppery taste.
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Paddy McAloon is a human curio. Sixty-four years of age yet comparatively ancient in outward appearance, he sports long grey hair which melts into a silver beard of equal length. For a photo shoot with the guardian he once sported a cane with a white globe atop it. While this may only be the singular instance of cane wielding one can attribute to McAloon, it’s an image that is seared in my brain; another addition to the aesthetic powerhouse the man is. It would be somewhat trite to call him an elder statesman of pop but with a visage like his, he practically yearns for the honour.
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Laurie Anderson’s Big Science is an album that is obsessed with time. Its progression, its regression and its stalling. It fixates on the mundanity of modern life, suffusing it with a sense of dread about what is to come and a sense of anguish that we haven’t traversed too far from our origins. It’s an album that exists in the past, present and future and doesn’t enjoy being in any of those three places at once. Anderson’s simple exclamation of “this is the time, and this is the record of the time” becomes less prosaic and more ‘mosaic’ in its multiple layers. This is the record of the time, it’s the record of all times, but that doesn’t mean it enjoys being there.
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There’s a misconception surrounding Róisín Murphy that’s followed her for a number of years now, something that sounds nice when written down but is ultimately a completely empty statement. Critics like to point out the unfair way in which Róisín Murphy hasn’t become a global superstar. Off the back of 2007’s impeccable pop masterpiece Overpowered, many jumped on the bandwagon that this would propel her to deserved universal acknowledgment and acclaim. Whether Overpowered should’ve done so is irrelevant. A truer assessment of Murphy’s career is that she has always been destined to be a cult favourite, always leftfield in some way. Murphy has been on an inexorable path throughout her career; from Moloko’s Statues to 2016’s Take Her Up to Monto, she has been honing a notably uncommercial strain of nu-disco, each release perfecting the previous’ imperfections. Róisín Machine is Murphy incarnate: relentlessly danceable and relentlessly uncommercial and relentlessly her.
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You return home, slowly locking the door behind you. Your ears still ringing, you make your way upstairs. Collapsing onto your bed, the same ringing that was once a comfort on your journey home now pierces the silence. High on the euphoria of the evening, you place your headphones on and search for the perfect album to play. Do you feel lonely? Or is it just the contrast of being surrounded by people and now being alone? You don’t know, but the evening now leaves a bitter taste. You decide on the B-side of Please. No- Bilingual. No- Elysium. You can’t decide. Further searching presents to you option D: Hotspot.
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On the plastic sleeve for the vinyl of Vulnicura, computer generated and mutating, Björk lies with her back stretching over a rock. A crevice splitting her chest, she is the embodiment of pain. As if all of nature’s might has physically and emotionally cracked her in two. Broken and bleeding, she holds her mouth ajar, a silent scream hits you as hard as the rock that surrounds her. It’s one of the most visceral and daring album covers in her discography and, now five years old, it remains one of the most visceral and daring albums of her career.
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Speaking about Aja, Steely Dan’s sixth album, guitarist Dean Parks said of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, “perfection is not what they’re after, they’re after something that you wanna listen to.” No other quote encapsulates the music of Steely Dan better. Indeed, on Aja, as evidenced by its sales, they really did find something you wanna listen to and, arguably, found perfection. It is what Parks said next that hits true poignancy in regards to Aja’s follow up: “… we would go past the perfection point until it became natural.” 1980’s Gaucho is evidence of what a Steely Dan album sounds like when it stops just before perfection- the sound of a band desperately striving for flawlessness but ending up with a finished product on the wrong side of their goal.
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In 1994, listeners got a tantalisingly brief glimpse at the real David Byrne, one they would have to wait a decade to witness again. On his self-titled album, Byrne raised the veil slightly; just enough to let his most personal song writing to date into the world.
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2015’s stunning Emotion was one of the best pop albums of the decade. It was a perfect mix of breathless hooks, simple narratives and underhand bitterness, lifting to something of cult status amongst fans. Since then, Carly Rae Jepson has kept us fans waiting; teasing us with 2017’s Cut to the Feeling and 2018’s Party For One… she’s been playing a long game.
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