Recent Pop Tunes You May Enjoy

I'm about to prep tomorrow's Friday Four post for GCN.ie but if you missed last week music from Lady Gaga, TLC, Bastille and Jessie Ware and Julio Bashmore are still worth a look. 

Best of the Year Lists Alert!

If you're into that sort of thing (AND WHO ISN'T) then make sure you catch my Top 10 Albums and Top 40 Pop Singles of 2012 lists over on GCN.ie this week. Quite a bit of work to get lined up but very enjoyable all the same!

The singles post also includes a helpful playlist of all 40 songs should you need an office / Christmas party soundtrack. Feel free to suggest your faves in the comments below!

Jessie Ware - Live at The Sugar Club Dublin - Review

Jessie Ware's Devotion is one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year and with good reason. It's a beautifully made soul-pop album that takes it's cues from the very best UK dance producers and let's her tremendous vocal prowess shine. Ware touched down in Dublin this week for a sold-out show at The Sugar Club to a room packed full of avid fans. Ware, an endearing and entertaining presence on stage, even brought up the house lights as she jokingly tried to figure out exactly who her audience was on the first night of her own solo tour.

However you could classify the crowd at the show they were undoubtedly under the spell of the British songstress. She ran through all of the material on Devotion (including deluxe edition tracks), with a tight live band adding an upbeat texture to the tracks that gave them a new sense of life in a live setting. The intimate feel of the Sugar Club, that Ware jokingly suggested was like a David Lynch film, lent itself well to be completely sucked into Ware's captivating delivery but with a surprising amount of bounce in her set it was a shame to be in a venue without more room to do a little dancing (bar a few brave souls who twirled up the front). 

Still there was little to fault about Ware's hour-long set. Album tracks like No To Love and Taking In Water sound bigger and more expansive with a willing audience and that aforementioned live band, 110% stands up as a smartly made dance song with a melancholic air while the 80s sheen of Night Light continues to be a winner. Her cover of Brownstone's 90s R'n'B hit If You Love Me was an unexpected surprise, a faithful rendition that wouldn't have sounded out of place on her own album.

The high-point undoubtedly come in the final songs, having charmed Dublin into submission Ware deploys Wildest Moments as her penultimate number, an earnest sing-along erupting amidst the crowd. Closing with Running, Ware asks the crowd to stand up pointing out that her mum will be proud she had a seated venue on it's feet. It's a blissful moment, the goodwill and slow-burning pulse Ware has been building for sixty or so minutes reaching an exuberant climax. She warmly thanks the audience before pointing out she doesn't do encores, takes a few snaps with excitable punters and departs. An accomplished and polished performer with a beautiful voice that genuinely sounds even better in a live setting, Jessie certainly did Mama Ware very proud during her Dublin show.

Jessie Ware's debut album Devotion is out now

Brandy "Two Eleven" Album Review

Brandy has certainly had a long but eventful run as an R&B superstar with a sideline in teen sitcom stardom and ongoing personal drama. What she also has is a voice that goes deep, intense and right into you heart on the right material. Since the failure of her last album, 2008’s Human and her parting ways with her record label Brandy has spent time licking her wounds and convincing a stellar line-up of contributors to assist her in a much-needed comeback on Two Eleven.

Named after her birthday and the date her close friend Whitney Houston passed, Two Eleven is an attempt by Brandy to update the sort of music she made at her peak. A lofty ambition it might but she just about pulls it off. The likes of Bangladesh and Rico Love pepper Two Eleven with productions that feel slick, modern but also churn with the sort of solid, hook driven R&B pop that informed Brandy’s strongest mid 90s output.

Opening track (After a perfunctory “Intro”) Wildest Dreams is a grower, a mid-tempo ode to finally finding the right lover that might not wow the way you’d expect a big single to but slowly gets under your skin, the impassioned delivery setting up an album that feels highly personal despite Brandy not writing much of the lyrics herself .  With so many producers involved it’s a credit to the team involved that Brandy’s signature vocals and tight, engaging production are joined together so seamlessly. Let Me Go and Put It Down fulfill the “club banger” quota but they’re still smart, swirling productions with beats dropping in and out as Brandy twists her deep voice around saucy one-liners. There’s some solid balladry too, like the gentle No Such Thing As Too Late that gets emotional and winds back down at just the right time before things get too soppy. Best are the mid-tempo come-ons like Slower and Can You Hear Me Now. The sex-jam is a staple of any R&B album (just ask Janet Jackon) and few get it right but Brandy’s delivery of lines about letting her inner freak out are played just right and it’s some of the most sonically interesting material on the album.

Despite the magic she came up with during her Timbaland phase on Afrodisiac, Brandy resorts to less modish sonic palettes here, instead going for a lived in vibe to the songs with a sense of space and mood created effortlessly by the songs. Frank Ocean hands in material (having worked on one of the few highlights of her last album and before he broke out on his own merits) and that sensitive, nu-R&B style in his work and in that of contemporaries like Drake, sits well on a Brandy record, a reminder of how her early work has made something of a lasting impact.

And that’s sort of the genius of Two Eleven. This is a consistent, tightly-woven piece that feels up-to-the-minute in an underhand way. With artists like The XX and Jessie Ware paying tribute to the golden era of 90s R&B in their work it’s exciting to see one of the stars of that era do music that tips a hat to their style while still sounding like themselves. A moody, brilliantly realized grower, Two Eleven might not dip it’s toe into the club-pop waters favoured by many R&B stars but is still one of the most satisfying listens of the year.

Sky Ferreira Drops "Everything Is Embarrassing" Video, Continues To Be Queen of Cool

Sky Ferreira is cool. Like, really cool. And not just because Pitchfork debuted her latest video, she's been in campaigns for Calvin Klein, is friends with all the right people and because she's photographed by Terry Richardson as much as I eat toast (i.e. A LOT). She's cool because she's slowly but surely building a stark, moody presence as a popstar that she wants to be as opposed to some sort of faux-trendy bubblegum type. Not there's anything wrong with bubblegum (I've had Carly Rae Jepsen's frothy magnum-opus Kiss on loop the last two weeks) but it clearly was never going to work for Sky and finally we're inching towards where she wants us to see her.

There's been Youtube buzz and bloggers harping on about Miss Ferreira for years now between her perfectly pitched covers and her occassional singles (everything from the underrated electro-pop of One to the Katy Perry-esque tune shes publicly derided Obsession), an EP (the sharp and entertaining As If!) and promises about a much-delayed debut album. That debut, Wild Heart, is still awhile off it seems but Ferreira is ploughing ahead with some impressive new material. There was Red Lips a couple of months back, a co-write with Shirley Mason, all scuzzy grunge pop charm. Then Everything Is Embarrassing appeared a few weeks back, a moody yet earworm-y 80s number with a lovely sense of melancholy brought to life perfectly by Ferreira's husky yet delicate vocals. It's like a slightly more sprightly pop-driven take on the kind of 80s referencing-but-contemporary electronica Jessie Ware uses in spades on her debut album Devotion.

The video has just arrived and it's a pared back but perfect affair. Black and white and sparesly shot it lets Ferreira put on a performance that's equal parts come-hither and sad-eyes, her washed out blonde tresses and black ensemble giving her the vibe of a 90s super-model off-duty (only I guess, shorter. Sorry Sky.) The clip isn't unlike the one Azealia Banks gave us for Luxury last week, lo-fi, rippling with 90s references but using that simplicity to it's advantage. Without having to do too much this does the job of a truly great pop video, it lets the song come to life and give added impact to the message of the tune. And it lets their performer look really, really cool, something Sky excels at.

According to Pitchfork the EP Ghost will be out in October (check out their post for tracklisting and those involved with the project). It's fun watching Ferreira finally get closer to the kind of pop music she wants to make, at the moment there's more than a little Fiona Apple in her DNA which sits nicely beside her frequent references to being a big Britney fan.  Also if you haven't read the excellent interview she gave with Rookie mag earlier in the year, do so immediately. It's fascinating stuff.