Dua Lipa Future Nostalgia Warner, out now
As if to demonstrate that pop is a game of fine margins, New Rules, Dua Lipa’s excellent three-point manifesto for heartbroken girls, was the sixth single to be pulled from her debut album, but it thoroughly revived the enterprise and made her the woman to watch.
The Kosovan-Albanian Londoner promptly hammered her advantage home with One Kiss, another multi-platinum girl-boosting anthem, recorded with Calvin Harris, and now for album two.
Future Nostalgia doesn’t attempt to recreate New Rules’s twisty tropical house, but it does place some safe bets on pacy, Eighties-flavoured dancefloor pop (Physical), Kylie-ish nouveau-disco (Break My Heart) and irresistible, Moloko-style holiday nightclub grooves (Don’t Start Now), all sprinkled with crowd-pleasing modern-girl feminism.
New Rules, Dua Lipa’s (above) excellent three-point manifesto, was the sixth single to be pulled from her album, but it thoroughly revived the enterprise and made her the woman to watch
For its first nine songs, in fact, Future Nostalgia feels like a minor classic of effortlessly likeable, to-the-point dancefloor pop. Only the final two – the jaunty Maroon 5 stylings of Good In Bed and heavy-handed attempted show-stopper Boys Will Be Boys – feel like they break the spell, and by then Future Nostalgia has long since done its Dua-consolidating job with ease.
Bob Dylan Murder Most Foul Columbia, out now
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Well, this is an event: Bob Dylan’s first new song in eight years. It’s probably the first single ever released by a Nobel prize-winner. And since it deals with the assassination of President Kennedy, it’s one Sixties icon singing about another.
It’s Dylan’s longest-ever track, four seconds short of 17 minutes. (On his first LP, that was the length of a whole side.) Running to 1,370 words, Murder Most Foul is not so much a song as an epic poem: the Kennediad.
It was recorded, Dylan says, ‘a while back’. The timing of the release is top-class. A world on fast-forward has been forced to press pause: seldom have so many people had so much time on their hands.
It’s Dylan’s longest-ever track, four seconds short of 17 minutes. Running to 1,370 words, Murder Most Foul is not so much a song as an epic poem: the Kennediad
On Monday, Murder Most Foul was No 7 in Apple Music’s UK chart, just behind Harry Styles.
So, as Dylan once sang, it’s all good – until you play the song. The first word is ’Twas. ’Twas! As so often at his gigs, you wonder if he’s having a laugh. The opening couplet – ‘’Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63/A day that will live on in infamy’ – is dreadful.
Murder Most Foul does get better. It switches swiftly between then and now, and why and how. As reportage it’s effective, if gory – there’s blood on this track.
As poetry, though, it’s mediocre. The similes are lethargic: poor JFK is ‘like a sacrificial lamb’, then ‘like a dog’. Moving on to the late Sixties, Dylan could tell the inside story, as in Chronicles, his masterly memoir.
Instead he shows standard snaps from Woodstock and Altamont, adding nothing to the newsreels. So far, Murder Most Foul is a poor man’s American Pie.
Soon it turns into something else: a playlist. Like Homer summoning the muse, Dylan invokes the late DJ Wolfman Jack; unlike The Iliad’s plodding catalogue of ships, his rock ’n’ roll-call is fully alive.
It’s fun to see what he includes (Queen, Randy Newman) and what he ignores (everything after 1980).
When Leonard Cohen died, Dylan said his melodies were ‘his greatest genius’. That’s what Murder Most Foul is missing. A piano and a fiddle circle each other, but the music doesn’t go anywhere. Which makes it even more topical.
Tim de Lisle
THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASES
Waxahatchee Saint Cloud Out now
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Katie Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee has been making fabulous music for years, but Saint Cloud feels like a pitch for deserved wider attention. Setting down her noisy guitars, she mints a road-tripping country-rock that showcases arresting lyrics and pretty melodies
Becca Stevens Wonderbloom Out now
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Becca Stevens has been doing service in David Crosby’s band for five years. Her latest album, however, is unCrosby-ishly glamorous, deploying a form of dramatic, semi-electronic pop Prince might approve of, tied together by Stevens’s graceful voice
The Weeknd After Hours Out now
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If 2016’s Starboy ventured out to a deluxe nightclub, After Hours finds The Weeknd, aka Abel Tesfaye, back in the smoky penthouse, rueing his romantic mistakes. But for all its self-absorption, Tesfaye’s spotless, saturnine R&B is regularly thrilling