Listener’s Songs of the Week: New tracks by Pulp (with bonus thoughts on Auckland show), Foo Fighters, U2, Lana Del Ray and more

Jarvis Cocker and Pulp performed the band’s latest track live for the first time at its Auckland show. Photo / Getty Images

Click here to hear the entire playlist on Spotify

Begging for Change

by Pulp

As luck would have it, this fiery state-of-the-world song for the forthcoming Help(2) Warchild charity album by
the reconstituted English band came out just as the group started their Australasian tour. Which means we can also say something about their joyful, jubilant, performance at Spark Arena on Saturday night. They included the first live performance of Begging in the set, after frontman Jarvis Cocker warned the audience things were about to get noisy (he also reminded us, wryly, that when Pulp won the Mercury Prize for their peak-Britpop album, Different Class, they donated their prize money to Warchild). Live, Begging for Change was also part of a refreshening of the Pulp songbook brought on by last year’s reunion album More, and it’s another in the Pulp tradition of the spell-it-out chorus (see also F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.). More tracks like Spike Island and Hymn to the North which were more Cocker’s mature reflections on the past, nicely bookend the brash, bratty, corduroy-meets-carnal – “this is a song about sexual confusion … arguably they are all are,” quipped Cocker in one intro – songs of their 90s heyday. Some old notables (Sylvia, Little Soul, Help the Aged) were missing, though. And the sets were split by a 15-minute interval which indicated the four sixtysometing members of the original band (who had five supplementary players on stage) first formed by Cocker at his Sheffield high school 40 or so years ago, were taking things sensibly. You had to admire keyboardist and fan favourite Candida Doyle whose almost life-long rheumatoid arthritis figures visibly in her playing hands. Meanwhile Cocker’s ever-moving mitts reminded of a unique performance style, that’s part Bowie, part bloke getting carried away on point duty while dressed as a geography teacher on a date in 1975. NZ may have been left out of reunion tour plans for other Britpop notables, but Pulp, here only once before in 1998, outdid themselves and their previous Auckland show. Oh, and good song that new one. – Russell Baillie

Your Favourite Toy

By Foo Fighters

The Foo Fighters head to NZ for two shows next summer, one making them the first international act announced to play the One New Zealand Stadium in Christchurch, which is still under construction. So is Dave Grohl’s and band’s new album which is due in April and after the grunge-metal pummelling of its debut single, Asking for a Friend, the title track, Your Favourite Toy, has more of a Ministry/Nine Inch Nails industrial undertow. And on a rare performance of rock music on The Graham Norton Show (see video below), they played it without recently injured guitarist Pat Smear (that’s his face on the drums) but with Scissor Sisters Jake Shears on backing vocals. – Russell Baillie

American Obituary

by U2

Yes, they’re still around and have just dropped the six-song Days of Ash EP (Yours Eternally featuring Ed Sheeran and Ukrainian singer Taras Topolia) but we point to this, the opening track which arrives with the kind of attack the Sex Pistols brought before devolving into Bono in declamatory Achtung Baby mode about recent events on the streets (“America will rise against the people of the Right”), their archetypal Big Chorus and co-opts a bit Power to the People (“power of the people”) in a chant. Bono also makes a direct address: “I am not mad at you Lord …” His God will be relieved. To give this song it’s due the band sound genuinely fired up, and their heart is in the right place, on the side of the repressed and beleaguered. A stand-alone EP in advance of a new album later this year. Here is whole diverse EP at Spotify, and at Apple Music. – Graham Reid

Stampede

by Genesis Owusu

Canberra-based Ghanaian-born rapper Genesis Owusu is a big deal across the Tasman where his previous two albums have won the album of the year ARIA awards and given him a launching pad to the rest of the world. Think Australia’s answer to Stormzy. Stampede is the fittingly named first single off the forthcoming third album, a headrush song that you might mistake for UK post-punk more than Oz hip-hop, its jagged initial attack softened by a chorus that may be the influence of producer Dann Hume, one-time frontman of Evermore, the fraternal band from Fielding NZ, and backing vocalist Ladyhawke. The video suggests Genesis is a popular dude at home in Ghana too. Well, he is getting chased down the streets … – Russell Baillie

Javelin

by Kevin Morby

In the shorthand of social media, IYKYK. And for those who do know, this American singer-songwriter has often been someone quite special for the past decade. In 2020 he penned the moving Beautiful Strangers that Mavis Staples covered on last year’s outstanding Sad and Beautiful World which sounds as contemporary as an ICE invasion. This acoustic-driven apolitical piece locates itself in a small town in the Bible Belt and Morby is the itinerant character who has returned but is ambivalent about being there as a husband. It cleverly gains in intensity through drums and electric guitar then the background vocals from Amelia Meath (of Sylvan Esso) slowly take the lead from Morby’s weary voice. Pitched somewhere between an Americana James Taylor and Father John Misty, Javelin – produced by Aaron Dessner of The National – is a journey with some mystery embedded in its imagery. Very outdoorsy video which is a bit at odds with the lyric. A singer-songwriter to discover before the new album Little Wide Open arrives May 15. – Graham Reid

Novus Annus Adiit

by Tanya Donnelly and Chris Brokaw

If this sounds like a left-field folk take on a medieval song by Donnelly (Belly, Throwing Muses, Breeders) and Brokaw (Come, Codeine) you’d be on the money. The title means “a new year approaches” and the piece is often delivered by an unaccompanied choir. But here Brokaw winds a mesmerising guitar part through it as Donnelly’s vocals reach for a dream-like transcendental place. Quite haunting and the first piece from a four-song EP The Done is Undone Again where they explore similarly historic Christmas songs. A bit late for 2025 but there’s a restful timelessness about this music and their hypnotic approach which can take you somewhere quieter for six-plus minutes in your busy life. – Graham Reid

White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter

by Lana Del Rey

She of the absurdly long album title (the prosecution calls Do You Know That There’s a Pipeline Under Ocean Blvd) here offers a whimsical, childlike delivery of a song which includes the lyrics “snap crackle pop”, “whoops-a-daisy, yoo-hoo”, something about a “spirit hunter” rhyming with “a nicotine patch for the summer”. Produced by Jack Antonoff who doubtless felt it a relief from more serious stuff, it has a touch of wispy Kate Bush about it. It appears to be about being in love and making dinner for her new husband Jeremy Dufrene, one of the co-writers with her sister and brother-in-law. Strange, eccentric but oddly enjoyable. Warning: the home video contains cooking broccoli. – Graham Reid

I Adore

by Fiona and the Glow

Last year’s self-titled debut EP by Fiona McMartin and band landed square between alt-rock and mainstream rock – a touch of Fleetwood Mac too we noted – with McMartin’s dragging vocals having a touch of Americana about them. This driving guitar-pop song opens with an arresting crash of abrasive guitars before settling into a relentless groove and once more hits the spot with its rowdy and heroic appeal. Recorded again in Port Chalmers (with Tom Bell) and mixed by Tom Healey, I Adore factors in riff-driven, clanging guitars with McMartin in slightly bored, sneering mode and has radio programmers and live audiences in mind. As before, we think there’s something good going on here from a band worth keeping an ear on. – Graham Reid

Theme from Living

by Amamelia

Like a retro-electro take on a 1960s children’s TV theme, expat Amamelia (Amelia Barry now living in Melbourne) delivers this smile-inducing mix of cheap synths, programmed whistling, loops and fizzy guitar. Think psychedelic dancing dinosaurs and you’re getting close. Another bouncy single – after the buzzy-bee, synth produced flute-flavoured pop of The Floating Opera and the breeze-blown song Summerlong – announcing a long overdue follow-up to her catchy, kitschy and sometimes tongue-in-chic 2022 album Bananamelia. The new album, The Joy of Living – by this Taite Prize-winner for best independent debut for her 2020 album WOW! – is due April 17. – Graham Reid

Handel: Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, HWV74, “Eternal Source of Light Divine”

by Iestyn Davis countertenor, Lea Desandre mezzo-soprano, Jupiter/Thomas Dunford

Handel, whose birthday falls on February 23, wasn’t always a pleasant chap – his treatment of musicians is infamous – but he sure knew who to suck up to, developing a strong relationship with the British royals. In 1713, he wrote a secular cantata and dedicated it to Queen Anne as a birthday ode. There’s no evidence that Anne, reputedly not a great music lover, ever heard it (“Too careless or too busy to listen to her own band,” according to the Duke of Manchester). If not, she missed some of Handel’s most beautiful music, particularly the opening “Eternal Source of Light Divine”. – Richard Betts

SaveShare this article

Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Copy LinkEmailFacebookTwitter/XLinkedInReddit