CDs/DVDs
Ellie Roberts
PUP’s Who Will Look After The Dogs? is a raw and emotionally charged album that captures the band’s chaotic spirit while showing clear growth in both sound and subject matter. Across 12 tracks, the Toronto group delivers a mixture of driving punk energy, wry humour and moments of vulnerability. It is a loud and heartfelt record that might not hit the heights of their best work, but still leaves a strong and lasting impression.Lyrically, frontman Stefan Babcock leans into personal struggles with disarming honesty. Themes of isolation, self doubt and fractured relationships run through the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, can it really be 40 years since Solitude Standing, the second studio album by Suzanne Vega who put the 1980s folk revival on the map. “Fast folk” the New York scene was called, and its voices emerged from much the same Greenwich Village cafes which were the proving ground for the 1960s revival that introduced Bob Dylan to the world. Plus some newer ones, notably the Cornelia Street Café, founded in 1977 and run by a Brit named Robin Hirsch until absurd rents forced its closure just a few years ago. The album Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange honoured the weekly gatherings when Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over its crisp 32 minutes and nine songs, Altogether Stranger embraces electropop, lo-fi terrain and gothic solo contemplation. By deconstructing modern R&B, the upbeat “Come on” is as close as it gets to pop’s mainstream. The unifying factors are Lael Neale’s way with a tune – she writes a memorable song – and her penetrating yet translucent voice.The Virginia-born, now Los Angeles-resident Neale’s third album is firmly in the art pop bag. Her main instrument is the electronic Suzuki Omnichord, which can employ pre-set rhythms, be played with buttons and strummed via a touch-sensitive Read more ...
mark.kidel
Following a tradition that reaches back to the The Who’s Tommy, bands and musicians with serious artistic ambition have created rock operas, reaching beyond the thematic explorations pioneered in concept albums a form that transcends the limits of the three minute popular song. Singer and guitarist Will Toledo, the leader of Car Seat Headrest, is the latest to throw himself into the drama and story-telling that an opera requires.It’s not clear how this would play out on stage – and to that extent, it may not strciktly speaking be an operatic work – but “The Scholars” consists of a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s this mod milieu, harking back to the Eighties. Weller at the forefront; Dr Robert and his Blow Monkeys; all righteously hate Thatcher; then the electronically groovy 1990s arrive; Acid Jazz Records; boss mod Eddie Piller; his collection of snappily dressed muso's who magazines wrote about and who nearly had hits. These sorts are still about, endlessly churning out music. It’s impressive. Sometimes the music is too. As with this album.Matt Deighton was in Acid Jazz outfit Mother Earth. He’s one of the aforementioned who keep on bangin’ out music. Much of it well-liked. Those mods Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Given that Prioritise Pleasure was Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s (RLT) Back to Black, and that there’s been a lengthy wait for this new release, it’s no wonder that there’s so much anticipation around A Complicated Woman. Add to the mix her frankly jaw-dropping performance alongside Jake Shears in Cabaret in the West End, and you might be forgiven for expecting big changes. But Self Esteem knows a winning formula when she’s on to one. The reprise of perhaps her most popular piece, “I Do This All the Time” in the form of “I Do and I Don’t Care” begins with that same Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s always been a goofy charm about Billy Idol. As an implausibly chiselled Adonis shining out from the deliberate ugliness of the original London punk scene, he was a misfit among misfits. As a pop star through the ‘80s, he was visibly so spectacularly high almost all the time that he somehow made everything pantomime-ish around him. Latterly he’s been such a perfect encapsulation of the Brit rock star in LA archetype he could quite plausibly be starring in a Spinal Tap spinoff.Along the way, though, he’s made quite a few really great records and remained absolutely, in every possible Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Sweden’s most gloriously unhinged export is back, and Viagr Aboys might just be Viagra Boys at their most fun, feral and fully realised. This album doesn’t try to out-clever the world; it grabs it by the collar, shakes it around, and laughs in its face.From the opening notes, you can tell this isn’t the band trying to reinvent the wheel. They’ve set the wheel on fire and are using it to roast marshmallows. Sebastian Murphy howls and rambles through songs that feel like the soundtrack to a party thrown by nihilistic philosophers and drunk uncles. It’s chaotic, weird, and totally locked in.“Man Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luster’s fifth track “Halo” has the lyric “mystical creatures… of Éirne,” referencing the Irish river and lough of the same name – both of which are associated with a mother goddess. Earlier, the album’s opener is a short, ambient-styled, scene-setting instrumental titled “Réalt,” where birds, wordless vocals and a harp are heard. Réalt translates from Irish Gaelic as “star.”The second album, then, by the Connemara-born Maria Somerville affirms her Irish origin (the track "Corrib" is named after another lough, one located in Connemara). In contrast, Luster cleaves stylistically to a form of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In this new album, three top-flight musicians based in Berlin, guitarist Ronny Graupe, Lucia Cadotsch (voice) and Kit Downes (piano) work collaboratively, superbly, as a real team. The music, some well-known tunes which Cadotsch sings hauntingly, and some original tunes by Graupe – it’s hard to tell them apart – just flows superbly.I can’t help musing, incidentally, that we are a long way here from the typical set-up in classical music, where pianists who accompany singers can often suffer death by adjectives such as “supportive” or “sensitive”. (I even remember one pianist getting Read more ...
Tim Cumming
For lovers of British folk from the 1970s on, Peter Knight is a potent force – renowned for his years with Steeleye Span, in their 1970s heyday and from 1980 through to 2013’s classic set written with Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith.The first iteration of his band Gigspanner was as a trio, releasing four albums between 2009 and 2017, while the big band version has released a live set and a studio album, 2020’s Natural Invention. The sextet comprises the original trio of Knight, guitarist Roger Flack and percussionist Sacha Trochet, alongside relative newcomers in Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mark Morton is best known as a guitarist with US metallers Lamb of God. They’ve been going for three decades, established and successful, at the more extreme, thrashier end of the spectrum, but still achieving Top Five albums on the Billboard charts.He’s also been developing a solo career. His debut, 2019’s Anesthetic, was straightforward heavy rock, featuring names such as Mark Lanegan and Chester Bennington, but his follow-up is more interesting, a riff-tastic dive into southern boogie, tipping its hat to The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.There are guests throughout again, but this Read more ...