The future's uncertain and the end is always near, as Jim Morrison put it, and you wonder how long Oz's antique rockers can keep cranking it up. After 41 years, most of them vastly successful, they're now missing guitarist and riff-creator Malcolm Young (who's suffering from dementia), while it's not clear whether drummer Phil Rudd is still on board after a drugs bust and allegations that he was trying to get somebody killed.Despite all that, Rock or Bust, their 16th studio album, manages to deliver a few jolts of the old megaton swagger. Angus Young is still there on lead guitar, and judging Read more ...

As tough-going as expected, the eagerly anticipated collaboration between Scott Walker and deconstructed metallers Sunn O))) is 48 minutes of deliberately ugly darkness. On the opening track “Brando”, in his now-familiar strangulated tenor, Walker wails “a beating would do me a world of good.” He’s already punned “whip-poor-will” which was, with crushing inevitability, followed by the sound of an actual bullwhip. All the while, Sunn O))) grind away, producing elongated slabs of unyielding noise.Like Walker's last album, 2012’s Bish Bosch, Soused (as in saturated or drunk) is, sonically, Read more ...

In a week packed with releases from music industry veterans including Neil Diamond, Chris De Burgh and Status Quo, it’s actually the new one from Slipknot that’s the most interesting. .5: The Gray Chapter is the mask-wearing Iowan metallers’ first album in six years, and their first since the 2010 death of founding member and bassist Paul Gray from an accidental overdose. As its title suggests, much of this album is a tribute to friend and colleague – and, as the genre suggests, it’s one that is brutal, honest and raw.Musical tributes to absent friends are not rare – “Silver Bridge”, from Read more ...

PrologueOn Thursday 26 June I arrive at a cloudy but warm Glastonbury Festival, set up camp, eat sausages, chase after DJ Richie Hawtin for an interview that never happens, then acclimatise, settle, let this hedonist Mecca do its work on me…Friday 27 JuneIt starts as spotting. Then it lets go. The sound of droplets pattering against the outer skin of the brown four-person tent becomes a regular tattoo. I lie within, waiting out the mind-fuzz of yesterday’s cider, whisky and chemicals, munching on a breakfast of Morrisons Cheese Savouries (which are, incidentally, addictive). I wonder if 2014 Read more ...

Jon Lord may have tickled his last ivory in 2012, but last night his spirit lived defiantly on. The great and the good from both heavy and contemporary music gathered in his memory. It was for a serious purpose - to raise funds for pancreatic cancer care. But, boy, what a time we had doing it. A revolving door of stars brought us wild solos, screaming vocals and thundering rhythms. But before all the classic rock, culminating in a set from Deep Purple, came something a little more classical.The first hour was devoted to Lord’s orchestral compositions. Our host was “whispering” Bob Harris, who Read more ...

Phil Campbell (b 1961) has been guitarist with Motörhead since 1983. That’s four fifths of the band’s 38 year existence. His have been the dirty great riffs at the core of classics such as “Killed by Death”, “Flying to Brazil”, “Eat the Rich", “Stone Deaf in the USA”, “Rock’n’Roll” and multiple others. He has appeared on 15 of their 21 studio albums, including Aftershock, their latest, which initially comes cover-mounted on a special edition of Classic Rock magazine, but receives a full release in late November.First turned onto the guitar by listening to Jimi Hendrix, Campbell grew up in Read more ...

Read anything about rock music in the Seventies - about British hard rock music in particular - and three bands are pushed forward as titans: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. However, while both Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin have gone on to receive widespread critical acclaim and massive sales since their glory days, Deep Purple have assumed the position of a guilty pleasure – at best. How is it that the band who produced songs such as “Black Night”, “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water” have not been subject to a whole Friday night’s coverage on BBC Four?The line-up fronted by Read more ...

In their new, semi-fantastical concert movie Metallica: Through the Never, the gas-masked marauder who hunts the band’s fictional roadie, Trip, through a nightmare landscape, pictured below, is less cinematically memorable than Metallica themselves. Director Nimrod Antal gets his cameras up amongst them on-stage, as their muscles and eyes bulge and mouths gape, revving up the fans with how much they get off on this music, too.Metallica have been metal’s most important and respected band for much of their 32 years. Debut Kill ‘Em All (1983) combined speeding guitar athleticism and pummelling Read more ...

There is no guarantee of success in any area of rock and pop but those who wish to succeed through sheer graft might look to metal as their main chance. While multiple bands in other genres have fleeting, unpredictable moments in the sun, a decent metal act ticking the right boxes with the fans and initially willing to slog the circuit for 350 nights of every year, especially in the endless wilds of Middle America, can build and build and build. Look at Iron Maiden, possibly the biggest band of their vintage in the world. They do what they do with thundering, enjoyable efficiency, are beloved Read more ...

I write as a listener and concerned citizen. It's 2013, the legends of dad rock are facing the death squad: no liquids, no solids, no chance, baby. There's something dead in the water and a new breed is feeding on the remains. Welcome to Deathcore, Screamo, Metalcore, whatever.Asking Alexandria come from Yorkshire. They're on their third album, on the Sumerian label (got to love the name), and the lynchpins are guitarist Ben Bruce and singer Danny Worsnop. They rock like men on three legs – crunching, stop-start, arhythmic, stuttering guitar riffs that sound as if they sprouted out of the Read more ...

The original Black Sabbath were a feat of engineering on a par with a classic Land Rover or an AK47. Everything about them was basic, brutal, unadorned and brilliantly functional – and as such achieved a very real, if rather grim, kind of beauty. So it's very nice indeed to see Tony Iommi's churning detuned guitar, Ozzy Osbourne's desolate howl (one of the most inhuman voices in popular music this side of Kraftwerk, in fact) and Geezer Butler's basslines and lyrics of alienation reunited, 35 years after they last recorded together.There are issues here. Sadly original drummer Bill Ward is Read more ...

In its day Alice in Chains’ so-called “sludge metal” – something a bit like the sound of industrial machinery pulled through treacle – was some of most darkly brilliant music to come out of Seattle. Much of this was down to Layne Staley’s drug-soaked lyrics which eventually proved prescient: in 2002 he succumbed to an overdose. Seven years later, when guitarist Jerry Cantrell resurrected the band, many wondered how long the new line-up could keep it up.On the strength of this new album they can do it as long as they like. The droning guitars, sledgehammer drums and bitter melodies on The Read more ...