punk
graeme.thomson
There are times when Paul Weller seems little more than a strutting anachronism, his gear-box jammed permanently in reverse. His appearance – a toasted walnut with a tinsel trim; or, if you prefer, Ian McLagan in aspic – is a pitch-perfect rendition of a clapped-out Seventies rock star. More than once in his long career his music has sounded similarly out-dated, all earnest huff'n'puff and stodgy “authenticity”. Sonik Kicks – thank heavens – is emphatically not one of those occasions. Instead it sparkles with psychedelic mischief and brims with youthful vigour. So much for appearances.The Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Well, better late than never. I wanted to see The Stranglers at The Roundhouse in April 1977, but a combination of homework, strict parents and being way too young meant that I had to make do with playing their debut album Rattus Norvegicus IV to death in my bedroom. Neatly 35 years later I finally made it and the band did their bit by performing more tracks from their early years than they did from their very well-received latest album, Giants.The quartet was in remarkably fine fettle. The part of Hugh Cornwell, who left in 1990, is currently played by genial Sunderland musician Baz Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This album caught me completely off guard. The Stranglers work of the late Seventies/early Eighties is classic post-punk pop but their critical and (slight) commercial comeback since 2004’s Norfolk Coast album has been less convincing. Giants, however, is a corker. The band’s oldest member, drummer Jet Black, may now be 73 – and is pictured on the CD wearing an oxygen mask – but this is the sound of a reinvigorated quartet utilising their last-gang-in-town status to create music that’s poignant, tuneful, and unafraid of adventure.Giants startles from the start, opening with instrumental “ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Céline Danhier’s Blank City is a useful but slightly frustrating primer on the grass-roots No Wave cinema movement that blossomed in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side in the post-punk era of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Hyper-energized and calculatedly ramshackle – thus echoing its subject matter – the documentary traces the emergence of the sync-sound super-8 filmmaking craze from the alternative art and music scene oriented around the CBGB rock club on the Bowery. Did you know that Jim Jarmusch was once in a band, the Del-Byzanteens, which supported Echo and the Bunnymen Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Mark Lanegan, ex-junkie and one-time singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, so fully inhabited his cover of “The Beast in Me” on last year’s Hangover II soundtrack you could easily have assumed he'd written it. With Blues Funeral, his first full solo outing since 2004, he again uses his grated baritone to express the twilight zones of the soul. The result? A magnificent account of a life lived to within an inch of its limits. Bible-black and whisky-soaked this is the work of a man who was born to be living through a depression. And still, there’s a lightness of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is an unexpectedly wonderful album. A five-star rating might seem a bit much but then judging music in the same way as sport or exams is a bit crap anyway. So let’s say 5/5 compared to other Christmas albums and, yes, this is at the very summit. Ever. Then again, it’ll be useless from 2 January until next December.Making a Christmas album is like writing haikus or cooking soufflé - it follows a precise formula, absolutely requiring key elements that are incredibly hard to quantify correctly and, most especially, make even faintly original.The backstory here is that smashingly affecting Read more ...
howard.male
“It’s cultural imperialism,” a middle-aged gentleman felt compelled to say to me, presumably because I was the bloke with the notebook. “Then all pop music is cultural imperialism,” is what I should have fired back at him, had I not been so immersed in the transcendental racket of tussling brass and distorted guitars that had almost made him inaudible. But instead I took the scenic route of pointing out that this legend of 1970s Ethiopian jazz would hardly have spent the last seven years playing with these white Dutch musicians if he had felt he was being exploited.As I finished the case for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 9 September, 1985 The Jesus and Mary Chain played Camden's Electric Ballroom to a ceaseless hail of plastic pint pots. After 20 minutes, the songs gave way to formless feedback and they sloped off the stage. Although Yuck weren’t born then, the significance of playing the same stage can’t have been lost on them. Carrying a torch for the pre-grunge fuzz-rock that was shoegazing’s ugly sister, Yuck know a thing or two about what they’re drawing from.Yuck’s set ended in formless feedback and there was no encore. The house lights were quickly switched on and that was it. Singer/guitarist Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“My first album was a personal love letter to God,” Josh T Pearson tells me, looking like a cross between Johnny Cash and Moses. No wonder, then, that it took him 10 years to record another. On this year's release, Pearson had moved on, talking failed love like a punk Leonard Cohen stranded in the wilderness. Face to face, Pearson is, however, quite the Southern gent: the Last of the Country Gentlemen, as he calls himself in the title of the new album. In a west-London café, he recounted how he got here, and why he is nervous about this Saturday’s big gig at the Barbican.Pearson grew up in Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The passing of Jackie Leven, who died last night from cancer, comes with a sense of real sadness. One of our most distinctive and original singer-songwriters, the Fifer maintained a doggedly low commercial profile throughout almost four decades spent weaving his rich, rather brave musical tapestry. With the abrasive, unclassifiable pre-punk band Doll By Doll and later as a solo artist, Leven often specialised in difficult subjects. A song on one of his recent solo records was called “The War Crimes of Ariel Sharon”, and his music was typically peopled by Serbian prostitutes, Earls Court Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Whose idea was it to do the gig in this shithole?” asks Captain Sensible towards the end of the night. He’s right. The East Wing is truly an atmosphere-free venue, a carpeted, low-ceilinged conference room that’s part of the much larger Brighton Centre complex. It’s easy to imagine it filled with municipal administrators milling about, the stink of coffee and the rustle of paperwork. Instead, it’s packed to the gills with men and women, mostly in their late forties and early fifties, mostly clad in black, lots of leather and badges.The Damned have undoubtedly played worse. They’ve had a Read more ...