tue 24/06/2025

New Music Reviews

Reissue CDs Weekly: The Count Bishops - Speedball

Kieron Tyler

A new band called the Sex Pistols played their fifth live show on 28 November 1975. The appearance at a ball at Kensington’s Queen Elizabeth College got them their first mention in the press. New Musical Express remarked “they are all about 12 years old. Or could be 19.”

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Yardbirds - Yardbirds

Kieron Tyler

Instability coursed through the Yardbirds in 1966. When their first studio album Yardbirds was issued in July, the band seen on stage was not the one which had made the album. Bassist and in-house producer Paul Samwell-Smith had left between its recording and release. His replacement was session player Jimmy Page.

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Rag‘n’Bone Man, Jazz Café review – powerful first post-lockdown gig

Katie Colombus

Rory Graham’s first words as he comes on stage are: “Well this is a bit weird, isn't it? It's been a while.” After a run of cancelled gigs, the band haven’t performed live for a year and a half – which feels, says Rory, “a bit like missing a testicle.”

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 65: Solomun, Black Sabbath, Trojan Records, The Creation, Seefeel, Motörhead and more

Thomas H Green

The latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl combines the best new sounds on plastic with the vinyl reissues that are pressing buttons. Ranging from heavy rockin’ book-style boxsets to the funkiest summertime 7”s, all musical life is here. Dive in.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

This Is The Deep The Best Is Yet To Come (Part 1) (B3)

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Elton John - Regimental Sgt. Zippo

Kieron Tyler

Empty Sky, Elton John’s first album was released in June 1969. Now, an album titled Regimental Sgt. Zippo has turned up. It’s marketed as “The debut album that never was.” The 12 tracks are annotated loosely as having been recorded from November 1967 to May 1968.

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Album: John Grant - Boy From Michigan

Kieron Tyler

While recognisably a John Grant album, Boy From Michigan brings on board something new and unprecedented – an outside producer. Welcome, Cate Le Bon. Among her previous production credits are Deerhoof and Tim Presley, whom she’s collaborated with on an album. As these and her own releases attest, she’s not going to steer anyone towards the mainstream.

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Young Pilgrims, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham review – raucous jazz rockers whip up a storm

Guy Oddy

With a third wave of Covid-19 being widely predicted in the media and the UK live music scene still not back on its feet after the last one, audiences must take their gigs however they are served up. Given the news coverage, I admit to having visions of the Hare and Hounds being set up like a school examinations room, but in the event it was not so bad.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Dungen - Stadsvandringar

Kieron Tyler

Dungen’s October 2005 appearance on Late Night With Conan O'Brien was incongruous. Here was a Swedish band on an independent label, singing in their native language, playing live on coast-to-coast mainstream US TV. The show’s host making a great play in his intro of trying to pronounce their name compounded the sense that this was a band of outsiders which had been mistakenly invited to the banquet.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Screamers - Demo Hollywood 1977

Kieron Tyler

In its first issue of 1979, Melody Maker included an article by Jon Savage on a Los Angeles band named Screamers. “They're ambitious, talented and they want it all NOW,” he wrote.

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Album: Julian Lage – Squint

Sebastian Scotney

Expectations are high with Julian Lage; they always have been. The guitarist is one of the special ones: born on Christmas Day (1987)...appearing with Carlos Santana at age seven... a documentary made about him at eight...clocked by Gary Burton at the Grammy awards at the cusp of his teens...and performing in Burton’s group at an age when he still needed parental chaperoning.

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