CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
These horribly remarkable times can shake the strongest souls. Since the popular acceptance of The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow at their worst have sometimes resembled their friends and supporters Coldplay, offering anthemic placebos to vaguely generalised ills, as Guy Garvey’s big, sentimental heart buried the odder, proggier band they once were. But this sixth album mourns the death of Garvey’s dad and close friends during a period of nihilistic national trauma, from Brexit to Grenfell. Bruising and unravelling marks its music.“Dexter and Sinister” is about lost faith and death’s certain Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been almost five years since we’ve heard anything from the mighty Lightning Bolt, but the tail end of 2019 promises to be something of a musical feast from Brian Chippendale and Brian Gibson’s noisy, high-speed sonic riot. There has already been a re-release of 2003’s Wonderful Rainbow album and an announcement of European tour dates, but this week also sees the appearance of a new album. It’s safe to say that those who have been waiting for it will not be disappointed. Sonic Citadel is disc of adrenalin-soaked, untamed abandon, played at a deafening volume, and it’s one wild ride. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Both first broadcast in 1967, Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show were collectively written and performed by the future Monty Python team. More written about and discussed than actually seen, many episodes were wiped or lost, and these two three-disc DVD sets from the BFI offer as much as is likely to survive of both series. A significant amount of the footage included has been sourced from foreign broadcasters and private collections, including that of David Frost, who was executive producer on At Last the 1948 Show, a late-night successor to The Frost Report.Do Not Adjust Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There’s something in the dichotomy of Babymetal that I just can’t fathom. Cutesy J-pop meets heavy metal. Sheeny bubblegum-bounce dance routines to thrash. Sweet teen vocals over shredding.It’s like something that would get the audience vote on X Factor just because the entire nation wanted to piss off Simon Cowell. It shouldn’t work. And yet, bamboozlingly, they seem to have won over at least some of the hard core metal heads (Corey Taylor from Slipknot, Rob Zombie, Anthrax, Judas Priest) that should, by definition, think they’re a load of shite.My own mindset adds to the conglomeration of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Prior to the UK dance music explosion of summer 1988, house and techno were American micro-scenes, geographically restricted to Chicago, Detroit and New York. Small coteries showed interest in the UK, but few thought of making the stuff. Mancunian producers 808 State, however, were early adopters, recording an album that year and later charting with iconic 1989 hit “Pacific State”, a futuristic, Balearic instrumental. 30 years on, their seventh album is both forward-looking and a tribute to old analogue technologies.808 State, once a four-piece, is now the duo of long-term members Graham Read more ...
joe.muggs
When he arrived on the scene in the mid Noughties Mika – yes his name is Michael Holbrook – flew the flag for grandiose pop classicism. He had The Feeling as fellow travellers, and to an extent The Killers in their first wave of success and Muse entering their imperial phase channelled these same impulses. Now, of course the songwriting and production values of ELO, Queen, Abba, Wings, Hall & Oates are all good and noble things to aspire to. The love of studio as instrument, the ability to cram whole concertos and movies into three minute pop songs is nothing to be sniffed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy has been pondering how to react to oppression, and his own music’s obsolescence. What use is a rock band’s eleventh album at the best of times, he’s wondered, let alone in these worse ones under Trump?Wilco’s response is not to mirror their President in futile, raging protest. Instead, Ode to Joy is mostly gentle, built on acoustic strums of Tweedy’s toy guitar, and the relentless crunch of Glenn Kotchke’s percussion, which hammers against the protagonist’s self-deceit in “Everyone Hides”. Though static crackles at its margins, the music rises with purposeful optimism, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Punk rock, more so than any other genre, comes with a built-in age limit. There’s only so long you can play weeknights at basement venues for a share of the door and travel expenses; only so many years your back can withstand so many nights on strangers’ sofas. Those that don’t age out, sell out: their youthful excesses repackaged to shill hatchbacks and low-fat spread. Thank god, then, for The Menzingers: a four-piece born in the Scranton, Pennsylvania punk scene who opted to channel their 30s into roots-rock with a latent edge, capturing the free-fall into adulthood proper with a certain Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Bassist Dan Berglund was a founding member of the highly influential euro-jazz Esbjörn Svensson Trio (e.s.t.) until the accidental death of Svensson, while diving, in 2008. The first Tonbruket album appeared the following year, with Berglund joined by guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Johan Lindström, keyboardist Martin Hederos and drummer Andreas Werlin, the music stretching into prog-rock territory, some distance away from e.s.t.’s supple euro-jazz dynamics.Since then, four further albums have come, including last year’s live set, Live Salvation, with each musician bringing their Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Darkness have become something of an institution in British rock music since exploding onto the scene with their 2003 debut album, Permission to Land and its breakthrough single “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”. Over-the-top stage costumes and Justin Hawkins’ falsetto vocals may have been their trademarks for almost 20 years, but their humorous take on hard rock continues to raise smiles everywhere. Easter is Cancelled, needless to say, does little to change their somewhat individual take on a genre that is not usually renowned for having a sense of humour.Hawkins’ dramatic singing Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There comes a time for reflection in everyone’s lives – perhaps for Canadian indie-pop duo Tegan & Sara this is it. Harking back to the 1990s, they have found and re-worked tracks written in their teenage years, taking grains of truth from their own once lost lyrics and melodies, trussing them up with fancy production values and a new wave retro-pop sound.The album is launching just after the twins’ memoir, “High School” – a coming of age story of growing up in Calgary. Hey, I’m Just Like You feels like the musical accompaniment that should have been tucked into its sleeve.Created with an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Since the mid-2000s, Anders Trentemøller has been a major part of the European live circuit. A long time indie rock musician in his native Copenhagen, he had actually come to prominence as a fairly commercial electro-house remixer, but it was his 2006 album The Last Resort that cemented his position. Blending a subtler version of his dance production tricks with British shoegaze guitars and a bleak and eerie widescreen sweep, it was the perfect encapsulation of a particular kind of Nordic noir aesthetic: hints of dark doings in bleak forests and the cold sublime of unpopulated Read more ...