punk
Fontaines DC, Barrowland, Glasgow review - flowers and football terrace anthems from triumphant Dublin quintetThursday, 21 October 2021
Upon emerging onstage at the Barrowland, Fontaines DC took time to pass flowers into the crowd. Aside from the occasional thank-you later on, that was the only genteel note struck in a thrilling, compelling and often bruising set. Their last... Read more... |
Manic Street Preachers, Brighton Dome review - solid gig occasionally explodes to another levelFriday, 15 October 2021
There is a three song segment midway through Manic Street Preachers’ set which suddenly ramps everything up. For this brief while, the performance and response in the sold-out, nigh-on-2000-capacity venue, elevates the concert from another decent... Read more... |
Patti Smith, Royal Albert Hall review - a wild ride from a musical legendWednesday, 06 October 2021
Patti Smith has been making rabble rousing punk rock for half a century. She’s spent a lifetime on the road with rock stars and poets, surfing the charts, bringing music and wisdom to the people in myriad ways from beatnik to mainstream and now here... Read more... |
Album: The Specials - Protest Songs 1924 - 2012Thursday, 30 September 2021
When The Specials returned with their chart-topping 2019 album Encore, it was a wonderful surprise. As well as being their first in nearly four decades (excluding material by alternately named intermediary incarnations), it proved they were more... Read more... |
Album: Black Dice - Mod Prog SicSaturday, 25 September 2021
There’s a strand of music that a friend of mine once referred to as “Caveman Electronics”, which snakes through the decades, never quite becoming a genre. It’s surfaced in scenes and moments like postpunk and electroclash, you can hear it in bands... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 66: Etta James, BABii, George Harrison, Helloween, Cat Stevens, Gnod and moreMonday, 20 September 2021
As the summer folds away on itself, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns. Beset by backlogs at pressing plants and delayed by COVID, it's finally here, jammed to the gunwales with commentary on a grand cross section of the finest music on plastic. Dive in!... Read more... |
Album: The Stranglers - Dark MattersSaturday, 04 September 2021
Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990... Read more... |
Album: Toyah - Posh PopWednesday, 25 August 2021
Toyah, always a one-off, has been a surprise star of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Her YouTube Sunday Lunches, kitchen-filmed cover versions with her husband, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, have been celebratory shared moments, jaunty, unlikely, silly,... Read more... |
Reissue CD Weekly: Iggy and the Stooges - Born In A TrailerSunday, 22 August 2021
Despite their implosion three years earlier, 1977 was a good year for The Stooges. The CBS budget label Embassy reissued their 1973 Raw Power album in the wake of their songs cropping up in the repertoires of The Damned and Sex Pistols. After the... Read more... |
Album: Alan Vega - Alan Vega After DarkThursday, 05 August 2021
Following in the slipstream of wide critical acclaim for posthumous album Mutator, released earlier this year, comes Alan Vega After Dark by the former Suicide frontman. It’s a starkly different album to its predecessor, swapping concrete collisions... Read more... |
Album: Willow - Lately I Feel EverythingMonday, 26 July 2021
Willow Smith has done more during her life than the average 20-year-old. The daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, she bounced off her childhood appearance in her father’s film I Am Legend to a No 2 UK hit with “Whip My Hair” a decade ago,... Read more... |
Album: Wavves - HideawayFriday, 16 July 2021
Wavves’ Nathan Williams found you can go home again. Following a deteriorating decade on a major label, and 2017’s raucous retrenchment You’re Welcome (2017), the punk-pop Californians have returned to their first label, Fat Possum. Williams then... Read more... |
