punk
Jonathan Geddes
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 visit to Glasgow back in 2019 had been hindered at times by some dubious sound, but there were no such issues here. Instead, this was a group in control throughout, pacing the set well and sounding rousingly triumphant by the night’s end.A wider repertoire helped, too. The set was split nearly exactly between debut offering Dogrel and last year’s A Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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 gig on another tour in front of a devoted fanbase, to something more memorable and truly electric. It also sums up the Welsh rock stalwarts’ unlikely fusion of socially aware poetics and cheesy rock which, at its best, can be exuberant and touching.Having come onstage to what sounds like a looped house rejig of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s last proper Read more ...
Katie Colombus
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 she is at London’s Royal Albert Hall – a gig she says her agent has been trying to land for years.Grabbing hold of the audience from the get-go with the spoken word “Piss Factory” which ends with those prescient lines “I'm gonna be somebody, I'm gonna get on that train, go to New York City… I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return, Never Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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 than an endlessly touring heritage night out for ageing rude boys. Critics of their reappearance on the tour circuit claimed they were washed up without the band’s original driving force, Jerry Dammers. Encore, full of musical pep and socially conscious vim, proved this was not the case. Protest Songs 1924 – 2012 is an apt sequel.With the band now Read more ...
Joe Muggs
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 like Add N to (X) and maverick house/techno producers like Jamal Moss and Funkineven. You can trace it back through Cabaret Voltaire’s breakthrough and Suicide back to “Popcorn”, and even Joe Meek’s productions. It’s not about “lo-fi”, more “differently fi”: a relish in the fine details of distortion, the beautiful geometries of the most rigid Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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!VINYL OF THE MONTHGod Damn Raw Coward (One Little Independent)Let’s start with some NOISE! With their fourth album Wolverhampton band God Damn continue the reinvigoration that began with their eponymous 2020 Album. There’s metal in there somewhere but mostly it’s a roaring rage of punk rock, with singer Thomas Edwards howling his indignancy at, well Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums. Dark Matters, their eighteenth, is a decently wrought, sometimes elegiac conclusion to a career that’s taken them from pre-punk to post-everything.Eight of the 11 songs were recorded before Greenfield’s death but the single “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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, revelling unashamedly in pop music (and, bawdily, in her own physical attributes!). Toyah is enjoyably eccentric, even when her music does not appeal, thus I really wanted to like this album, a celebration of her indefatigable spirit, but it failed to win me over.Co-written and produced by regular collaborator Simon Darlow, and with contributions from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 arrival of Autumn 1975’s Metallic KO live album and punk rock reviving their commercial profile, it was confirmation of The Stooges’ endless afterlife. Former frontman Iggy Pop was on the up too, treading the boards with old friend David Bowie as his unobtrusive keyboard player.Also in 1977, two singles arrived which were in-tune with the spirit of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
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 and considered collages for the tremolo tones of vintage rock and roll, the driving krautrock energy of 70s Dusseldorf and the space cadet cadence of… well, of Alan Vega.Vega’s last live band recording, made in 2015 in collaboration with members of Pink Slip Daddy, a band similarly steeped in the spirit of rock and roll and the pure power of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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, and has since released a bunch of music. This is her fourth album and, where her last couple came from a musically contemplative, indie-tronic, singer-songwriter stance, Lately I Feel Everything ramps things into the sweary pop-punk and metal zone.Avril Lavigne appears on the slick self-affirmation power-pop of “Grow” (“I hope you know you’re not Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 wrote Hideaway in his parents’ shed, where Wavves’ first records were taped.The need for safety and care suggested by a 35-year-old retreating to his childhood home plays out in this seventh album, where standing fast against buffeting waves of fear and self-loathing often seems progress enough. Hideaway feels like a breakup album, written when pain Read more ...