rock
Ellie Roberts
2025 was another year of flaunting for the ever impressive beast that is female-led pop domination. The now iconic line up of legends and future greats, and their growing class of inspired apprentices, have punctuated the year with defiance and celebration in the form of fantastic pop songs. The prevalence across festival stages, TikTok trends, and radio are telling of the power that this entity basks in but doesn’t take away from the deserved success of most of it. Lady Gaga’s Mayhem took the crown for me this year, it’s an all round well planned and polished album with a perfectly Read more ...
howard.male
What is a documentary maker supposed to do when someone as gifted and empathic as Francis Whately has already covered most of the Bowie bases with three detailed and hypnotic films about different defining periods of the man’s life and career? Five Years, Finding Fame and The Last Five Years are texturally complex films that bear repeated viewings. And there’s another Whately film due out next year that will no doubt definitively nail the Berlin years too.Maybe Jonathan Stiasny film should have been called "The Less Raked-Over Years", rather than the more grandiose The Final Act – given that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alabaster DePlume, aka Mancunian Gus Fairbairn, has been an antically charming performer, confounding unsuspecting crowds with tenderly comic philosophy, voice Tiny Tim-eccentric yet alive to mental fragility, and attuning listeners to the brave possibilities in their every breath. Operating at a quizzical angle to London’s jazz scene, he surfs his own, sui generis wavelength.Working with West Bank Palestinian musicians during the Gaza War had clearly changed DePlume in gigs in Brighton and Norway’s Moldejazz festival, and A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole. He sometimes found elevated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
UK prog-rockers Gracious! acquired their exclamation mark when their first album was released in July 1970. Up to this point, they were Gracious. Barney Bubbles, who designed their LP’s sleeve, added the symbol without asking or telling anyone.The sleight typifies the story of Gracious! The band had breaks, but their path through the music business was bumpy. They recorded a second album between January and March 1971, but split in August that year before it was scheduled for release. When the LP was issued in April 1972 the band were not informed. The label “just flopped it out there with no Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHManduria Bite Me (Wild Honey)
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The debut from Milan punkers Manduria is a six-tracker haemorrhaging rock’n’roll cheek and sass. They riff and fuzz and bang about without a care in the world, shouting and revelling in reverb mess, howling like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins while cranking up the amps like The Cramps, the rhythm section indulging in a mono-stomp that penetrates the inner brain like Joe Pesci’s vice. There’s a track called “I Hate to Think” and you don’t need to. On “Buongiorno” they slow things down for a dip Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yes, I know. Maybe everything bitched about them is true; an eye-watering marketing push, cynically calculated, monied, etc. Maybe it is not. I’ve no real idea.But, but, but, the second album by this London five-piece is my most listened-to of 2025 – and it only came out in October. In the end, all that will be left is the music, the rest history. Just think of The Monkees. The cool kids loathed this manufactured TV group in the 1960s, but who listens to “Daydream Believer” today and froths with the same indignation?From the Pyre is a gem, start-to-finish, a perfect balance of Sparks-like pop Read more ...
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, O2 Academy, Glasgow review - revisiting the past produces mixed results
Jonathan Geddes
Towards the end of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's run-through of their old album Howl, bassist Robert Levon Been told the crowd the "pain was nearly over". By BRMC standards that's a wisecrack, referencing the gloomy, pared-back tone of that 2005 release, but some of the Glasgow audience seemed to have experienced it for real, having headed for either the bar or exits as the set progressed.That is partly on them, given the show was clearly advertised in advance as a 20th anniversary revisitation of Howl. However, it is unquestionably an album that was an odd pick to play in full, lacking many Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In all honestly, 2025 has not been a vintage year for new recorded music and there certainly seems to have been a significant paucity of high-profile album releases that are likely to be viewed as stone-cold classics in years to come. Nevertheless, there has been gold for those prepared to look hard enough.Swiss electro-rock veterans, the Young Gods unleashed a techno-metal monster, Appear Disappear, that dug deep into an intoxicating malevolence with their muscular, sample-heavy electronics and live percussion. Soulwax brought us the gritty electro-pop flavoured All Systems Are Lying. While Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Of all the problems a band could face, fighting for room onstage with a Christmas tree must be far down the list of possibilities. Yet there was David "Jaff" Craig struggling to find room to move around, while avoiding knocking over the decoration next to him with an errant swing of his bass. It was the Futureheads own fault though, as both their current album and tour have a festive theme, hence the choice of two large trees on either side of the band.Some of the crowd had taken this theme to heart, with Christmas jumpers and Santa hats worn, suggesting a works night out had wandered into Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Last Dinner Party’s second album, From the Pyre, is one of this year’s most enjoyable. Its lead single, “This is the Killer Speaking”, is a belter that’ll be around for years. Their musical and pop chops are hard to argue with. They’re a band who can put on a show which combines theatrical opulence and rockin’ zest. I’ve seen them do it. Tonight, however, they undermine themselves during the latter half by sabotaging the concert’s forward momentum Things start well. The quintet, accompanied by a male drummer introduced as “Luca”, appear on a stage set akin to a ruined church Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Axis: Bold As Love, the second album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was released in the UK during the first week of December 1967. In America, it came out in January 1968. Now, it is the subject of a multi-disc box set titled Bold As Love.Why this puzzling new title – “Bold as Love” is the track closing the album – has been chosen is unknown. No reason for losing the word “Axis” is given in the accompanying book, or in the promotional material: which describes this as a “box set containing [the] landmark 1967 album Axis: Bold As Love.”
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Adam Sweeting
Having given us Peter Jackson’s monster documentary series The Beatles: Get Back four years ago, Disney have returned to the Moptop well to deliver this spruced-up reissue of the Beatles Anthology. This epic history of the Fab Four originally aired in six-episode form in the US and the UK in 1995, but that was expanded to eight instalments for VHS and LaserDisc releases in 1996.The USP of this latest version is a supposedly new ninth episode, a sort of post-match roundup assembled from mid-1990s interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison with interpolations from producer Read more ...