rock
Tim Cumming
“Our only hope of saving our planet is if we begin to have different feelings about it,” Brian Eno writes in introduction to his new album in five years, Foreverandevernomore (the first featuring his own vocals since 2005’s Another Day on Earth). “Perhaps if we became re-enchanted by the amazing improbability of life; perhaps if we suffered regret and even shame at what we’ve already lost; perhaps if we felt exhilarated by the challenges we face and what might yet become possible.”Not, he adds, that this is a preachy album of propaganda songs. And it isn’t. Its mood music. It intimates, not Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Not content with having released one of the best hip-hop albums in recent memory (Cheat Codes, alongside Black Thought), producer Brian Burton has rekindled his partnership with The Shins’ James Mercer for the first Broken Bells album in almost a decade.Into the Blue is described as “an ode to the pair’s shared musical influences”, a phrase that can, let’s be honest, raise eyebrows and alarm bells. However, far from being a lengthy synonym for painful pastiche, the pair manage to plunder the past with remarkable panache.One thing no one can accuse Into the Blue of is limited range, and that’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s fair to say that The Cult have taken on a number of identities since their mid-80s’ transformation from Goth also-rans the Death Cult to the chest-beating rockers we've come to know. They’ve been the Native American-influenced post punks of Dreamtime, the neo-hippies of Love, and the Rawk Gods of Sonic Temple, to name but a few.Under the Midnight Sun, their first album in six years, sees them still rocking, maybe just not as forcefully as in the past. In fact, there’s more than the odd dash of AOR present on both “Knife Through Butterfly Heart” and the title track, which also basks in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Unless you’re one of the infamous 1%, you might be forgiven for recently spending a bit of time searching for a booster to reinvigorate your mojo before a seriously difficult winter kicks in. Well, assuming that your electricity supply hasn’t already been cut off by profiteering greed heads, the Bobby Lees’ new album might just do the trick.There’s nothing like raucous and fiery rock’n’roll to replenish your soul and the Bobby Lees have enough of that for it to be prescribed by the NHS. In fact, kicking off with its raucous title track indicates just how Bellevue is going to go and it’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Make no mistake about it, Slipknot are massive. 23 years after their recording debut, they’ve had 8.5 billion streams, their sixth album, 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind, hit the top of the charts in 12 countries, including the US and the UK, and their spectacular shows are a global phenomenon. In fact, it’s live that this writer really embraces Slipknot but their last album demonstrated they still had the chutzpah to knock a longplayer out of the park. The new one almost hits the same peaks. It certainly contains enough piledriving drama to keep their devoted fans, “the maggots”, happy. Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s a minor tragedy that Yeah Yeah Yeahs arrived just in time to be bundled in with a spurious “new rock revolution,” because they were so much more than rock. The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Libertines all may have had decent enough songs, but all were ultimately extremely trad rock, sonically living in mythical pasts.But YYYs were anything but that: they were explosively in-the-now, perfectly able to use classic rock and punk tropes as tools but never beholden to them. Indeed they even sounded less retro than their more electronic NYC hipster contemporaries LCD Soundsystem. Not Read more ...
joe.muggs
Beth Orton has never rushed her music. Her first four albums came one every three years, then since 2002 it’s averaged at a five year gap each time. So it’s no wonder also that there can be stylistic schisms from one to the next.In contrast to its rootsy, bluesy predecessors, her last record, 2016’s Kidsticks, was a clattery, electronic affair co-produced with Andrew Hung of synth noisemongers Fuck Buttons while living in LA. It felt like she was experimenting her way into a new sound that could evolve into a whole new phase of creativity.But, it turned out, the hyperactive energy of that Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I can still taste you and I hate it/That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it/You took the first slice of me and you ate it raw/Ripped at it with your teeth and your lips like a cannibal/You fucking animal.” The opening lines of “Cannibal” the first track on Self-Titled, the solo debut from Marcus Mumford – are the first indication this might not be the album you’ve been expecting. Even if you’re already aware of the childhood abuse the singer suffered, and which inspired this collection songs, prior knowledge does little to prepare you for the visceral punch those Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Suede were both prototypes and outliers of the Britpop pack, and their 2010 reunion managed a rare, creatively substantial second act; given their resurrection after guitarist Bernard Butler’s fractious 1994 exit, this may even be the band’s epic, open-ended Act 3.Where their first three reunion albums restored Suede’s sense of conceptual art, Autofiction brings back the pop, the glamour and fizz of their early singles and feverish gigs. Rather than rehash that past, it looks to post-punk for its attitude and sound, imagining a Suede born into the hard monochrome of 1979, not the hedonism and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hedonism and romance still drive Greg Dulli’s rock’n’roll on his main band’s ninth album.Relationship traumas have always simmered just beneath the Whigs’ surface, most notably on Gentlemen’s 1993 autopsy of an affair. Whatever the real life skeleton of How Do You Burn?, it mostly shows love for the rock form itself, and the life it traditionally offered. The ghosts of the Nineties, when the Whigs bloomed and American rock last defined an era, haunt this record. So too the Seventies, when the Stones dropped clues to an apparently seedily splendid existence through albums of implicit Read more ...
joe.muggs
Travis, Coldplay, Haven, Elbow, Snow Patrol, Aqualung, Embrace, Starsailor, Turin Brakes, Athlete, Elbow, Doves… and of course Keane. The turn of the millennium deluge of sincere young men opening up their feelings to the world, their voices cracking into falsettos over grandiose post-U2 rhythms, really was quite a major cultural movement, wasn’t it? Easy to mock – and indeed the target of some real hatred – but absolutely inescapable, and as defining of its time as any hipper sound.Keane in particular exemplified the ostentatious sensitivity – and Tom Chaplin’s choirboy tones were up there Read more ...
Tom Carr
From three young lads making music to escape adolescent boredom, inspired by heavy doses of Nirvana and Deftones, Muse now regularly make stadiums around the world their own with seas of thousands adoring fans their home. Since 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations they have also continuously refined their larger-than-life brand of stadium rock. Taking straight up alt-rock and arming it with an extravagant presence, somewhat reminiscent of Queen, they never shy of regularly dipping in and out with distorted, fuzz-laden riffs.On 2018’s Simulation Theory they toyed with a synthesised sound Read more ...