rock
caspar.gomez
My friend George claims to have nightmares about The Great Escape. In them he’s standing in an endless queue, never reaching the front, never entering the venue, and never seeing the band he wants to see. That was his experience the only time he attended, and he consequently reckons The Great Escape is rubbish.“I’ve been going for years and that’s never happened to me,” I said to him.“Yeah, well, you’re press, aren’t you,” he responded, with only a smidgeon of bitterness.“I s’pose so,” I replied, with only a smidgeon of smugness.But now photographer Finetime and I are standing outside Horatio Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Onstage at The Old Market in Hove, New York’s Mykki Blanco has been waving around a knot of garlic bulbs as if it were a wand or occult aspergillum. At some point during Blanco’s punchy rendition of 2016 single “Loner”, or possibly the dizzier “Summer Fling”, they transfer it to the flies of their trousers, let it hang there, all mischief. They explain that this is the result of the band becoming obsessed with “a mad coven of witches in Italy”.Whatever, it certainly adds to the freeform conviviality. Blanco (pictured left) no longer adopts a draggy look. The non-binary MC first enters wearing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The mystifying chasm between Van Morrison’s personality and music became total with last year’s Latest Record Project Volume 1, as masterfully sung, textbook R&B rolled under biliously paranoid words. This 28-song more than double-album was loaded with the likes of “The Long Con”, which found Van “targeting individuals” who are “pulling the strings” and “trying to erase me”, as he came out fighting mad at lockdown, and the pandemic’s temerity in keeping him offstage. Despite singing “Why Are You On Facebook?”, Van seemed to have swallowed the social media Kool Aid.Now, here are 15 more Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nick Cave’s cinematic progress has been unexpectedly, catastrophically personal. 20,000 Days On Earth (2014) introduced Bad Seed Warren Ellis as his droll, wild-bearded foil, with scripted, semi-fictitious revelations. Andrew Dominik’s One More Time with Feeling (2016) was a compassionate crescendo of grief at the death of Cave’s son Arthur, alongside sessions for the album Skeleton Tree, finding the singer suddenly raw and defenceless, searching for balance and a way forward.Dominik returns here to film lockdown performances of songs from Ghosteen, the record which truly reckoned with Arthur Read more ...
Tim Cumming
In a little over two week’s time, the three remaining ones will kick-start their 60th year as The Rolling Stones by taking to the stage at a stadium on the edge of Madrid on June 1, around the same time that Elizabeth Windsor marks her own @70 jubilee across the UK.The Stones will stop by in Munich’s old Olympic Stadium, which dates, like quite a chunk of their set list, from the early Seventies, before SIXTY’s opening UK date in Liverpool, the band’s first gig there since 1971. That was the year they bade farewell to Britain before decamping to the south of France to make Exile on Main Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts with an unfortunate sound. Its title track begins with the kind of drum loop that rock bands from U2 on down adopted in the early 1990s having heard Massive Attack and Happy Mondays and deciding that they were going to get on the groovy train. It’s unfortunate because as with all those Nineties bands, it remains completely beholden to a very Eighties Big Rock production style with over-egged notions of “fidelity”. Every element is neat, tidy, separated, sparkling – completely missing the point of what dance and hip hop producers were doing by hacking the possibilities of Read more ...
Tom Carr
When the pandemic closed in, Canadian experimental indie rock troupe Arcade Fire were on the cusp of heading into the studio to record their new album. COVID had other plans. But rather than pause, the husband and wife duo of Win and Regine Butler continued to work on more songs together. As they admit, this has ended up being the longest time they’ve spent writing for an album.The result, WE, is a concise, 40 minute LP that explores the experience of living through a pandemic: the first side is emotive and dark, tinged with isolation and fear; the latter half brighter and celebratory, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Radiate Like This is the first album in six years from American indie rock outfit Warpaint. The wait is, in part at least, down to Covid, which took hold just after they’d finished early recording sessions, forcing the band – like the rest of the world – into a solitary stasis of sorts.This resulted in time to tinker – space to iron out the creases and finesse the folds as band members Emily Kokal, Jenny Lee Lindberg, Stella Mozgawa and Theresa Wayman recorded their parts in isolation, building the songs slowly, carefully, layer by layer.The result is really quite beautiful. Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
You could never accuse the Vaccines of being the most subtle of bands. When the London quintet ran through the intro to “Surfing in the Sky”, their frontman Justin Young started to shoogle around onstage as if, yes, he was riding a surfboard, in case the song’s title and Ventures-cum-Beach Boys opening hadn’t made the inspiration clear enough.In a way, it was a brief snapshot of the band, influences worn on their sleeve and with a cheerful grin on their face. This has both positives and negatives, but it is undeniably successful. The Glasgow venue, which Young later hailed as being one of his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Spring is in the air and vinyl is, as always, on the turntable here at theartsdesk on Vinyl. We’ve been ploughing through all the latest releases and reissues, played loud on a large sound system, each evaluated as fully as possible. Below you’ll find 7000 words to pick through and locate what sounds good to you. Unrestricted by genre, all musical life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHJames Domestic Carrion Repeating (Amok/TNS)Suffolk-based James Scott is in more bands than there’s space to list here, most notably punk outfit The Domestics. His solo debut is a complete treat that deserves Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Much has changed for Foals since their current run of shows were first announced. Initially scheduled to support 2019’s twin releases of Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Parts 1 and 2, so much time has passed that the group are now set to release their next album instead, while in the meantime they’ve seen keyboardist Edwin Congreave depart and, on a rather less dramatic note, released their own brand of hot sauce.Therefore a sense of relief seemed to run through this night, the second of a two night residency in Edinburgh, a feeling that came across from both enthusiastic band and gleeful Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Jono McCleery has one of those voices that once heard, demands your attention, an instrument of richness and depth, and one that has earned him many fans. The likes of Vashti Bunyan and Tom Robinson helped to crowdfund his recording debut back in 2008, Darkest Light; he steered himself through London’s eclectic electro-acoustic underground music scene alongside the likes of Jamie Woon and the Portico Quartet, and released four more folktronic-textured releases with Ninja Tune.His sixth album, on the Berlin-based Ninety Days Records, was recorded in early 2021, over five days in Rotterdam Read more ...