rock
Thomas H. Green
Perhaps surprisingly for a band famed for the raw, tightly wrought, balled-up fury of their music, the most affecting moments of Idles’ fourth album are slower numbers. Chief among these is “Progress”, whose looping, repeated lyrics may reflect singer Joe Talbot’s ongoing reflections on putting drug addiction behind him. Lines such as “I don’t wanna feel myself come down” are given added potency by a threatening shroud of tunefully warped, loping band underpinning. While the album’s words sometimes – and enigmatically – offer hope, the tone of the music often sounds doomed.This is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
If you were looking for a word to describe Black String in performance at Grand Junction in Paddington, before the high altar of the church of St Mary Magdalene, itself a pinnacle of Victorian neo-Gothic bravura, then that word would be “intense”. Intensely intense. More intense than a blooming bank of Intensia.They may fold in to their sound influences from global jazz, post-rock, Korean folk and free improvisation, but the array of instruments they use to raise the unholy walls of sound in their music, from ancient folk instruments to squalling electric guitars, makes their performance one Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It may go against rock n’ roll cliché, but occasionally there is merit to good time keeping for a band. Lucia and the Best Boys saw their support slot in their home town of Glasgow reach an ignominious ending when they were cut off a song early, vocalist Lucia Fairfull’s chat having seen the glam synth pop group go over their allocated slot.It was an announcement greeted with some derision from those gathered there, but seemed a fitting climax to a rather stop-start showcase. Although Fairfull has a strong voice, their dancefloor friendly tunes only rarely provided a suitably catchy backing. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As The Rolling Stones – sans a much-missed Charlie Watts – generate old fashioned, 20th-century rock'n'roll excitement in the stadiums of north America this autumn, their final great studio album, 1981’s Tattoo You, returns to the new releases shelf after 40 years. It's available in a range of editions, from the standard single remastered album through a deluxe double set that comes with a disc of “Lost and Found” outtakes, to a “super-deluxe” four-disc boxed set encompassing a hardback book and the band’s live performance from the second of two dates at Wembley, on 26 July 1982.The Wembley Read more ...
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 ...
joe.muggs
This record is a heck of a metatextual experience to listen to. In releasing his debut album, 24 year old Finneas O’Connell is attempting to step out of the shadow of one of the biggest pop cultural behemoths of our time – his own sister, Billie Eilish, who he also writes and produces for – and mark out a creative lane of his own. And he’s documenting this in many of these songs, which touch repeatedly on his experience of fame, struggles with identity and the like.Struggles-of-success narratives (and make no mistake: as Billie ticks inexorably towards 100 billion streams, her brother is Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Time waits for no band, as Maximo Park’s lively singer Paul Smith opined early into his band’s set. “I am young and I am lost” he declared during "The Coast Is Always Changing"’s jangly guitar-pop, before drily admitting afterwards that he might have to retire those words soon enough. It’s over 20 years now since Maximo Park emerged as the thinking man’s indie rockers, all bursts of energy and romantic lyricism, and two of the quintet have departed along the way, in the shape of bassist Archis Tiki and keyboardist Lukas Wooller.Yet the albums and tours have continued regularly, save for the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grand, sweeping romanticism with strong Celtic leanings is the order of the day lately, in a way it hasn’t been since the 1980s heyday of U2, Waterboys, Bruce Springsteen, Dexys and Simple Minds. The likes of Lewis Capaldi, Dermot Kennedy, Declan McKenna, Ed Sheeran in “Castle on the Hill” mode and Fontaines D.C. when they show their softer side are all taking yearning songs of big dreams colliding with small realities all the way to the bank. The Manic Street Preachers too have turned up the Van Morrison-ish swoon to 11 on their new album – and indeed The Waterboys’ Room to Roam and Dexys’ 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
“There should be some kind of spirit there which is outside whoever is in the band. The spirit of the band, wanting still to play songs, real songs, wanting to play complicated music to a certain extent. Fairly dense arrangements, also difficult pieces of music, not to be difficult but just because that’s a challenge. To do all that and then also play with a degree of anarchy, chaos, and fire and spirit. That’s the spirit of Van der Graaf.”So said a drawn-looking, jumpy Peter Hammill on 17 June 1978. He’s on Austrian TV, sitting on an unmade bed in a hotel room, with a cigarette in his hand Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lindsey Buckingham was last in and first out of Fleetwood Mac’s classic line-up (quitting in 1987, and forced out by long ago ex- Steve Nicks in 2018). He was a would-be Brian Wilson in their midst, an unlooked for, maverick auteur whose first hit “Go Your Own Way” helped conquer the world, and confounding follow-up Tusk demanded much more.This is his seventh solo album, and they all exist in the Mac saga’s interstices, even as he strives for a purer, separate art, muddied by the band’s cocaine-clouded excess and soap opera along the way.Lindsey Buckingham was recorded after typical turmoil Read more ...