rock
John Bungey
If you want to understand the psychic harm that prolonged lockdown can do to a man, then take a listen to Van Morrison's new 28-song set. Actually, you don't need to listen, the song titles say enough: “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?”; “Stop Bitching, Do Something”; “Deadbeat Saturday Night”; “They Own the Media”; “Why Are You on Facebook?”While Sir Van's vast catalogue is revered for transcendent love songs and joyous R&B, it also includes a sub-genre of complaint songs (“They Sold Me Out” on Magic Time or “School of Hard Knocks” on Keep it Simple, for example). With the singer stuck at Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When Laurence Binyon wrote: “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn…” he was, of course, talking about the fallen soldiers of World War One, not Amherst’s premier hardcore grunge punks. However, on hearing Sweep It Into Space, Dinosaur Jr.’s fifth album since their unexpected 2007 rebirth, it could easily apply to J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph.A lot has been written, much of it here, about the trio’s glacial evolution since their 1985 debut, and Sweep… certainly has all the familiar ingredients perfectly preserved in its slowly shifting ice. There’s heavy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It'll All Work Out In Boomland was issued by Decca at the end of July 1970. A poor seller at the time, it began attracting attention in the mid-Eighties when prices for original copies began creeping up. Around 2000, it was picking up about £100. These days, a first press of British rock band T2’s sole album generally sells for between £300 and £400. There’s the odd outlier where it has fetched over £1000. It’s a wallet buster.Despite T2’s commercial failure, Decca must have been interested in the band as there were two British pressings of the album in 1970: one without the band name on the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
11 Past the Hour opens with its title song, a delicious, twangy, string-laden Nancy Sinatra Bond theme that never was. The album closes with a lyrically empowered torch song, “Never Look Back”, which rises and rises over a marching band drum tattoo and swelling orchestration. Its enormousness is hard to argue with. Unfortunately, in between these two, Imelda May’s sixth album is a bit of a stinker.May is a likeable, intriguing artist, also one of Ireland’s biggest recent musical success stories. She spent years building a career as a rockabilly revisionist, her visual image well-defined, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sound of Metal has been a long time coming. Director and writer Darius Marder faced years of delays ranging from casting changes to the whole world shutting down. Was it worth the wait? Well, six Academy Award nominations including Best Film certainly suggest it was.The film follows Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke as Ruben and Lou, band members and lovers living the ideal rock'n'roll lifestyle. But when Ruben starts to suffer major hearing loss, it's clear their co-dependent relationship is built on shaky foundations. To avoid falling back into addiction, Ruben must isolate himself in an AA Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Glasvegas deal in hyper-emotion, personal dramas playing out in Spectoresque caverns of sound. Their signature songs, “Daddy’s Gone” and “I’m Gonna Get Stabbed”, wrung wrenching feeling from singer Jamie Allan, melodramatic blood and heat pulsing through his Glasgow tragedies, which pierced the sky and hearts from a root of dour realism. It was a place Springsteen and Strummer had been before, dirtied by the fuzz of The Jesus and Mary Chain, and elevated by worship of early Elvis.Making this fourth album was, though, more prosaically wearing. Godspeed’s studio was Allan’s spare room, making Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Close to the back of Jon Savage’s 1991 book England’s Dreaming, there’s a section titled “Discography.” In this, he goes through the records which fed into and were spawned by punk rock and the Sex Pistols, the book’s subject. The wide-ranging selection begins with Fifties rock ’n roll and Max Bygraves, and ends with the “post-house dance music” of The Justified Ancients Of Mu and Renegade Soundwave.When the mid-Seventies are reached, he says “the Murray Head 45 ‘Say it Ain’t so’ referred to in Chapter Nine is long deleted.” This chapter examines the birth of the Sex Pistols: tracking John Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Over 50 years into her career, Suzi Quatro could be forgiven for taking a break. And yet, last spring, staring down almost one hundred cancelled shows, her first instinct was not to put her feet up but to team up with her son Richard Tuckey on a new collection of songs as a follow-up to their recent collaboration on 2019’s No Control. With songs referencing imprisonment, darkness and solitude, it’s fair to say Quatro had the pandemic on her mind while pulling together 18th album The Devil in Me - but, unsurprisingly, her take on the isolation blues wears a hard rock sheen.The album bursts out Read more ...
aleks.sierz
All theatre is local — if you can’t get to where a show is playing you can’t see it. That is, until a pandemic closes all theatres and forces their shows to go online. The latest offering from Sheffield Theatres, now streaming to your home, is local in another way: Chris Bush’s The Band Plays On is an entertainment that has place at its very heart — it is a musical and historical love letter to the city of Sheffield. Over about 100 minutes, we get a mixture of female monologues and some spirited covers of mostly well-known songs by local heroes, from Dave Berry to Jarvis Cocker.This is a show Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Indie rock has taken a commercial back seat, even if the music press still hasn’t quite caught up. Sure, there have been hit-makers, and bands that sell out stadiums, but overall, indie’s tide is very slowly retreating. Like any genre, it will always be about, like westerns in Hollywood, a classic formula, but the take-up of technologies far beyond the electric guitar renders it a retro curio. Like metal, it offers invigorating rejigs, rendered fresh by each new generation revelling in the classic singer/guitar/bass/drums chemistry. Black Honey from Brighton are just such a case, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson knew February 1978’s Drastic Plastic was the last Be-Bop Deluxe album. In his essay for the book coming with the new “deluxe expanded” box-set reissue, he writes “that, as far as I was concerned, was that, the final Be-Bop Deluxe studio album, an era ended and a new one was about to begin. As the songs developed, I felt that the album might provide a kind of bridge to what might happen further along the road. It was definitely a half-way house between Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise.”Be-Bop Deluxe split in August 1978 and Nelson’s new band Red Noise first played live on 2 February Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple vocal styles, reminding of beatbox genius Reggie Watts (most especially his recent Wajatta project with John Tejada). The album cover encapsulates the cinematic, occasionally garish persona that comes across during the 15 tracks. What’s clear is that Genesis Owusu is no wall flower.Running through Smiling With No Teeth is the theme of a “black dog”. Read more ...