rock
Nick Hasted
Rock’n’roll’s spirit is mother’s milk to Prophet, imbuing everything he touches. His old band Green On Red had stopped being roots rivals to R.E.M. long before their 1992 split, but alongside their co-leader Dan Stuart’s solo trilogy embellishing his Mexican wild years (where Ambrose Bierce met Hunter Thompson), Chuck Prophet has become a Zen rock songwriting master, rolling out a series of unassuming classics. His touchstones are mostly dead wastrels, his style wry, low-slung and romantic.The Land That Time Forgot finds him gentrified out of recording in his San Francisco hometown, instead Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson’s views on his band Be-Bop Deluxe’s debut album are measured. In the essay accompanying its reissue, he writes “Axe Victim is one brief snapshot of a band in the process of becoming something else…a modest beginning, flawed but not without charm. And not the end of the story. I’ll always be grateful for the way that it helped launch a more appropriate vessel for my music, a ship which sails onward to this very day.” He sees the album as transitional.When it was issued in June 1974, NME’s dismissive Ian MacDonald was less restrained in his review: “I confidently predict that Be-Bop Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
During the first decade of this century Conor Oberst was critically anointed as a successor to the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. It didn’t seem to make him very happy. His project Bright Eyes, with musical prodigies Nate Walcott and Mike Moggis, twisted and turned through varying musical styles, as if purposefully evading easy definition, while Oberst’s lyrics became increasingly bleak and opaque. Bright Eyes now return, after nine years of absence. Oberst is no happier, but his cryptic, committed, broken-voiced melancholy is a good fit for these times.Bright Eyes' last Read more ...
mark.kidel
Together for over 20 years and with a string of incredibly successful albums, the Scottish trio return with a ninth release that offers more of the relatively sophisticated bombast they've consistently delivered, not least in perfectly-paced audience-pleasing festival performances.Biffy Clyro are a metal band with heart, with little of the doom and gloom or Gothic menace associated with so much of the genre. They're creatures of the golden sunlight rather than the dark underworld. And yet also macho guitar heroes, fuelled by fiery energy that borders on anger but never gives way to excess. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Although Metallica are screening a freshly recorded concert across America’s drive-in cinemas at the end of the month, we’re no nearer to actual gigs anywhere, especially the UK. Hold tight. We’ll get there. In the meantime, here are three events worth taking a look at.AIM Music AwardsTonight (Wednesday 12th August), the annual AIM Music Awards will occur online here from 7.00 PM. The event features performances by two leading names in UK hip hop, Little Simz and AJ Tracey, as well as a tribute to the late great Afro-beat drumming legend Tony Allen by Femi Koleoso from UK jazz unit the Ezra Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
One of the most evocative tracks on James Dean Bradfield’s second solo album is hardly his at all. The Manic Street Preacher takes “La Partida”, a haunting, finger-picked melody by the Chilean musician Victor Jara, and blows it up to the size of an arena, its central refrain echoed back by a stadium’s worth of voices. As a tribute to Jara who, with thousands of his countrymen, was tortured and shot by General Pinochet’s troops in the stadium which now bears his name, it’s both apt, and breathtaking.Fans of the Manic Street Preachers are quick to list the art, music and literature they have Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s exciting to come to an album with no preconceptions and no context and find you fall immediately in love with it. Tanya Donelly is probably less well-known in Britain than she deserves to be: she last toured here in 2014 with Throwing Muses, one of two bands she co-founded (the other was The Breeders) before founding and fronting Belly, finally going solo in the mid-'90s.Stateside she’s more of a name, particularly in the Boston area, and essentially known as a singer-songwriter. She’s no stranger to covers and during lockdown has been laying down a series of modern classics at # Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
New Heavy Sounds is one of Britain’s most exciting and undersung labels. Founded in 2011, they have consistently released music that boasts innovation, imagination and a strong female presence. The added sweetener is that this comes attached to sheer guitar-slingin’ power of the kind heavy rockers, from the 1970s to the present, have always relished. Styling themselves in favour of “anything with dirty, big riffs and attitude,” their output has one foot in the metal camp but aspirations beyond it. The two men behind New Heavy Sounds, Ged Murphy and Paul Cox, avoid gimmicks and hype and let Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We are no nearer live music returning and, as venues across the country face financial collapse, it’s clear that even when we reach some sort of "new normal", far from all will be left standing. This is clearly a disaster for British music. #SaveOurVenues offers an opportunity to help over 500 UK venues stay alive: details here. In the meantime, as ever, there's still plenty happening online. Check out these three.Cambridge Folk at HomeThe Cambridge Folk Festival is one of Britain’s oldest but, like every other green field event, they’ve been kyboshed by COVID. However, in conjunction with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Everyone keeps upping their game with what and how they’re presenting music in these unwelcome times, and this week sees a red hot selection on offer. Below is a cross section of the best that’s out there to see, hear and get involved withTomorrowland Around the WorldAs the weeks pass, new standards are being set for the presentation of music online. Nowhere more so than with epic European EDM festival Tomorrowland. Working with experts in 3D design, video production, gaming and special effects, they will be presenting eight stages, each one with a landscape equivalent to around 10 square Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The lockdown which began in March is now noticeably easing, although in the realm of gigs and festivals things are still nowhere near operative. Nonetheless, theartsdesk is responding to the changes by ceasing our many weeks of New Music Lockdown Specials and looking forward to an increasing amount of actual live events. This week, we can only offer one, alongside plenty of streamed entertainment, but it’s early days. Here’s to the future. Dive in!Supersonic presents SofasonicBirmingham’s Supersonic is one of the only shindigs in Britain’s jammed annual summer festival calendar that truly Read more ...
Asya Draganova
It is difficult to live up to your own legacy when you’ve reached an iconic status in rock’n’roll. It is even harder when you are a frontwoman in a “masculine” genre where age makes you increasingly invisible and/or viciously criticised. Like Chrissie Hynde sings in the autobiographical “Can’t Hurt a Fool” from the new record, she does not “play the rules” and is “too old to know better/too young for her age”. She rises to the challenge with confidence and oomph: the tunes from the new Pretenders album Hate for Sale are well worth the listen.If you are a Pretenders fan, you will not be Read more ...