rock
Adam Sweeting
Despite having been a rock star since the late Seventies, Chrissie Hynde seems to be an introverted, elusive sort of person. If this Arena profile was anything to go by, she lives as a virtual recluse, positively revelling in solitariness. Like the film, her last album was called Alone.“I spend all my time alone,” we saw her telling Sandra Bernhard, evidently a close friend. “I have nothing else to do. It’s my choice, I like it.” Well good for her, and it does mean she has plenty of time to pursue her recently-found passion for painting (which she’s pretty good at, too). But it didn’t really Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Another peripatetic global music update from theartsdesk's Peter Culshaw, hosted by Music Box Radio. This edition features forthcoming album releases from hard salsa revivalists La Mambanegra, a remix from heroic desert rockers Tinariwen and electro Tunisian stars Bargou 08. We go to Brazil for the adventurous Sāo Paulo singer Luisa Maita and preview new jazz tunes from Brad Mehldau and E.S.T. There’s a new track from rebel star Manu Chao. Out this month is the new album from Aurelio, already in various music to-look-out-for-in-2017 lists. His cool take on garifuna music from Beliza and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been 12 months since the news guy wept and told us: David Bowie, ever out in front, became the first to depart in the year of musical mortality 2016. After the initial lamentations, the memorial tributes have been a mixed bag. Best was the life story stitched together for Radio 4 from a vast back catalogue of audio interviews. Less impactfully there was also the well-meaning misfire at the Proms, plus a messy Dadaist meta-biog rushed out by Paul Morley. Broadcast on what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday, The Last Five Years is the best attempt yet to contextualise late Bowie in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Context in rock is everything. Popular music is, after all, essentially a reaction to a moment in time. So, whilst in another year, an album like A Moon Shaped Pool may just have lurked in my top five, political circumstances propelled it straight to number one. It wasn't just that the piece was thick with feverishness and alienation. What really made it embody 2016 was the unmistakable whiff of fear. The album's emotional release began from the get-go. "Burn the Witch" was built on a series of rhythms that pulsated like a montage of Daily Mail headlines. Lyrics Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A 90-minute biographical documentary about Bruce Springsteen, you may think, is for Springsteen fans only. But really anyone who is interested in fame, friendship, family relationships and the creative process will have enjoyed this – a revealing mix of personal testimony, The Boss reading from his recently released autobiography of the same title, Springsteen family home movies, and rarely seen footage of his early career.For music fans, the most interesting section was where Springsteen talked about his influences – they are wide and varied, and have a noticeably large number of British Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“One thing there's not is the big Metallica ballad – it's all pretty uppity,” said Lars Ulrich of Hardwired… to Self-Destruct, Metallica’s first album for the best part of a decade. If we ignore, for a moment, the Trump-esque grasp of language and assume he meant uptempo rather than arrogant, the drummer appears to be a master of understatement as soon as opener “Hardwired” tears out of the gate, all rabid intent and sweary barking.It’s a tempo that you’d imagine would be difficult to keep up for a group that’s made up of, in the main, men in their 50s, and you’d be right. So, after the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Good grief, was Out of Time really 25 years ago? This was the seventh studio album from the li'l ole band from Athens, Georgia, and the one with which they finally cracked open the mainstream international market. This was when people still used to buy CDs, and a time when it was still possible for bands to sustain slow-growing careers which built steadily from the ground upwards. Having been one of the trailblazers of America's mid-Eighties alternative rock movement, growing a faithful following through college radio and endless touring, REM had had it moderately large with their Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The last time Genesis Breyer P Orridge was in the UK, it was to touch down and talk about life, art, magic and strange encounters as part of COUM, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and PTV3 at the October Gallery's William Burroughs centenary show back in 2015.Since then, there has been a return to music – earlier this year, the entire catalogue of Psychic TV and PTV3 was reissued on Dias Records, much of it for the first time in digital format. Given that there was a campaign to release 23 live albums on the 23rd of each month (a Guinness World record), there's quite a lot of archive to Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 58 years since “Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley” had his first top 10 hit and now he’s back, and back to his roots, with a new CD, Just… Fabulous Rock ‘n’ Roll, released by Sony with whom, at the grand old age of 76, he has signed a lucrative new contract. And don’t mock. It’s a terrific album: 15 classic songs including a “duet” with Elvis Presley, without whom.Recorded at the Blackbird Studio in Nashville, where the likes of Dolly Parton, Sheryl Crow, Hank Williams Jr, Taylor Swift and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers have worked, it’s produced by Steve Mandile of country quintet. Sixwire Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It was 2008 when The Early Years went into the studio to begin work on the follow-up to their impressive self-titled debut. Having pretty much set out the blueprint for many, if not all, of the kraut-esque bands who followed in their wake, there was disagreement on where to go next: further down the same path or sideways onto softer, more experimental ground? Songs or structures? Klaus Dinger or Michael Rother?It was a disagreement that led to the abandonment of the project, until now, almost a decade later: the result, released on Sonic Cathedral, is such a beautifully balanced feat that it’ Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's an eeriness about this record that comes of it being so very perfectly anachronistic. TOY have formerly mined various parts of experimental rock history, notably Krautrock, and on their collaboration with Natasha “Bat For Lashes” Khan, some wild psychedelic rock from all corners of the planet. And certainly you can hear the chug of 1970s Dusseldorf sublimated into the grooves here on their third album – but the overwhelming sense is that this record exists somewhere around 1988 or 1989, back when indie truly meant indie.Yes, that does mean there's a feyness and reticence to the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Bon Jovi may be many things – a rock star, heartthrob and possessor of a fine haircut, to name but a few. The jury's still out, however, on whether he's actually a great singer. The consensus is more that Bon Jovi's voice is a character instrument and one that works best with Richie Sambora's guitar. Little wonder then, that when the guitarist left in 2014, the band struggled to recapture their old magic. Still, two years have now elapsed, since when many sonic adjustments have been made. So have they now regained their old mojo?This House Is Not for Sale certainly starts well enough Read more ...