rock
caspar.gomez
PrologueOn Thursday 26 June I arrive at a cloudy but warm Glastonbury Festival, set up camp, eat sausages, chase after DJ Richie Hawtin for an interview that never happens, then acclimatise, settle, let this hedonist Mecca do its work on me…Friday 27 JuneIt starts as spotting. Then it lets go. The sound of droplets pattering against the outer skin of the brown four-person tent becomes a regular tattoo. I lie within, waiting out the mind-fuzz of yesterday’s cider, whisky and chemicals, munching on a breakfast of Morrisons Cheese Savouries (which are, incidentally, addictive). I wonder if 2014 Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as if the life-on-the-road song has become a rite of passage for those rock bands that manage to clock up enough years together, but after 20 years in the business Texan alt-country rockers Old 97’s probably have more of a claim to it than most. Clocking in at just under six minutes, “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” is one of the best examples of the genre, regardless of its titular accuracy. It’s a meandering, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the rock star excesses, but also the tedium, that comes with life in a moderately successful touring band. As frontman Rhett Miller reminisces, most Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dead Moon: In the Graveyard, Unknown Passage, DefianceAfter a few notes of barbed-wire, bent-string guitar, a descending riff kicks in. It’s a relative of the uptempo version of “Hey Joe”. The voice starts. It’s high-pitched, as if Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant had only Love’s Arthur Lee and The 13th Floor Elevator’s Roky Erickson as an influence. The lyrics are hard to make out but touch on mean days and a girl who turns the singer cold. He might as well be dead and in a graveyard. The momentum is tempered by a break borrowed from The Elevators' “You’re Gonna Miss me”. The production is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If they ever wanted somebody to make a sequel to Marty Robbins's Gunfighter Ballads and usher in a rockabilly revival for good measure, Jack White is the man. The 11 tracks on this new album - the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss - reek of rage, lust, drink and gunpowder (among other things), and most of them crash along like a herd of stampeding buffalo.Identifying every ingredient White has smuggled in could take years, but he squeezes bags of mileage out of crashing piano chords, guitars that sound like steel girders being hammered out of shape and country fiddles that yowl like mating cats Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tonight Birmingham was treated to a guitar fest of epic proportions, as the Japanese, Hawkwind-esque experience that is Bo Ningen hit town. Prior to the main event, we were treated to the boisterous thrash of The Scenes, who finished their set with the flippant yet amusingly named “Anorexia Is Boring”, and the Teenage Fanclub-esque 12-strings of Younghusband. Neither, however, quite prepared the crowd for the ear-lacerating noise and mesmerising groove of the headliners.Taigen Kawabe and his band of psychedelic renegades arrived on stage amid swirls of dry ice. Dressed like extras from the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who remembers the critical mauling that The Horrors received on the release of their first album, 2007’s Strange House, might be surprised to learn that seven years later, they have just put out a fourth set of new songs. Not only that, but that it wouldn’t be a stretch to describe Luminous as eagerly awaited by many.However, while the release of each previous Horrors album has seen significant stylistic musical leaps, Luminous sees the band settle into the sound of 2011’s Skying and build further upon its early Simple Minds-esque template. This isn’t to say, however, that Luminous is Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Lord may have tickled his last ivory in 2012, but last night his spirit lived defiantly on. The great and the good from both heavy and contemporary music gathered in his memory. It was for a serious purpose - to raise funds for pancreatic cancer care. But, boy, what a time we had doing it. A revolving door of stars brought us wild solos, screaming vocals and thundering rhythms. But before all the classic rock, culminating in a set from Deep Purple, came something a little more classical.The first hour was devoted to Lord’s orchestral compositions. Our host was “whispering” Bob Harris, who Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time I reached “Coming Home” - the second track on Kaiser Chiefs’ fifth album, and the band’s "comeback" single - I was predicting not a riot exactly, but certainly a few snide comments below re: my knowledge of the Leeds lads’ back catalogue. While not wholly unpleasant, its drivetime radio-friendly smoothness seemed an odd choice for a band best known for anthemic, stadium-filling indie swagger - particularly as it was always going to be seen as something of a mission statement for their first album without chief songwriter and drummer Nick Hodgson.But then Education, Education, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who came across Band of Skulls' sophomore album, Sweet Sour, in 2012 would have heard the sound of a band that was more than conversant with the Led Zeppelin songbook but who had no intention of staying put in the early Seventies. The chugging guitar was there alright, but there was plenty more than that going on in the likes of “Bruises” and “You’re Not Pretty but You’ve Got It Going On”. Follow-up, Himalayan, breaks still further from the strict blues-rock template with the introduction of a bucketful of other textures. That said, the echo of Jimmy Page’s crunching riffs and Robert Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Thinking back, it was with 2010’s Heaven is Whenever that I stopped recommending my favourite band to the people who didn’t already get it. It wasn’t that it was a bad album – in capturing the world-weariness of the party band once the world moves on it was almost exactly the one that they needed to make – but by that stage you probably knew yourself whether you were the type of hopeless barroom romantic likely to learn lessons from the one who’d seen it all in the corner. On first listen Teeth Dreams comes across as more of the same, but there are so many moments of magic here I’m half Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tyrannosaurus Rex: A Beard of Stars/T.Rex: T.Rex, Tanx/Marc Bolan & T. Rex: Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of TomorrowReactions to these reissues are going be determined by what level of fandom the band's acolytes subscribe to. These are not for the casual purchaser. Each is stuffed with masses of bonus tracks, many previously unreleased. The primary content is overwhelmed by the bonuses. Whether it's good or bad to put original albums in the shade is a matter of taste. The volume of extra material makes it hard to appreciate what Bolan intended each album to be in the first place.With Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If English Oceans is the Drive-By Truckers finest album since 2004’s The Dirty South - and I’d argue that it is - I doubt it was intentional. A little time away; more of a partnership of equals between founder members and songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley; and inspirations rooted as much in real life (“Grand Canyon”, dedicated to the memory of crew member and friend Craig Leiske) as in fiction (“Pauline Hawkins”, named for a character in a Willy Vlautin novel) find the southern-fried country rock veterans in a creative place that sounds both vibrant and effortless.What probably helps Read more ...