rock
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For almost 20 years, Drive-By Truckers have been one of Americana's most consistent and enduring voices – and, since 2001’s breakthrough double album Southern Rock Opera, probably the quintessential southern roots rockers too. Formed in Athens, Georgia in 1996 by Alabama natives Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, the five piece specialises in catchy melodies with more than a hint of the southern gothic, vivid characters and wickedly witty lyrics.The band are perhaps best known for a trio of concept albums: Southern Rock Opera, 2003’s Decoration Day and The Dirty South, released in 2004. Read more ...
joe.muggs
If you're looking for good vibes, you could do worse than watch people who've queued up for a surprise show by a megastar finally getting through the doors, having paid only a tenner. The buzz on the way into the Shepherds Bush Empire last night, in fact, was a real tonic – people whooping, spontaneously singing, grinning inanely. A quite peculiar mix of celebrities – Nick Grimshaw, Cara Delevingne, Alan Yentob and George Clinton – all took to their seats looking as excited as the 3,000-odd standard punters. This was what fandom should be about, and it couldn't have started off the evening Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Last night Lloyd Cole arrived on stage with a similar suede-and-corduroy air to that of his Eighties college-rock hits. Yet something was different. Over the last few years he has developed a real gravitas. It showed in the lines on his face and gunmetal hair; and it's this depth that critics have perceived on his recent album, Standards. Yet despite the critical acclaim the old troubadour is still not happy with how he’s “ disappearing into a niche”. In fact, he says, if this tour is a flop, he might give up music altogether.Whatever concerns Cole might have about his career, he didn’t bring Read more ...
Josiah Howard
Cher was the multi-platform performer of her day, a singer, TV personality, cabaret artist, and Oscar-winning actress. She came up as the initially teenage half of pop duo Sonny & Cher (pictured below left) in the mid-Sixties with her partner (and later husband) Sonny Bono, hitting the charts with megahit "I Got You, Babe". The pair went on to helm a successful TV show in the early Seventies but when they split up Cher was given her own self-titled variety show in 1975. New York journalist and writer Josiah Howard has focused on this in his new book Cher: Strong Enough. Below Howard tells Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This debut album came out a couple of years ago in New War’s native Australia but is now receiving a full international release courtesy of All Tomorrow's Parties. It deserves it. The quartet from Melbourne give rock, indie, punk - and a whole lot else - a dramatic shake-up, notably boasting lyrics by frontman Chris Pugmire that are intriguing, literate and sometimes poetic. The band also add weight to their driven sound with keyboards and effects utilised in a way that recalls the explosion of millennial New York bands such as Interpol and Out Hud.Try these lyrics - from "Revealer" - for Read more ...
Russ Coffey
As fans of Dylan’s Bootleg series will testify, “odds and ends” albums may require a small modification of expectations. High Hopes falls into a similar category: it’s a collection of 12 re-recordings, outtakes and covers of material that the Boss couldn’t find a home for in his previous 17 albums. Listeners may not find the experience especially consistent, but, still, there are some real nuggets here.Much of this is down to guitarist Tom Morello. Last year, Morello toured with the E Street Band whilst Steve Van Zant was off acting. Chemistry developed between the Rage Against The Machine Read more ...
joe.muggs
Country music in the 21st century is the weirdest thing, and not much of it seems to have to do with the country any more. At its commercial end, it sells billions of records by men with tight T-shirts and women with very white teeth who all drive gigantic 4x4s, making gigastars (in the US at least) of the likes of Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift. Elsewhere there is rootsy bluegrass for urban hipsters, avant-garde classical-electronica-folk, and a vast swathe of “alt.country” and Americana acts that blur the lines between indie rock and retro country.It's in this last category that Shonna Tucker Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s panto time in the UK and what better way to get into the spirit than the Goth Christmas Roadshow that is The Mission and Fields of the Nephilim? Here are two bands who were part of the goth scene that sprang forth in the second half of the Eighties in black cowboy hats and blacker shades, with a mission to move things away from post-punk austerity and back towards Seventies excess.In the Eighties, Fields of the Nephilim (pictured below in their heyday) adopted a stage show that included industrial volumes of dry ice and the fierce strobe lights. The music was a loud dirge and Carl McCoy’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now twenty five years since the release of the Waterboys’ most popular album, Fisherman’s Blues. To mark this auspicious occasion, Mike Scott has persuaded EMI to release a six-CD expanded version, Fisherman’s Box, which has 120-odd tracks of the type of music that, let’s not forget, did not receive universal acclaim in 1988 but has significantly grown in stature since then. He’s also called in the guys who recorded these folk, gospel, country and bluegrass flavoured tunes and has hit the road for a proper celebration of their “raggle-taggle gypsy” years.The Birmingham leg of the tour Read more ...
Tim Cumming
And so Dylan’s tour of European theatres, opera houses and concert halls ended on Thursday night at the Royal Albert Hall, his first dates here in 46 years. I’ve seen him plenty of times over the past 30 years. This was the best of them. Dylan’s found a way to use his voice again, and his group is so nuanced to its needs, it’s a pure pleasure to hear. Charlie Sexton plays a warm and refined lead, not rock'n'roll at all, and there’s a quiet glow between all the players; it’s as if they’re facing the same way, looking at the same colours.Appropriately, "Things Have Changed" opens it up as the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“There is a misconception that we have called ourselves the greatest band on earth.” Jack Black, the self-styled “lead singer” of Tenacious D, is all for dispelling a persistent rumour about a band which has, if he’s honest, done practically nothing to make him a famous name in Hollywood. “People have marketed us that way,” he explains. “You won’t find it anywhere in the albums. You won’t find it in any of our songs.”It’s true, you won’t. A semantic confusion may have initially arisen the first time the band ever performed in public, at a place called Al’s Bar in Los Angeles in 1994. The only Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dave Edmunds is one of a generation of rockers who came of age in the 1970s and excelled in channeling decades of American popular music: cue the pub rock bands, think Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello. There is a mixture of total knowingness and a nostalgic yearning for innocence that characterized the power pop of the period and a return to the three-minute single after the symphonic excesses of pomp and prog rock.Dave Edmunds channels The Beach Boys, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Otis Redding on this newly released album, most of which was originally available on his 1994 release Just Plugged. Read more ...