rock
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...
mark.kidel
PJ Harvey is undoubtedly Britain’s most original and consistent rock musician and poet, an artist with a natural passion for transgression that fuels her ceaselessly self-renewing creativity.War is the toughest subject of all: the realm of senseless bloodlust and violence to which humanity seems fatally addicted. Let England Shake walks straight in there, fearlessly grappling with the contradictions of patriotism, the tragic fate of the helpless foot-soldier sacrificed in his youth, and the memory of death from which there is no honest escape. As our unofficial war artist, steeped Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There were other contenders for my favourite album of 2011. Nicolas Jaar’s electronic odyssey Space is Only Noise certainly pushes towards imaginative sonic frontiers in ways nobody could accuse Motörhead of doing, and The Death Set, bratty noiseniks from Australia via New York, demonstrated on Michel Poiccard just what a brilliant racket can be made by lacing punk rock attitude with electronic thunder. In the end, though, as other albums came and went, The World is Yours sat in my car stereo’s 10 CD changer from January until December and I hammered it. It gave me the most pleasure of all. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Call it an absurdly grand gesture if you like, but Manic Street Preachers' decision to bow out of live performance for a while with a gig in which they would play every one of their 38 singles had to be admired. It certainly had an all-or-nothing rigour that Richey Edwards would have endorsed. But would James Dean Bradfield recall all the words? Would Nicky Wire's knees survive all of that sustained bouncing around. Would piledriving drummer Sean Moore wear a hole in his skins? These and more questions were answered during last night's frequently stunning gig.The canny step was taken not to Read more ...
david.cheal
This show was memorable almost as much for the audience as it was for the music. The Roundhouse was perhaps two-thirds full for a show that The Low Anthem’s singer Ben Knox Miller said was “the biggest gig of their career” (adding: “And I’ve never called it a ‘career’ before”), but those who were there had clearly come to see the band rather than catch up on gossip, because the audience’s attention was absolute, their silence total; I can scarcely recall a gig where the crowd’s concentration was so complete.The objects of their attention were a band from Providence, Rhode Island who have been Read more ...
joe.muggs
Nova Scotia-born Leslie Feist is the very model of a 21st-century artist: independent in spirit yet able to work the mainstream industry to her advantage, technologically savvy and au fait with all the means to build and sustain a profile and sales while still maintaining some sense of artistry and dignity. Yet she is also resolutely traditionalist in many ways, with the rich traditions of Laurel Canyon rock, Brill Building songwriting and older, rootsier sounds audible in her songs, and a sense of rather old-school Bohemianism to her dedication to music as a lifestyle and the collective of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I remain bemused when bands such as U2 or Coldplay announce they are “going experimental” and are greeted as if they might be. The correct response is: “No, you’re not, you’re as alternative as avocado in a prawn cocktail rather than lettuce.” So here we have U2 and Coldplay’s wet younger sibling supposedly stepping into the wild unknown for their sixth album. In reality this means having a tentative crack at sounding like an early Simple Minds album, albeit firmly filtered through the epic sonic template laid down by those aforementioned older brothers.Snow Patrol’s early history is a story Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Some successful rock stars accumulate wives, others accumulate houses, cars or drug habits. Damon Albarn seems to accumulate bands. As well as his on-off relationship with Blur, there is the semi-regular Gorillaz. And he has been seeing even more musicians on the side, too. He recently appeared at the Barbican alongside the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea (must have been a seven year itch?) and last night he rekindled an old flame, reconvening The Good, The Bad & The Queen for a one-off Greenpeace benefit.If things started sluggishly that was unsurprising. Albarn, Paul Simonon, Simon Read more ...
bruce.dessau
“My friends don't add up to one hand,” intoned Mark E Smith on his 1988 album Frenz Experiment. Maybe not, given his legendary propensity for dramatically falling out with band members, but his albums now add up to considerably more than a single appendage. Ersatz GB is Smith's 29th studio album, and while not necessarily his best, it certainly demonstrates that his appetite for creating angry, angular, wonderfully warped state-of-the-nation addresses is hardly diminished.Ersatz GB reflects Smith's increasing despair at this sceptic isle's rotten-to-the-core decline. The lyrics are Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s guitar rock, but not as we know it. Anna Calvi, the Londoner in her late twenties whose debut album created a stir earlier this year and earned her a Mercury Prize nomination, makes music that has all the familiar, recognisable elements of the music that we call “rock” – guitar, vocals, drums – but her treatment of it is idiosyncratic; she exploits the spaces between the instruments as much as the instruments themselves to create a dark mood, an atmosphere of heightened sexual tension.It takes a bit of getting used to. At a sold-out Shepherds Bush Empire, on the London leg of her UK tour Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Boy, do Arctic Monkeys move fast. There were 21 songs in their set at the O2 Arena last night and at one point they were racing through them at such a breathtaking lick I thought I would be on my way home within the hour. In the end their performance clocked in at around the length of a football match thanks to some pauses to swap guitars. Plus a break for Alex Turner to stand by the drums and ostentatiously comb his elaborate quiff. Some sections of the crowd might have questioned Turner’s surprising 2011 rug-rethink, but no one would dare question his ability to pen a brilliantly infectious Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...