There’s a specific vocabulary that attends the arrival of a new Nick Cave album in the 21st century. Words like redemptive, cathartic, stark, unsparing are a crucial part of his music’s terroir. They’re as inescapable as the figure of death, and that’s something that looms large too, in the art and in the life. With a Gothy, druggy, doomy and well-dressed back story trailing from the Birthday Party and post-punk years of the 1980s, through to the presence of the Lord, interventionist or not, on The Boatman's Call, and the epic, wracked albums of the past decade, you suspect any new Read more ...

Whether it’s maturing or selling out, the tendency for rock bands to soften and smooth down their sound is understandable and, for fans, usually dispiriting – edge, purity, and strangeness evaporate as the dollars roll in. With their fourth album Romance, Fontaines DC have not only pulled away from their mordant, Dublin-dank post-punk toward a heady melange of rap, shoegaze, indie, and grunge, they've also become winningly tuneful. The miracle is that they’ve arrived at this eclectic juncture without sacrificing the danger and anxiety, as embedded in the music as in the lyrics, that Read more ...

Aside from their musical output, the fame – or notoriety – of Californian rockers Osees derives from two main factors. First, their consistently changing the spelling of their name on different releases (eg, Thee Oh Sees, OCS, etc). Second, their gushing prolificness of output. They’ve been releasing music for 21 years and Sorcs 80 is their 29th album. That’s going some.The short version of this review is that it’s a spirited electro-garage splurge but its sameyness occasionally grows annoying. Although Osees is a band it mostly represents the artistic vision of one person, frontman John Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHMike Lindsay Supershapes: Volume 1 (Moshi Moshi)Solo debut from Mike Lindsay, a founder member of tunng and also half of psychedelic duo LUMP. It’s a good thing when music is hard to describe. Opener “Lie Down” sets up the stall, a catchy but weird slice of poet-pop, wherein wonky dance rhythms, abstract jazz, lyrics about mundanity and shouts of the title phrase, including contributions from singer-songwriter Anna B Savage, add up to a wild frolic. With plenty of woodwind, lyrics about toast and Sunday roast, an inability to musically settle down anywhere “normal”, the Read more ...

X, although beloved of music journalists, are one of American punk’s most under-acknowledged. They took a tilt at fame in the mid-Eighties with the radio-friendly Ain’t Love Grand album and its lead single “Burning House of Love”, but it wasn’t to be. They remained a connoisseurs’ choice (inarguable evidence of their abilities is the stunning 1983 tune “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”). Now they reach the end of the line, persuasively so, with a wistful but sonically punkin’ final album.Led by the vocal spar-harmonising duo of John Doe and Excene Cervenka, the Los Angeles four-piece were never Read more ...

The weather is perfect. Rare at a festival in this country. The sun shines. Occasional clouds pass. There’s a light breeze. Flamingods are on the Charlie Gillett stage. They are a London-based unit of primarily Bahraini origin who make psychedelic-electronic rock tinged with exotica and Middle Eastern flavour. Very WOMAD, in other words.All around are iterations of hippy, from gnarled Sixties originals, lined and lived-in, batik-patchwork panted, to psy-trancey youths, half-clad, sleek in bodypaint and retro pink Lennon shades. We jog and nod. The music is likeable, not ecstatic. The vibe, Read more ...

Swedish-American four-piece Blues Pills are new to this writer but have been around since 2011. Their fourth album makes me wonder why.Of its 11 songs, judged purely on sheer pop-rock chops, nine have real legs. If a friend had put Birthday on and told me it had topped the charts in the US for three weeks, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Mind you, I might also have asked if it had been a hit some time between 1977 and 1982.That’s not quite fair. Birthday has a production sheen and feel that flirts with the modern. “Top of the Sky” sounds akin to Lady Gaga doing one of her lighters-in-the-air Read more ...

Ever since their 2013 album Now What?! hard rock veterans Deep Purple have been on a roll, both creatively and commercially. They’ve seemed a revitalised force. An album of covers aside, their output since has also sold/streamed multitudes. Not bad for a unit that’s been going for 56 years, with a stable line-up for well over 30. Their latest album is more enjoyable and feistier than cynics might imagine. It’s business as usual, of course, but Deep Purple wear their heritage with aplomb.Deep Purple, at their best, have always combined widdly guitars and hefty riffs with a pop sensibility, Read more ...

Orange Goblin have been flying the flag for exuberant biker rock for the best part of a generation. Yet, somewhat incredibly, their latest and 10th album, Science Not Fiction may come to be viewed as a career high for these hard rock lifers.Coming on like the soundtrack to a thundering berserker raid, Orange Goblin’s incendiary riffing and boisterous grooves tip a hat to iconic rockers like Motörhead or Venom at their most rabble rousing with man mountain and vocalist Ben Ward leading the charge. Indeed, while Science Not Fiction may not be especially original or inventive, it’s seriously Read more ...

SUNDAY 30th June 2024It’s late. But not really. Not by the standards of this place. Photographer Finetime and I are in Block9 in the South-East Corner. The so-called “naughty corner”. We take turns juggernauting quomble off a pinecone. Finetime’s right eyelid is twitching. This tic developed today. Nearby is a gigantic head. About the size of a large Victorian house. It’s at an acute angle to the ground. Instead of eyes it has a kind of welders’ mask blitzing white-noise light. Like the haunted, detuned television in the 1982 film Poltergeist.We all know what happened to the little blonde Read more ...

For a band as creative as St Albans’ own electronic-hardcore-rock fusion pioneers, Enter Shikari, the last thing you would expect them to do is sit on their hands.And that’s exactly what’s come to pass, as only a year after achieving their first UK number one with A Kiss For The Whole World, they follow up with companion album Dancing On The Frontline.There is always a risk with remix albums that they either end up feeling superfluous. Or, they go too far down the rabbit hole away from the original. Here, Enter Shikari thread the needle somewhat and limit the remixes, and include live Read more ...

Great bands’ output can, famously, be predicated by the intense interaction between members, often between a central creative pairing. This can be a harmonious mutuality but, more often, music is built from tension, from difference, from the frisson between two individuals.Such was the case with Kasabian for many years, with the gradually increasing disparity, between Kasabian guitarist and primary songwriter Serge Pizzorno and bullish frontman Tom Meighan. On their first album without the latter, 2022’s quirky The Alchemist’s Euphoria, they just about got away with his absence. On the Read more ...