New music
Nick Hasted
This album’s title began as a reaction to fractiousness under Trump, but gained more intimate meaning when drummer Janet Weiss quit Sleater-Kinney shortly before release. With production by St Vincent’s Annie Clark pushing these knotty indie-rock veterans towards gliding electro-pop, the musical differences Weiss cited after 22 years of shared service are obvious throughout. Sleater-Kinney’s abrasive, post-riot grrrl American feminism, forged in the idealistic Nineties hotbed of Olympia, Washington, is the core of their enduring importance. The Center Won’t Hold coherently develops their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
To Whom Buys a Record roams through 12 crisply recorded pieces confirming that jazz which isn’t shy of acknowledging its heritage can still have an edge. Though structured and tight, each composition is defined by an attack positing this as an unmediated music: not so much improvisation, but still free-flowing.Take “Bøtteknott”. A sax takes off; stabbing, then weaving. The drums are relentless. A double bass dives, runs and skips. During the more subdued “Broken Beauty”, a mournful sax refrain gives way to a tense wash of cymbal and then, on its own, pulses of bass. A storm is coming.The Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Justin Sullivan, the last remaining original member of Bradford post-punkers New Model Army, has always given the impression of taking things all a bit seriously. After all, he did go by the name of Slade the Leveller and wear wooden clogs for the first few years of the band, railing against the small-mindedness of “Small Town England” and howling for “Vengeance”. Some 40 years on, while Justin may have mellowed a bit, he can still hardly be described as light-hearted and frivolous in his approach to songwriting. Instead, his worldview of general disappointment at the rest of the human race, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Diamond Head was Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera’s first solo album. Released in May 1975 and recorded the previous December and January during a lull in his parent band’s activities, it hit shops between Roxy’s Country Life and Siren albums. Singer Bryan Ferry had done a short solo tour in December 1974 which culminated with a show at The Royal Albert Hall where he was backed by an orchestra. Manzanera took a different tack.Playing alongside him on Diamond Head were Eddie Jobson, Andy Mackay, Paul Thompson and John Wetton – sans Ferry, Manzanera assembled the whole of the then-current Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Foo Fighters are an unlikely candidate for one of the biggest bands in the world. There’s nothing workmanlike about the sheer joy with which Dave Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins approach playing live. They’ll play the hits, sure, but they’ll stick a 10-minute long jam session on the end of each one, and they’ll also play the 22-year-old deep cut that you used to sing 'Pat Smear backing vocals' along to with your first boyfriend. And you, the audience, will love every minute of it.Here’s what a two-and-a-half hour open-air headline set from the Foo Fighters gets you: a selection of songs from Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Pram could hardly be described as representative of the UK psychedelic scene, it would be hard to imagine South Birmingham’s favourites being birthed by any other sub-culture. Sixties film and television soundtracks collide with dreamlike soundscapes, 30s jazz, trippy pop and more than a dash of the almost mythic BBC Stereophonic Workshop to create music that somehow feels particularly rooted in the British mindset. Especially once it finds itself under the influence of a couple of stiff gins or something perhaps a little stronger. Strange, yet half-recognised grooves power this eerie Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
South-coast four piece Grenades’ debut album is that most unlikely of musical outings, an ecological grunge-punk concept album. This is no wafty, feel-good affair, though, its environmental concern is akin to the eco-parable shock tactics of rough’n’ready Eighties exploitation flicks such as Cannibal Holocaust and Green Inferno. Whether the listener goes on the darkly bizarre lyrical journey or not, Primates is crammed with shout-along songs built into hefty guitar attack.Musically, Grenades carve their own path. They emanate the down-tuned bite of Soundgarden but at a much greater velocity. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been a period of upheaval and change for singer-songwriter, and compelling interpreter of traditional ballads, Josienne Clarke. These days she’s a Rough Trade artist, now sailing solo seas away from her long-time musical partner, producer and arranger Ben Walker. Together between 2010 and last year, they released two digital albums, Our Light is Gone and The Seas are Deep, three EPs and four exquisite CD/vinyl releases in 2013’s Fire & Fortune, the following year’s Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour, 2016’s Overnight and the final Seedlings All last year, the latter the first to be Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It's been two years since Ride came back from a 20-year break with their reunion LP, Weather Diaries. Fans considered the album a triumph. This is Not a Safe Place, though, is a notch above. It's 50 minutes of intoxicating and contrasting moods that move from dreamy indie to post-punk. Underpinning the music is a sense of finding your identity in an increasingly disconnected and polarised world. Intriguingly then, it wasn't contemporary Britain but 1980s New York that first inspired the album. Or rather, the city as Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At recent live shows, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn has taken to describing the band’s current lineup as the best it’s ever been. Boosted to a six-piece by the return of Franz Nicolay on keyboards, the Hold Steady of the band’s latter-day London residencies has been well worth the annual 800-mile round-trip: celebratory; poignant; communal; joyous. Thrashing Thru the Passion takes all of these moods, combines five of the tracks released digitally over the past 18 months with five new ones, and the result is the band’s tightest and most fun album since 2008’s Stay Positive.“Denver Haircut” Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Frank Turner’s compendium of extraordinary female lives, from the “impudence” of a Byzantine princess to his mum via Mata Hari, is admirably ambitious and historically intriguing. The arena-playing folk-punk digs deeper into factual byways than he has any career need to, insisting on his own wayward course. “Jenny Bingham’s Ghost” sympathetically revives the 17th century landlady who poisoned and cooked abusive men and was condemned as a witch, and draws idealistic threads to the agreeably seedy rock dive on the site of her tavern, Camden Underworld, and its ongoing role as “a sanctuary for Read more ...
howard.male
“I don’t want to talk, man. Let’s just fucking do it,” announces Ese Okoroduku, before crashing into the opening guitar chord of her debut album’s title track. This sums up the Nigerian-born, south London musician's whole ethos. Up In Smoke was recorded is just two days, with only a couple of overdubs added later, and analogue tape used to capture gorgeous valve amp buzz and vocal warmth. Such a cavalier approach could easily have backfired had she not already thoroughly learned her craft as a busker before then touring her band for 18 months.The material here oscillates between sophisticated Read more ...