CDs/DVDs
Ellie Roberts
Alkaline Trio’s gruesomely named 10th album, Blood, Hair, And Eyeballs, is a commentary on the modern world through the dark, poetic lens that the band have honed over their 25-year career. In both theme and sound, it captures their identity while offering new observations.The striking riff and sombre lyrics that open the album in “Hot for Preacher” set the tone for the remaining tracks. Cries of “I just cannot seem to get my rotten head around this mess” and “God has given up on me” are intertwined with solid melodies and an almost romantic smirk. For every reference to horror and despair, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Halfway through this album, “They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper” unlocks it. On first listen I’d been nodding along with the first few songs, enjoying how they find glimmers of more or less forlorn hope in amongst sadness and middle-aged domestic stress.I’d been enjoying, too, how the gentle, even kitsch bossa nova and psyche pop lilt of the arrangements makes them into what I like to think of as “soft music for hard times” (in fact an obsession of mine, see my playlist series now over 130 volumes strong). And then came “...Skyscraper” which pulled all of those elements together, Read more ...
Cheri Amour
When Ed Sheeran sang about a Galway girl in his radio-friendly folk number of the same name, he hadn’t met NewDad vocalist and guitarist Julia Dawson. This Galway girl doesn’t play a fiddle. She fronts an ethereal foursome re-energising a classic shoegaze sound rather than falling in line with fellow Irish acts and their hard-hitting anthems (see 6Music staples IDLES and SPRINTS). The band, completed by Cara Joshi, guitarist Sean O’Dowd and drummer Fiachra Parslow, share a closer resemblance to their experimental rocker peers Just Mustard – another group happy to swoop in on the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wax lyrical about the contents of a British Transport Films short and you might start sounding like a Daily Mail columnist, railing about things being better back in the day. On the evidence of this 15th volume in the BFI’s anthology series, many things clearly were. Take 1969’s Multiple Aspects, which shows engineers remodelling the lines leading into Paddington Station, the work completed on time, and presumably on budget, in exactly five weeks. Though it’s disconcerting to watch the workers slaving away without hi-vis jackets or protective headgear, just inches away from passing trains, as Read more ...
Tom Carr
Since his time fronting the hardcore band Gallows, Frank Carter has established himself as a figurehead of modern British punk-rock. His current project, Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes is among the most lively and exciting live acts in the UK.On previous albums they have regularly tackled subjects such as mental health and toxic masculinity. Their last effort – 2021’s Sticky – was a free-spirted affair, cutting loose after the containment of the lockdowns of the previous year.Having honed a streamlined, yet powerful, sound heavily tinged with punk and hardcore, combined with Carter’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
With this her third album, Bronx-born-singer-songwriter Lizzie No promises “an apocalyptic journey from exile to liberation” – a bold promise. Halfsies is certainly an album of musical contrasts: on the one hand the freneticism of “Getaway Car” or “Lagunitas”, on the other the gentle, delicate beauty of “Mourning Dove Waltz” or “The Heartbreak Store”.From folk to rock and back again, this is a beguiling album that’s tough and tender and full of sly humour. Listening to it, you can see why the audience at last year’s Celtic Connections was won over.No grew up singing in the church choir Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shaun Ryder is now known mostly for being Shaun Ryder, via any random TV programme that will pay him a couple of quid. In this light, his musical achievements have lost some of their shine over the decades. But, if given the chance, a couple of those Happy Mondays albums and the first Black Grape album still own the room. It’s 30 years since that first Black Grape album, It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah (they weren’t!), but the band's two albums since have both been, well, pretty good, actually. And the same can be said for their fourth.The band now consists of just Ryder and his old Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There are musicians on the UK dance underground who doggedly identify with particular scenes and evolve with them. There are those who adapt stylistically in order to move from scene, or manage to be part of several at the same time. And then there is Londoner Danny Native aka Altered Natives. He is truly the outsider’s outsider.He’s made tracks over the years that have been played by mainstays in scenes like house, broken beat, UK funky, post-dubstep and elsewhere, but by a combination of accident and design is part of none of these things. With a distinctively cantankerous and mordant wit, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the time the time that he retired his Ziggy Stardust alter ego, David Bowie put out an album of covers, done in a Glam/Proto-punk style. This included tunes by the Yardbirds, the Kinks and various other Garage Rock bands that were somewhat outside the mainstream at the time.Fifty years or so later (yes, really), Soft Cell’s Marc Almond and Neal X, most famously of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, have put together a new outfit with Mat Hector and Ben Ellis of Iggy Pop’s touring band and James Beaumont, called The Loveless, and have done the same – albeit with a couple of fine original tunes for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nailah Hunter’s debut album occupies a domain where trip-hop, Lana Del Rey were she recording in a deep, echo-filled cave and ambient-slanted pop overlap. There’s a kinship with FKA Twigs and Julia Holter, but Hunter’s propensity to channel what feels like a mystical experience means that Lovegaze is more inscrutable than what’s generated by first impressions.Her voice is distant, a low-ish soprano set in a wash of synths. Pattering percussion and the glissando of her Celtic harp pierce the aural mist. On the relatively sparsely arranged “Adorned” – which has a slight Alice Coltrane feel – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis hasn’t made large waves this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps this is because her appeal has partly been rooted in Latin communities across the US and, indeed, Central and South America. Last year her third album, Red Moon in Venus, reached the Top 5 of the US album charts. At the time she said she already had her next album ready, a Spanish language affair. This is it and it’s a slightly feistier creature than its woozily narcotic predecessor.Uchis’s current default setting remains sexy-stoned. Her voice is a seductive instrument. She silkily rolls language Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
January 2024 marks the beginning of a new era for leading UK pop-punks Neck Deep, their upcoming 10 track LP captures a moment of harmony between their global success and their dedication to staying true to their roots. Following huge tours and top 5 records, the band opted to write and record their self-titled album in their own warehouse space in Wrexham, and from energetic opener “Dumbstruck Dumbf**k” all the way through to introspective closing track “Moody Weirdo”, Neck Deep expertly represents the band. It’s pop-punk perfection with a distinguishable Neck Deep stamp on it.The familiar Read more ...