rock
joe.muggs
Wolf Alice are a band who consistently over-deliver. Their presentation is so staid, their cited influences so safe (The Beatles! Blur!), their politics so “bad things are bad, m’kay?”, that they give every impression they’re going to be bland and generic.Yet over the past decade and a bit, they’ve consistently built a sound that is super distinctive: a kind of supersized shoegaze that allows their relatively straightforward songwriting to grow into something oceanic and dreamlike. It’s no wonder they fill stadiums, and it’s great that it’s not spectacle, personal soap operas Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The history of popular music is littered with bands who fulfilled everything needed to make it. Then fate kicked them in the teeth. Goofin’ good time Brit heavy rockers Dinosaur Pile-Up have had some rubbish luck.In 2019, after slogging the circuit for a decade, their fourth album was signed to Parlophone, they supported The Offspring and Sum 41 on US tours, and their new song “Back Foot” was an ebullient pop-metal classic. They were on the brink of breaking big.We all know what happened next. That virus closed the world. But, worse for the band, frontman Matt Bigland became seriously ill, Read more ...
Tom Carr
For a band who started by entirely self-producing their own records and performing in basements, it has ended up being a long and storied career so far for The Black Keys. The blues-rock group, consisting of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, began their career with their first five albums, from 2001 debut The Big Come Up through to 2008’s Thickfreakness, all playing in a modern blues rock wheelhouse.Distorted, heavily fuzzed guitar lines and Auerbach’s soulful warm vocals played over Carney’s frenetic, energetic drums; the duo quickly garnered a passionate following and renowned for their live Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year. It’s an incredible work of fathomlessly deep ambient and drone music, and I was baffled to see something so out-there clocking up millions upon millions of views, until I finally clocked her previous success. Though Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The default setting for Brighton indie quartet Black Honey is pop-grunge. There are plenty of moments during their fourth album when Nineties femme-rockers L7 spring to mind. But Black Honey also spread their wings and fly in other directions. The latter songs tend to be Soak’s most noticeable, although whatever style the band chose, they know enough about hooks to keep listeners onside.Singer Izzy B Phillips, newly sober and with a recent autism diagnosis, veers lyrically between cinematic impressionism and a more specific observational approach. The album’s closing song, “Medication”, Read more ...
James Mellen
Cian Ducrot cut his teeth on a blend of intimate singer-songwriter balladry and lowkey alt-pop, most of his debut album Victory sounding like a less personable Lewis Capaldi. There’s a modernity to Ducrot’s sound, though. The palette is spotless, bordering on the sterile, his solid vocal performances the key, and perhaps only, selling point of his music. New album Little Dreaming takes this to the extreme: opener “It’s Cian Bitch” is half bastardised turn of the millennium French disco-house, half Fleetwood Mac pastiche, all wrapped up in a lifeless bow. Little Dreaming is Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.After a transgressive, life changing trip to London from school in Scotland to see Chuck Berry at The Rainbow, Simon Parkes wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. He was soon spitting out the silver spoon (but he never lost the easy charm and ironclad self-confidence that clings to the privately educated, a trait he cheerfully calls upon as and when) and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Paul Weller occupies a strange place in the cultural sphere. Especially since he was adopted as an elder statesman of Britpop in the mid 1990s, he’s been particularly beloved of a core audience whose tastes are extremely conservative. So much so, in fact, that middle-aged men who ape his classic mod haircuts are now a shorthand for meat-and-potatoes, Brexity, red-faced, pub-coke bloke-rock. Yet Weller himself is anything but conservative.From the beginning he understood the “modernist” mission of mod, his ditching of the youthful energy of The Jam for the sophistication of The Style Council Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tami Neilson’s career is long and storied. The short version is that she began with a 1990s Canadian family band (opening for Kitty Wells, aged 10!), moved to New Zealand and became a country star there, then, over the last decade, has been “discovered by" and worked with all manner of US artists, ranging from Ashley McBryde to Willie Nelson. Her latest album is named in honour of the signage on Nashville Broadway, “the patron saint of heartbreak in downtown”, as she puts it. Less cheekily characterful than her output of recent years, it still has much to recommend it.Where her last album, Read more ...
joe.muggs
I met Mark Stewart once. It was on a platform at Clapham Junction, I wouldn’t normally approach a famous person like that, but I felt I had to pay my respects. It turned out he was getting on my train – going down to Dorset to “visit his old Ma” – and we talked on and off down to Southampton. He was hilarious, half scholar and gentleman, half lively uncle at a family function loudly telling old-school “blue” jokes, all in the thickest West Country burr this side of The Wurzels. I was glad I had done the gauche thing, doubly so after he died in 2023. Where meeting your heroes can sometimes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Bob’s not the kind of guy you can say no to,” said Sting, reminiscing about the origins of 1984’s Band Aid charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. “He’s persistent.”He spoke, of course, of Bob Geldof, then best known as the singer with Dublin band the Boomtown Rats, but destined to be remembered as the driving force behind Band Aid and the subsequent massive Live Aid concerts which took place on both sides of the Atlantic in July 1985. Experts believe the shows were watched by 1.9 billion people (onstage at Wembley Stadium, pictured below).The Boomtown Rats had some success on the UK Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Manticore was owned by Emerson, Lake and Palmer and their manager. The organisation provided the name for the band’s label. Apart from ELP and its individual members, the best-known signees to the imprint were Italian prog-rockers PFM and former King Crimson member Pete Sinfield. Despite this new album’s title, Motörhead were not with Manticore.However, Lemmy and co used ELP’s Manticore Studio in Fulham – in what used to be a cinema – during August 1976 when they showcased for prospective record labels. The release of the album they had recently completed for United Artists appeared to be Read more ...