rock
Thomas H. Green
Seems odd now, but there was a time when many Brits found country music laughable. It was a common thing. For instance, when Keith Richards embraced country, Jagger initially thought it a joke. By the time I was coming up in the Eighties, post-punk still a long shadow, my peers and I mostly felt the same; country was corny schmaltz dominated by middle-aged rhinestone blandness. I soon realised the error of my ways, but The Shires’ fifth album reminds me that, back then, we did also have a point.On their debut, The Shires sang, “We can build our own Nashville underneath these grey skies.” The Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Seven and a half years ago, Loop frontman Robert Hampson retired the band's back catalogue in front of a live audience. “You won’t hear these old songs again,” he told the audience at Islington’s Garage.As shocks go, it might not have been up there with Bowie handing Ziggy Startdust – and most of his unsuspecting band – their P45s live on stage, but it was still a searing statement of intent. It signalled Loop as a continuing concern, but one determined not to trade on past glories.With Sonancy, Hampson has made good on his promise. While some might hear the muscular riffing and relentless, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tears For Fears were an odd non-presence through their most successful years. They were right up there in the premier league of stadium rock-pop bands, but had none of the Celtic romantic bombast of U2 and Simple Minds, weren’t as weird as Eurythmics or Depeche Mode, as muso as Sting, nor as showbiz as Duran Duran or late Queen. Their Songs From the Big Chair album sold eight million copies, and everyone of a certain age can just about chant along to “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, but what really was there to them? It was all very earnest, Roland Orzabal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Healing, ecstasy and transformation are the aims, from Johnny Marr’s Manchester counter-culture adolescence to this compendium of Covid-era EPs, released as he nears 60. Rock’s alchemising of dreams into action is Fever Dreams’ constant refrain, aimed at a perceived audience much like Marr, motivated by faith in music, and essentially kind.Rearing feedback as Marr plugs into opener “Spirit Power & Soul”, then he’s singing: “I’ve seen some shimmering things/Seen a vision of things…” Musically as well, it’s an account of coming up, getting high after a low, a transmission of a stiffening Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Ride guitarist Andy Bell has clearly been busy since the release of his solo debut, 2020’s The View From Halfway Down. As well as getting his Space Station instrumental touring show up and running, he’s found time to record a sprawling, 18-track follow-up, Flicker, also released on Sonic Cathedral.Bell’s “other life”, as a DJ and producer of immersive electronica under his Glok moniker has, for some time, been an indicator of his willingness – and ability – to veer from the playbook and embrace other forms. On Flicker, however, this impulse is supersized. From shoegaze movers to krautrock Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The transformation of Lily James, demure star of Yesterday, Cinderella and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, into smokin’ beach babe Pamela Anderson is the most memorable thing about Disney+'s uneven eight-part drama. At its core is the stormy relationship between Anderson and Mötley Crüe’s drummer Tommy Lee which produced “the world’s most infamous sex tape”, as the 2014 Rolling Stone article upon which this is based described it.The theft of the tape by disgruntled carpenter Rand Gauthier, after Lee apparently refused to pay him for what he considered unsatisfactory work on Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mr. E’s music examines hellish depths, but always climbs back towards the light. Electro-Shock Blues (1998) was soon redeemed by “Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues”, and a trilogy of sometimes feral, wracked albums ended with Tomorrow Morning (2010). As the hard blows of deaths, disaster and divorce were absorbed, The Deconstruction (2018) even found a kind of faith. All things considered, E’s a remarkably optimistic writer.Souljacker was, though, a plunge into heavy darkness with Unabomber vibes, coincidentally released in 9/11’s aftermath. PJ Harvey’s frequent collaborator John Parrish produced, and Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a sense in which Elvis Costello emerged as a recording artist fully grown, with that unique vocal mix of vulnerability and insolence, savvy and often brilliant lyrics. Although he has never stopped experimenting, always with the logic of a musical connoisseur, it was all there, one could say, with “Less Than Zero”, his timeless first single on Stiff.From the start, he was as comfortable with electrifying rock (see “Pump It Up”) as with heartfelt yet unsentimental love ballads (“Alison”). And he is in fabulous form on his new album The Boy Called If, a series of vignettes in which he Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Disclaimer: it’s a little unfair I’m reviewing Kiefer Sutherland’s third album. He seems alright, left-ish for an American, done his time in the bad boy lane, sense of humour, tried his hand at this and that, even as a rodeo-rider, and has entertained plenty onscreen. Although I’d never heard his music until this month, I knew he’d played everywhere from the Grand Ole Opry to far-flung Glastonbury marquees. Unfortunately, the reason I’m reviewing this is I understood from all I’d read that he made whisky-soaked country. This shows you should be careful what you believe. Kiefer Sutherland Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Katherine Priddy’s debut album came out in the summer, and it’s remained a high point for the rest of the year as 2021 plays out to the sombre drums and drones of resurgent pandemic warnings, fresh lockdowns, closed venues, silenced auditoriums. Her last gig of the year was at St Pancras Old Church on 16th December. I intended to be there, but Omicron infection rates ballooned to the point that going anywhere seemed no longer possible. Hello, and goodbye, to 2021.So I’m here at home again, hunkering down, listening to the songs from The Eternal Rocks Beneath, astonished again at their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To clarify: this is less a review, more a dispatch from a raucous wake. We all have a band that means something extra. Mine is The Men They Couldn't Hang, who I saw on Saturday night at the Powerhaus in Camden for the umpteenth time.I first came across the band when I was commissioned to go to Reykjavik with them in March 1989. They had been going for five years, were on the rise, their third album Waiting for Bonaparte was out, and they were warming up for a big tour. Beer had just been legalised in Iceland for the first time since the 1930s and I may well have ingratiated myself by buying a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we ride towards the holiday break on our magic reindeer, it’s time for one last theartsdesk on Vinyl, a seasonal special that, if you scroll down, contains all the usual up-to-date music reviews but, before that, takes a look at Yuletide-themed releases, reissues and heritage fare that might make great presents. As ever, all musical life newly pressed to plastic is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASONPatrik Fitzgerald featuring Lemur No Santa Clauses (Crispin Glover)This year’s VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASON top pick is by long lost new wave troubadour Patrik Fitzgerald. It’s only his Read more ...