rock
Jonathan Geddes
Time waits for no band, as Maximo Park’s lively singer Paul Smith opined early into his band’s set. “I am young and I am lost” he declared during "The Coast Is Always Changing"’s jangly guitar-pop, before drily admitting afterwards that he might have to retire those words soon enough. It’s over 20 years now since Maximo Park emerged as the thinking man’s indie rockers, all bursts of energy and romantic lyricism, and two of the quintet have departed along the way, in the shape of bassist Archis Tiki and keyboardist Lukas Wooller.Yet the albums and tours have continued regularly, save for the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grand, sweeping romanticism with strong Celtic leanings is the order of the day lately, in a way it hasn’t been since the 1980s heyday of U2, Waterboys, Bruce Springsteen, Dexys and Simple Minds. The likes of Lewis Capaldi, Dermot Kennedy, Declan McKenna, Ed Sheeran in “Castle on the Hill” mode and Fontaines D.C. when they show their softer side are all taking yearning songs of big dreams colliding with small realities all the way to the bank. The Manic Street Preachers too have turned up the Van Morrison-ish swoon to 11 on their new album – and indeed The Waterboys’ Room to Roam and Dexys’ Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Patti Smith has been making rabble rousing punk rock for half a century. She’s spent a lifetime on the road with rock stars and poets, surfing the charts, bringing music and wisdom to the people in myriad ways from beatnik to mainstream and now here she is at London’s Royal Albert Hall – a gig she says her agent has been trying to land for years.Grabbing hold of the audience from the get-go with the spoken word “Piss Factory” which ends with those prescient lines “I'm gonna be somebody, I'm gonna get on that train, go to New York City… I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return, Never Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“There should be some kind of spirit there which is outside whoever is in the band. The spirit of the band, wanting still to play songs, real songs, wanting to play complicated music to a certain extent. Fairly dense arrangements, also difficult pieces of music, not to be difficult but just because that’s a challenge. To do all that and then also play with a degree of anarchy, chaos, and fire and spirit. That’s the spirit of Van der Graaf.”So said a drawn-looking, jumpy Peter Hammill on 17 June 1978. He’s on Austrian TV, sitting on an unmade bed in a hotel room, with a cigarette in his hand Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lindsey Buckingham was last in and first out of Fleetwood Mac’s classic line-up (quitting in 1987, and forced out by long ago ex- Steve Nicks in 2018). He was a would-be Brian Wilson in their midst, an unlooked for, maverick auteur whose first hit “Go Your Own Way” helped conquer the world, and confounding follow-up Tusk demanded much more.This is his seventh solo album, and they all exist in the Mac saga’s interstices, even as he strives for a purer, separate art, muddied by the band’s cocaine-clouded excess and soap opera along the way.Lindsey Buckingham was recorded after typical turmoil Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the summer folds away on itself, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns. Beset by backlogs at pressing plants and delayed by COVID, it's finally here, jammed to the gunwales with commentary on a grand cross section of the finest music on plastic. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHGod Damn Raw Coward (One Little Independent)Let’s start with some NOISE! With their fourth album Wolverhampton band God Damn continue the reinvigoration that began with their eponymous 2020 Album. There’s metal in there somewhere but mostly it’s a roaring rage of punk rock, with singer Thomas Edwards howling his indignancy at, well Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Reaffirmation” is the sound of a San Francisco ballroom in 1968. The 12-minute long track opens mysteriously with what might be a Mellotron on the flute setting. A bubbling bass guitar arrives, along with jazzy piano. At 02.50, the tempo picks up and the guitar, which until then has delicately picked its way through the arrangement, begins to soar. There’s a vaguely funky section and, just over half-way in, a dive into an almost free-form spiralling section. This is top-notch psychedelia. Dungen have passed through similar territory.Other parallels include the first-album Steve Miller Band Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again? He is in many ways the culmination of the deconstruction of hip hop machismo, being from a generation that grew up on the dweebiness of Drake, the thoughtfulness of Kendrick Lamar, the camp of Nicki Minaj, the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. Saved’s proselytising may have tipped the balance. “The hand is in the hand” Picasso once remarked – describing the most reliable marker of an artists’ skill – and the hands raised up in the album art for 1980’s Saved stuck out in the wider culture like Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums. Dark Matters, their eighteenth, is a decently wrought, sometimes elegiac conclusion to a career that’s taken them from pre-punk to post-everything.Eight of the 11 songs were recorded before Greenfield’s death but the single “ Read more ...
joe.muggs
Iron Maiden are in very many senses as English, as camp and as ridiculous as Christmas pantomime, even down to the “HE’S BEHIND YOU!” looming of their vast onstage zombie mascot Eddie. Which is not to say there’s nothing to them: far from it. Just like pantomime, their durability shows how much they speak to something deep and archetypal in their audience’s spirit. In some senses it’s that Englishness that underpins it – on this, their seventeenth album, as much as ever. For all the finesse and flamboyance of their playing, there is the spirit of an old Englishman painting model tanks in his Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an interview with Zane Lowe about her new album, Halsey said that the producers wanted to “make some really weird choices”. This was, you suspect, the intention: you don’t bring Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails onboard to produce the follow-up to your mainstream pop breakthrough without being open to something pretty weird. Described by the singer (who uses she/they pronouns interchangeably) as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth” and combining cinematic production with pure pop riffs, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the boldest Read more ...