rock
Kieron Tyler
The standard recitation goes like this. In the early Seventies a London scene evolved, centring on bands playing in pubs. Music was taken back to the grassroots. Finesse was unnecessary. What happened was dubbed pub rock and it laid the ground for an even more basic style: punk rock. Pub rock fed into and helped foster punk rock.This is charted by Surrender To The Rhythm: The London Pub Rock Scene Of The Seventies and 1978: The Year The UK Turned Day-Glo, a pair of three-CD sets. Although the specifics of 1977, the year punk was most boldly platformed are leapfrogged, the two packages Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If Doves have a “thing”, it’s that they do “big” with impeccable intimacy. Over ten years and four albums, they consistently displayed exactly the sort of connection that bands like Coldplay and Keane pretend to have. Huge, sweeping scores and broad emotional swells that feel like an old friend putting their arm around you and telling you you're not on your own.More than a decade since Kingdom of Rust, their farewell (of sorts), Doves are back, and not a moment too soon. Given the year so far, we could all do with a cuddle, sonic or otherwise.The seeds of The Universal Want were sown in a no- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
So far this year, Live at Goose Lake August 8th, 1970 is 2020’s most exciting archive release. The album is a previously unknown soundboard recording of The Stooges playing at Jackson, Michigan’s Goose Lake Festival. The event was formally billed as Goose Lake Park – International Music Festival. Also on were Faces, Ten Years After, The Flying Burrito Brothers and The James Gang. As well as The Stooges, other Michigan bands booked included Bob Seeger, SRC, The Litter and more. It’s estimated that there were 200,000 attendees over the three days. The event was filmed and, although what was Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been a decade, more or less, since The Rolling Stones opened up their From the Vaults series with The Brussels Affair, AKA Bedspring Symphony, taken from the 1973 European tour following the release of Goats Head Soup. It’s one of the most thrilling live sets any band ever released. And this at a period when it is hard to ascertain exactly how many times Keith Richards was arrested, crashed his car, set his place on fire, or had his blood changed. But together on stage, they blew the roof off and the doors out, embodying the very definition of rock n roll music at a time when the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The usual summer vinyl release slump doesn’t seem to apply this year. During the COVID-19 crisis, the demand for vinyl has risen rather than fallen and theartsdesk on Vinyl reflects that again this month with another monster round-up of reviews, covering everything from extreme metal to country’n’western to contemporary jazz.VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Come Stay With Me (Come Play With Me)August 2020’s Vinyl of the Month is an Arts Council-backed compilation on bright red vinyl from Leeds label Come Play With Me. It’s designed to help support the contributing artists from the area as they deal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rock’n’roll’s spirit is mother’s milk to Prophet, imbuing everything he touches. His old band Green On Red had stopped being roots rivals to R.E.M. long before their 1992 split, but alongside their co-leader Dan Stuart’s solo trilogy embellishing his Mexican wild years (where Ambrose Bierce met Hunter Thompson), Chuck Prophet has become a Zen rock songwriting master, rolling out a series of unassuming classics. His touchstones are mostly dead wastrels, his style wry, low-slung and romantic.The Land That Time Forgot finds him gentrified out of recording in his San Francisco hometown, instead Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson’s views on his band Be-Bop Deluxe’s debut album are measured. In the essay accompanying its reissue, he writes “Axe Victim is one brief snapshot of a band in the process of becoming something else…a modest beginning, flawed but not without charm. And not the end of the story. I’ll always be grateful for the way that it helped launch a more appropriate vessel for my music, a ship which sails onward to this very day.” He sees the album as transitional.When it was issued in June 1974, NME’s dismissive Ian MacDonald was less restrained in his review: “I confidently predict that Be-Bop Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
During the first decade of this century Conor Oberst was critically anointed as a successor to the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. It didn’t seem to make him very happy. His project Bright Eyes, with musical prodigies Nate Walcott and Mike Moggis, twisted and turned through varying musical styles, as if purposefully evading easy definition, while Oberst’s lyrics became increasingly bleak and opaque. Bright Eyes now return, after nine years of absence. Oberst is no happier, but his cryptic, committed, broken-voiced melancholy is a good fit for these times.Bright Eyes' last Read more ...
mark.kidel
Together for over 20 years and with a string of incredibly successful albums, the Scottish trio return with a ninth release that offers more of the relatively sophisticated bombast they've consistently delivered, not least in perfectly-paced audience-pleasing festival performances.Biffy Clyro are a metal band with heart, with little of the doom and gloom or Gothic menace associated with so much of the genre. They're creatures of the golden sunlight rather than the dark underworld. And yet also macho guitar heroes, fuelled by fiery energy that borders on anger but never gives way to excess. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Although Metallica are screening a freshly recorded concert across America’s drive-in cinemas at the end of the month, we’re no nearer to actual gigs anywhere, especially the UK. Hold tight. We’ll get there. In the meantime, here are three events worth taking a look at.AIM Music AwardsTonight (Wednesday 12th August), the annual AIM Music Awards will occur online here from 7.00 PM. The event features performances by two leading names in UK hip hop, Little Simz and AJ Tracey, as well as a tribute to the late great Afro-beat drumming legend Tony Allen by Femi Koleoso from UK jazz unit the Ezra Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
One of the most evocative tracks on James Dean Bradfield’s second solo album is hardly his at all. The Manic Street Preacher takes “La Partida”, a haunting, finger-picked melody by the Chilean musician Victor Jara, and blows it up to the size of an arena, its central refrain echoed back by a stadium’s worth of voices. As a tribute to Jara who, with thousands of his countrymen, was tortured and shot by General Pinochet’s troops in the stadium which now bears his name, it’s both apt, and breathtaking.Fans of the Manic Street Preachers are quick to list the art, music and literature they have Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s exciting to come to an album with no preconceptions and no context and find you fall immediately in love with it. Tanya Donelly is probably less well-known in Britain than she deserves to be: she last toured here in 2014 with Throwing Muses, one of two bands she co-founded (the other was The Breeders) before founding and fronting Belly, finally going solo in the mid-'90s.Stateside she’s more of a name, particularly in the Boston area, and essentially known as a singer-songwriter. She’s no stranger to covers and during lockdown has been laying down a series of modern classics at # Read more ...