rock
Tim Cumming
French actor and director Sandrine Bonnaire’s warm, langorous film portrait of la Faithfull may not the first – that accolade goes to Michael Collins’s feature-length Dreaming my Dreams (2000), featuring Mick, Keith, Anita and John Dunbar – but it does feel like a refreshingly deep-focus, specifically female take on her life and mythos, intimate yet kept at a decorous arm’s length by its subject, who by turns seems to want to open up while firmly closing her atelier doors on too much interior revelation. There are several times in the film when she holds her hand up to Bonnaire, asking her, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the summer of 2014, there was little getting away from Hozier's "Take Me to Church". Whenever you turned on the TV or the radio there it was. It wasn't just in this country. Eventually, the song became number one in 12 countries and number 2 in the States. Of course, for the singer, this massive success also brought a big problem: how to top it? When Hozier sat down to write his new album he must have agonised about what he'd got so right first time around.On paper, the recipe was simply a blend of soul, gospel, folk, and rock. The clever bit was how the ingredients were mixed. Hozier's Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's 18 years since the last Royal Trux album, but it might just as well be 18 months, so easily have they slipped back into their sound. OK, Neil Hegarty and Jennifer Herera have been gigging together again on and off since 2015, but even so it's quite astonishing how natural this record sounds. But then again, the Royal Trux sound was always something that sounded more like a channelling of something elemental than anything composed or contrived.As ever, the fundamentals of sleaze rock are here: lashings of Velvets and 1970s Stones, the “no wave” sound of New York, a little bit of Cramps Read more ...
Owen Richards
Compared to Scotland, Welsh independence has yet to hit the mainstream. The idea has been mostly supported by the Welsh-speaking population, with opinion polls hovering around 19 per cent. It’s fallen to Super Furry Animals keyboardist Cian Ciaran to change this with the Yes is More campaign. On Friday night, Cardiff’s Tramshed played host to a mini festival of music, food and discussion, with the aim to engage the public in its political and social future.As line-ups go, it was a hell of a launch event. Mainstream appeal was clearly the target, with self-proclaimed “prosecco socialist/dank Read more ...
howard.male
Even the most ardent Bowie fan might dismissively sum up their idol's pre-fame years with just these three words: The Laughing Gnome. And so it's hardly surprising that the director of Bowie: Finding Fame, Francis Whately (who also made David Bowie: Five Years and David Bowie: The Last Five Years), found himself wondering if there was enough meat on this particular bone for another 90 minutes' worth of enlightening information and entertainment.But he needn't have worried. The Bowie he uncovered turned out to be just as compulsive in his greed for creating identities, just as keen to move on Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Jimmy Hendix’s Greenwich Village studios are the venue for LCD Soundsystem’s third live album, which features the most recent touring line-up playing a set heavy with songs from 2017’s American Dream album along with a smattering of covers. Live albums often come with the promise of dynamic abandon – the chance to see a band communicating directly with their fans and pushing emotional dynamics and song structures to the limit, but here, in a closed studio, there’s none of that – so what is the point? The answer for most bands would be “not much”, but LCD Soundsystem aren’t most Read more ...
howard.male
Who doesn’t like the rolling swagger of a bunch of seasoned Louisiana musicians? And that’s what New Yorker McCalla has assembled here to create a wider sound pallet for her third album. But we don’t just get a dozen generic New Orleans jazz tunes here. There’s also a calypso, a Zydeco dance number, a rollicking boogie-woogie and a doom-laden rocker with a Hendrix-style solo from Jimmy Horn that's like a knife slashing a canvas. And then to go straight into a Hawaiian guitar-drenched ballad?! I’ve not heard such a delightful collision of moods since the Velvets set “The Black Angel Death Song Read more ...
Jo Southerd
In recent weeks, you may have noticed signs for the Better Oblivion Community Center, from billboards to park benches, all displaying a mysterious helpline telephone number. This was not some new community support project, but a surprise collaborative album from premier sad songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst. Though Oberst was releasing music before Bridgers was born, their partnership is not unexpected: they share a heart-on-sleeve outlook and a mutual respect for each other's music, and have toured and appeared onstage together. Now on this new album, they elevate each other’s Read more ...
The Dandy Warhols, O2 Institute, Birmingham review - a silver jubilee jaunt with plenty of new tunes
Guy Oddy
This week, the Dandy Warhols rocked up in Birmingham to begin the UK leg of their 25th anniversary tour with a gig in the Institute’s shabby but beautiful main hall, with its dusty neo-classical alabaster reliefs and almost comically antiquated balconies. It was indeed the perfect venue for a band that have spent so many years taking the psychedelic and adding their own twist to create something fine but far from mainstream. Needless to the say, the almost capacity audience lapped it all up, even though not too many seemed to have come out on this cold winter night with the intention of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The disappearance of a band for a while calls for a re-set. A reminder, perhaps, of why you fell for them in the first place. "[10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs]", the four minutes of minor-key chaos that opens the new album from The Twilight Sad, is exactly that reminder: a title written by a computer programme, a sound like an air raid siren, and James Graham’s raw, tender, aching voice, screaming “I see the cracks all start to show” in a tone at once unhinged and pure.It Won/t Be Like This All The Time arrives with its own mythology, the band’s staggeringly intimate records and live Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past. Presumably touring schedules and the sheer physical effort (only temporarily supplanted, it turns out, by Roger Linn’s 1980s invention of drum machines) of banging the instruments kept our musicians in good nick.Copeland suggested that percussionists, sitting behind Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Are you tired of being pissed and confused?” opens the epic title track of Yak’s second album. Later on singer Oli Burslem brokenly croons, “For now I’m in pursuit of momentary happiness; it’s vacuous and a game gonna lose [sic]. Do you remember when we said it’d be easier if nobody felt a thing, no love, no loss, nothing…” The nihilistic lyrics belie an indie strum that blossoms into a sweeping explosion of melodically inclined space rock. Thus it is throughout. The lyrics are often gnarly but the tone triumphant.Three-piece Yak created waves amongst NME-orientated aficionados of guitar Read more ...