rock
Russ Coffey
First, an admission. I've never quite got the appeal of the Gallagher brothers. In particular, I've found their claims that each post-Oasis album represents some bold new horizon a little risible. And yet there is something intriguing about the brothers' 2017 output. Liam's As You Were came out a few weeks ago and now there's Noel's new one. True to form, the brothers have been trading insults all month.They've also been taking every opportunity to claim their album's the best. That is a matter of opinion. But what's indisputable is that the two records take opposite approaches. Liam's Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing. A major presence on the British music scene since their 1981 electropop debut Speak and Spell, they’ve since tried their hand at goth, new wave, rock’n’roll, industrial music, and classical piano, all of which has helped birth this year’s politically-influenced Spirit. Now, stood before hordes of people who grew up with their music, they’d be praised no matter what they played. That doesn Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Morrissey inspires some pretty fierce adulation, but there surely can’t be a fan on the planet who loves Morrissey quite as much as Morrissey does. This is the man who was reported, lest we forget, to have insisted that his memoirs be published as a Penguin Classic. This move put him alongside Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Graham Greene and, of course, Oscar Wilde.It is a shame then that, despite having some pretty decent tunes on it, Low in High School is like having world affairs explained to you by a teenager who’s just spent the afternoon wanking and reading The Canary. Possibly at the same Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There are more clothes flying Kesha’s way than onto the stage at a Las Vegas Tom Jones concert in the mid-Seventies. She started it. As she introduced her 2010 single “Take It Off”, she announced that since things were so hot she’d be discarding a few items. Duly, she removes the heavy, dark velveteen jacket, decorated with embroidered red roses, that she’s been wearing so far, and undoes her shiny gold shirt down to her sternum, revealing her bra. The song kicks in and the capacity crowd go nuts as she attacks her ballsy ode to a party hole “where they go hardcore and there's glitter on the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary thingsArcade Fire: Everything Now ★★★★★ A joyous pop album that depicts a world in tragic freefallAutarkic: I Love You, Go Away ★★★★★ Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel's latest collection is a triumph of head and heartBrian Eno: Reflection ★★★★★ Slow-motion cascades Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over. Thus theartsdesk on Vinyl didn’t have space for the likes of Sixties-flavoured popsters The Dials, lone Nine Inch Nail Alessando Cortini, “space mermaid” Johanna Glaza, Dutch-Belgian jazz trio De Beren Gieren, London electro noiseniks Fever Dream, Spanish rhythm’n’blues maestro Julián Maeso, retro soul revivalists D’troit Soul Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Forty years ago Whispering Bob Harris made a documentary about Queen. He eavesdropped on them as they recorded the album News of the World and then followed them around America on tour. The film was never broadcast but the footage was exhumed for this anniversary and stapled together in Queen: Rock the World (BBC Four), the latest in the BBC's prancing cavalcade of recent documentaries about the band (see sidebar).The reason for the film's non-appearance in 1977 was not made explicit. The charitable explanation is that this was the year of punk and the BBC were alive to a shift in popular Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s impossible to discuss TootArd without digging into the history of their region. They’re a funky desert blues outfit but they don’t derive from Saharan Africa; they were born and raised in the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. This is the region Israel grabbed off Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, then fully annexed in 1981, claiming it as Israeli territory. However, Arabic Syrians who remained were rendered stateless, given “Laisser-Passer” travel papers by the Israeli government rather than the passports of a full citizen. Hence the album’s title.The band, currently Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the recent death of the band's co-founder Walter Becker, it seemed faintly remarkable that Steely Dan went ahead with this O2 show at all – it was the closing night event of Bluesfest 2017 – but Becker’s absence wasn’t allowed to detract from the sustained brilliance of the performance. The Dan’s surviving guru, Donald Fagen, has announced that “I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band”, and surely it has never sounded better.Becker and Fagen always loved the idea of the great jazz orchestras, not least Duke Ellington’s band, and Read more ...
howard.male
It’s easier to admire than fall in love with the music of St Vincent aka Annie Clark. But then again does one genuinely fall in love with a Bacon painting or a Beckett play? It’s just that we’re more used to taking pop songs to our heart, fondly looking back on them as markers of key moments on our lives. Having said that, some love struck couple might semi-ironically play Massduction’s lead single “New York” at their wedding. It’s resigned hook line, ‘You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me,’ is delivered with such melancholy gratitude that it does evoke an emotional Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When Liam Gallagher turns up with an album in tow, no one is expecting "Jazz Odyssey". You wouldn’t call a plumber to turf your lawn, and you wouldn’t ask ISIS to explain the dynamics of intersectionality. Similarly, you wouldn’t expect the former Oasis and Beady Eye frontman to deliver anything other than Beatles-inflected rock stompers. For the most part that’s exactly what you get. I stopped counting Fab Four references when I ran out of digits, but lyrically, there are nods to “Helter Skelter”, “All Things Must Pass”, “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and “Run For Your Life” among many Read more ...