rock
Barney Harsent
In an age where things change at a lightning pace, where we are programmed for progress, touchstones are crucial. There’s a need for something we can rely on to remain solid, unchanging and free of the burden of momentum. The noise produced by Dinosaur Jr, which comprises J Mascis, Lou Barlow, drummer Murph and others, is just such a thing – gloriously monolithic and fondly familiar.On this, the band’s 11th studio album, there is, if anything, an echo of past glories. Indeed, when the clatter and drums of “Goin' Down” starts up, their 1987 sophomore statement of intent, You’re Living All Over Read more ...
joe.muggs
In the early 2000s, a club called Trash in London, run by DJ Erol Alkan, introduced a wave of indie teenagers to the joys of electronic music, giving them a way into club culture that was all theirs and not beholden to the superstar DJs of the acid house generation. A generation of bands would form directly or indirectly influenced by it – and by the end of the decade, there was a mini wave of bands like Friendly Fires, Late Of The Pier and Wild Beasts, who integrated electronic sound into a rock band format, and brought a bit of disco glitter and androgyny to their image to boot.It felt like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Purple’s 2014 debut album, (409), was a burst of party punk straight out of Texas that deftly avoided crass clichés while letting the good times roll. Sophomore effort Bodacious won’t disappoint those who were bitten by the Purple bug the first time around and might even entice new listeners along the way. In particular, a hefty dose of the funk has been added to their exuberant groove, with Joe Cannariato giving his bass a good seeing to where previously he might have sat back. While this means that things may have slowed down in places, this is still music with a beaming smile and a beer in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Thirty-three minutes is not long for an album. What actually counts is not length but what is said and its impact. Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio know what they are doing and over Black Stabat Mater’s 33 minutes they do it with such clarity, force and panache there is no need to say any more. This is exactly what an album should be: a coherent statement.The title is a feint. Hedvig Mollestad Trio’s fourth album does not sound like Black Sabbath. There are guitar riffs: heavy, pounding, pulsing riffs. They employ a one-string style similar to the soloing of Sabbath’s Tony Iommi. But Mollestad’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While many acts have deployed the live album as a stop-gap or an easy money-spinner, some of Neil Young's best work was recorded live – Rust Never Sleeps, Weld and Arc-Weld, Live at Massey Hall 1971, the enigmatic Time Fades Away and so on. As an artist who works spontaneously and intuitively, much of his studio work is effectively live anyway.With Earth, Young has put a new spin on the live approach by picking a batch of songs from across his career, recorded onstage last year with backing band Promise of the Real (featuring Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and Micah), then piecing them together Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The names may be unfamiliar, but Folque and Undertakers Circus are as good as better-known bands. Despite being musical bedfellows neither Norwegian band is as esteemed as, say, Trader Horne and Trees or Colloseum and Lighthouse. Folque issued their eponymous debut album in 1974. Despite line-up changes, the band was active until 1984. Undertakers Circus issued two albums, the first of which was 1973’s Ragnarock. The original band ran out of steam around 1976. Original pressings of Folque fetch between £40 and £80. Ragnarock is very rare and sells for around £70. The reissue of each album is Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Led Zeppelin are an icon of musical class. Train, even their admirers must admit, are not. With this faithful, perhaps too faithful cover, the credit can only flow one way. Responses to this album have been a touchstone of journalistic identity, with our competitor sites posting sarcastic reviews, only to be accused below the line of snobbery, ignorance, and, most damning of all, hipsterdom.So let’s get this out of the way. Rather like Monet re-painted by numbers in Dulux high gloss, Train have re-created the outlines of Led Zeppelin, but without the depth and nuance. In songs like “Whole Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Janis Joplin bio-doc has been a long time coming. The rock star’s family were notoriously cautious about exposure: who wouldn’t be, with a career so tragic and brief?As it happens, their collaboration made possible the inclusion of the rock star’s poignant letters home, which the documentary uses to great effect throughout, revealing something of the singer’s inner life and vulnerability, in contrast with her careful self-presentation as a mixture of bad girl, sex bomb and Etta James impersonator.Some of her inner torment may have been caused by a continuing and profound sense of Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's peculiar seeing any band come back together after a serious length of time, but when that band were part of your adolescence the cognitive dissonance is exponentially increased. Along with the likes of Ride and Slowdive, Lush were a band linked to the “shoegaze” indie sound born in the Thames Valley at the very end of the Eighties, and my main experience of them was at ear-bleed volume in dangerously packed-out, toilet-stall-sized venues around the area, my fringe covering my face and all the hormonal intensity of youth amplifying the effect of the sound. So to see them after a gap of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It's the first night of The Fall's four-night residency at The Garage in Highbury, north London, a suitably small venue to get the full visceral rub of the current group – Elena Poulou on keyboards, guitarist Peter Greenaway, drummer Keiron Melling, and bassist Dave Spurr. It’s the longest-lasting Fall line-up Mark E Smith has permitted in the group’s 40-year history, and they have a fabulous, wildly experimental and rough-at-the-edges new EP, Wise Ol' Man, and one of the best albums of The Fall’s latterday career – one of the best, full-stop – in Sublingual Tablet behind them.Much of the 75- Read more ...
joe.muggs
Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gloriously disruptive presence in popular culture from the very start to the very end. Everything about him was off kilter and wrong: it's not for nothing that the first major biography of him was called The Imp of the Perverse. His songs were full of deranged filth, skewed social comment with a conspiratarian edge, had a very individualist take on Jehovah's Witness spirituality and mysticism, and all manner of personal cyphers and in-jokes. He was a constantly self-creating work of art of the most esoteric and incomprehensible sort – yet for all that he Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The post-Christmas headlines could barely contain themselves: HMV sells one turntable per minute! UK vinyl sales set to hit two million in 2016! Tesco stocking records! Vinyl was officially back.And now Record Store Day 2016 is upon us and likely to be the biggest one since its 2007 inception. There has been much discussion about the merits of RSD, on which shops around the country will be stocking limited releases to sate the public’s newfound appetite. For some shops, it’s a boost as increased awareness, footfall and income can see them through fallow times. Buying in swathes of stock is a Read more ...