rock
Kieron Tyler
Just over two weeks before Christmas 1967, The Rolling Stones issued Their Satanic Majesties Request. The album’s title appeared to serve time on the peace-and-love, flowers-for-everyone good vibes of the psychedelic era. A year later, the Stones’ next LP, Beggars Banquet, went further. It opened with "Sympathy for the Devil." “Just call me Lucifer…or I'll lay your soul to waste,” sang Mick Jagger.The Stones were already troubled. There was the Redlands drug raid in February 1967 and the subsequent upholding of the appeal against the prison sentences handed down to Jagger and Keith Richards. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It begins with a superb rendering of his 2018 song “Ain’t Gonna Moan No More”, on which Van is joined by the mellifluous voice of Kurt Elling, and which was recorded alongside the other duets on the album in 2018 and 2019.It then winds through a mix of duets recorded in 2014 (alas, no Sir Cliff) and what they're calling "big band" arrangements of catalogue classics like “Avalon of the Heart”, “So Quiet in Here” and “The Master’s Eyes”, a gem from 1985’s A Sense of Wonder. This extremely likeable scoop of slightly random songs is the second of a series of releases from the vaults on Read more ...
mark.kidel
Apart from being one of Britain’s greatest songsmiths of the past 50 years, Elvis Costello – from the early adoption of the rock’n’roll King’s first name – has produced a form of naked self-expression, blurred by intricately-tailored pretence. Though this is “art”, never artifice.The geek of old has gone through several phases of metamorphosis – though something of the original persona remains, albeit battered and matured. While he was fast and furious in youth, a New Wave phenomenon, he has found a more measured stride, and the irony that was played down is now something Elvis revels in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 arena tour of the US, is a set that challenges the listeners’ staying power perhaps more than it celebrates an epochal tour.Sure, the 1974 tour was an important milestone in the Dylan story, and a coda, of sorts, to the story of The Band and Dylan’s trajectory away from the turbulent zenith of 1966. They were like two stage sets colliding: Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Real-life couple Graham Coxon and Rose-Elinor Dougall are both musicians of some profile in their own rights. The former, especially, for his work with Blur. Their band The Waeve is a relatively recent development but they’ve thrown themselves at it with verve since their appearance a couple of years ago.City Lights is their second album, a year-and-a-half after their first. Once again produced by James Ford, it’s a tonally bewildering collection with moments that shine. Mostly, it sounds like two talented and imaginative musical creatives having fun, sharing vocals, and revelling in what Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Contrary to popular belief, not all music journalists get off on being snide about the same old easy-to-slate bands. When something like this album arrives in my review schedule, my instinct is to seek the good, to stick two fingers up to my sneering peers. Unfortunately Snow Patrol’s new album is proving a challenge. I am struggling to find the positives.But let’s try. By now, you will know the drill with Snow Patrol. Kind of early Coldplay but lathered in (even more) overwrought emotion and lighters-in-the-air effusiveness. Their songs “Run” and “Chasing Cars” are staples of stadium Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There’s a specific vocabulary that attends the arrival of a new Nick Cave album in the 21st century. Words like redemptive, cathartic, stark, unsparing are a crucial part of his music’s terroir. They’re as inescapable as the figure of death, and that’s something that looms large too, in the art and in the life. With a Gothy, druggy, doomy and well-dressed back story trailing from the Birthday Party and post-punk years of the 1980s, through to the presence of the Lord, interventionist or not, on The Boatman's Call, and the epic, wracked albums of the past decade, you suspect any new Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Whether it’s maturing or selling out, the tendency for rock bands to soften and smooth down their sound is understandable and, for fans, usually dispiriting – edge, purity, and strangeness evaporate as the dollars roll in. With their fourth album Romance, Fontaines DC have not only pulled away from their mordant, Dublin-dank post-punk toward a heady melange of rap, shoegaze, indie, and grunge, they've also become winningly tuneful. The miracle is that they’ve arrived at this eclectic juncture without sacrificing the danger and anxiety, as embedded in the music as in the lyrics, that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Aside from their musical output, the fame – or notoriety – of Californian rockers Osees derives from two main factors. First, their consistently changing the spelling of their name on different releases (eg, Thee Oh Sees, OCS, etc). Second, their gushing prolificness of output. They’ve been releasing music for 21 years and Sorcs 80 is their 29th album. That’s going some.The short version of this review is that it’s a spirited electro-garage splurge but its sameyness occasionally grows annoying. Although Osees is a band it mostly represents the artistic vision of one person, frontman John Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHMike Lindsay Supershapes: Volume 1 (Moshi Moshi)Solo debut from Mike Lindsay, a founder member of tunng and also half of psychedelic duo LUMP. It’s a good thing when music is hard to describe. Opener “Lie Down” sets up the stall, a catchy but weird slice of poet-pop, wherein wonky dance rhythms, abstract jazz, lyrics about mundanity and shouts of the title phrase, including contributions from singer-songwriter Anna B Savage, add up to a wild frolic. With plenty of woodwind, lyrics about toast and Sunday roast, an inability to musically settle down anywhere “normal”, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
X, although beloved of music journalists, are one of American punk’s most under-acknowledged. They took a tilt at fame in the mid-Eighties with the radio-friendly Ain’t Love Grand album and its lead single “Burning House of Love”, but it wasn’t to be. They remained a connoisseurs’ choice (inarguable evidence of their abilities is the stunning 1983 tune “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”). Now they reach the end of the line, persuasively so, with a wistful but sonically punkin’ final album.Led by the vocal spar-harmonising duo of John Doe and Excene Cervenka, the Los Angeles four-piece were never Read more ...
theartsdesk
The weather is perfect. Rare at a festival in this country. The sun shines. Occasional clouds pass. There’s a light breeze. Flamingods are on the Charlie Gillett stage. They are a London-based unit of primarily Bahraini origin who make psychedelic-electronic rock tinged with exotica and Middle Eastern flavour. Very WOMAD, in other words.All around are iterations of hippy, from gnarled Sixties originals, lined and lived-in, batik-patchwork panted, to psy-trancey youths, half-clad, sleek in bodypaint and retro pink Lennon shades. We jog and nod. The music is likeable, not ecstatic. The vibe, Read more ...