mon 19/05/2025

New Music Reviews

KISS, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - familiar feel to rock legends bombastic farewell

Jonathan Geddes

The farewell for KISS has lasted so long that this Glasgow show, their final ever UK gig, came four years after the End of the Road tour first stopped off in the city. Admittedly that is partly down to the coronavirus scuppering touring plans for a couple of years, but even without that there is a suspicion a group who have monetised themselves so effectively over the years might have found a reason for another trip back here.

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Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, BST Hyde Park review - Saturday in the park with Bruce

Adam Sweeting

First things first. The support acts at events like this usually get completely overlooked, but it would be frankly criminal not to give a mention to a superb set by the Chicks.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Musical Offering - works for the Soviet-era ANS synthesiser

Kieron Tyler

One of the most striking scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 outer-space allegory Solaris is psychologist Kris Kelvin’s first encounter with a being which seems to be his wife, who had died a decade earlier. The unsettling incident’s inherent tension is heightened by its sonic backdrop: rumbling, a peculiarly musical pink noise, lightning-like bolts of sound. This was created on the ANS synthesiser (AHC in Russian script), a device invented in Soviet-era Russia.

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Music Reissues Weekly: The Sound - The Statik Records Years

Kieron Tyler

“There's a richness and a true depth here that places Jeopardy alongside (U2’s debut album) Boy as early Eighties tonics for ailing mainstream-rock. The Sound are on to a winner. There isn't one track here that isn't thoroughly compulsive. Overall it's a vastly impressive sound, with as much energy as I've heard on any record all year…the result is a form of sheer power-rock that doesn't make you blush or grimace.”

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Glastonbury Festival 2023: Down to the Paradise City

Caspar Gomez

TUESDAY 27TH JUNE 2023

I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.

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Theatre at Glastonbury Festival 2023 - so big and wild a hallucination, you're always left wanting more

Anya Ryan

And that’s it again for another year. Oh Glastonbury. A fever dream where the time of reality stops as you hop on a ride to a land of magic.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Blossom Dearie - Discover Who I Am

Kieron Tyler

Had Blossom Dearie overtly embraced pop, her vocal style could be characterised as along the lines of Priscilla Paris, Jane Birkin or Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell – intimate, a little breathy, oxygenated. However, jazz was her bag and June Christy, Peggy Lee and Norway’s Karin Krog are the closest reference points.

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Peter Gabriel, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - beaming with optimism and creativity

Jonathan Geddes

Even when Peter Gabriel is bleak, he has reasons to be cheerful. Early on in his set he opined that soon enough “none of us will have jobs anymore”, referring to the ongoing rise of artificial intelligence, although this was followed by him stressing the positives that can be found in such new technology. It seemed fitting, because Gabriel himself, now 73, showed on this evening that optimistic possibilities of the future occupy his thoughts as much as ever.

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Album: Brigid Mae Power - Dream From The Deep Well

Kieron Tyler

The cover versions on Dream From The Deep Well include “I Know Who is Sick,” most familiar from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Maken interpretation, and “Down by the Glenside,” which The Dubliners incorporated into their repertoire. The first opens the album, the second closes it. Between, amongst the original compositions, there is also an adaptation of Tim Buckley’s “I Must Have Been Blind.”

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Siouxsie, The Halls, Wolverhampton review - former Banshee brings the house down

Guy Oddy

When the Queen of the Goths comes down from her castle to tour the UK, given that she hasn’t played here at all in the last 10 years, people take notice.

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