New music
Music Reissues Weekly: Ultravox! - Live At The Rainbow 1977Sunday, 04 September 2022
Eddie and the Hot Rods played London’s Rainbow on 19 February 1977. A big deal, the Saturday headliner was at the largest venue they’d been booked into to date. Their debut album Teenage Depression had been issued in November 1976 and this confirmed... Read more... |
Album: The Afghan Whigs - How Do You Burn?Saturday, 03 September 2022
Hedonism and romance still drive Greg Dulli’s rock’n’roll on his main band’s ninth album.Relationship traumas have always simmered just beneath the Whigs’ surface, most notably on Gentlemen’s 1993 autopsy of an affair. Whatever the real life... Read more... |
Album: Julian Lennon - JudeFriday, 02 September 2022
Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, there’s no way for Julian Lennon to escape the longest of shadows – his parentage – so by naming this album Jude, he’s tackling it head on. Or is he? The haunting cover image and name are the only direct... Read more... |
Album: Tom Chaplin - MidpointThursday, 01 September 2022
Travis, Coldplay, Haven, Elbow, Snow Patrol, Aqualung, Embrace, Starsailor, Turin Brakes, Athlete, Elbow, Doves… and of course Keane. The turn of the millennium deluge of sincere young men opening up their feelings to the world, their voices... Read more... |
Album: Two Door Cinema Club - Keep On SmilingWednesday, 31 August 2022
Three and a half years on from 2019’s False Alarm, Keep On Smiling comes album number five from Northern Ireland trio, Two Door Cinema Club. Known for having more bounce to the ounce than your average band, their brand of guitar-flecked electro pop... Read more... |
Dope Lemon, O2 Academy, Birmingham review - Australian cosmic cowboys bring the house downMonday, 29 August 2022
The Academy 2 may not be the biggest venue in Birmingham, but it was packed on Friday evening for the first gig of Dope Lemon’s much delayed Rose Pink Cadillac tour – to support an album that was finally released after delays of its own back in... Read more... |
Album: Julia Hülsmann Quartet - The Next DoorMonday, 29 August 2022
Not every musician has friends in high places in quite the way German jazz pianist and composer Julia Hülsmann does these days.A few weeks ago she played a private concert at the invitation of the German Head of State. Bundespräsident Frank-Walter... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Swinging Blue Jeans - Feelin’ Better Anthology 1963-1969Sunday, 28 August 2022
In late August 1962, Liverpool’s Swinging Blue Genes were booked to play Hamburg’s Star-Club for the first time. At the opening show of their season, they were booed and the curtain was pulled across them. The audience took against their mix of... Read more... |
Fleet Foxes, Islington Assembly Hall review - exceedingly aliveFriday, 26 August 2022
Just under two weeks ago, Fleet Foxes finished their US tour at the 13,000-capacity Forest Hills Stadium. Now, here they are kicking off their European dates in an auditorium attached to a North London town hall. Capacity 890. Unsurprisingly, it’s... Read more... |
Coldplay, Hampden Park, Glasgow review - a pop spectacle for all agesThursday, 25 August 2022
It is a testament to Coldplay’s capacity for reinvention that a good portion of this stadium crowd were not even born when the band first broke through over two decades ago. Such an age range in the audience clearly caught the eye of Chris Martin,... Read more... |
Camp Bestival Shropshire, Weston Park review - a musical mixed bag for the pre-teens and their parentsWednesday, 24 August 2022
When I first started going to music festivals in the late 80s and early 90s, they were all wild celebrations of bacchanalian excess. Children were nowhere to be seen and there was always a crustie on hand, openly plying a wide array of brain... Read more... |
Album: Muse - Will of the PeopleWednesday, 24 August 2022
From three young lads making music to escape adolescent boredom, inspired by heavy doses of Nirvana and Deftones, Muse now regularly make stadiums around the world their own with seas of thousands adoring fans their home. Since 2006’s Black... Read more... |
