guitar
Cheri Amour
Five years ago, breaking dry January a few days early, I joined a throng of folks amongst the merch boxes and strip lights of Rough Trade East to see Dream Wife. The London-based trio has come a long way since those small-scale shows in the backroom of a Brick Lane record shop.Their last release, So When You Gonna… was the only indie album recorded and produced by all women at the time to break into the Official UK Top 20 album charts. And they’ve shared the stage with the bands who likely informed them to pick up their instruments, opening for Garbage and The Kills across North America.Half Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When is the right moment for a musician to step out of the shadows and release an album in her/his own name? Vicente Archer, one of the most in-demand NYC bassists around, has certainly taken his time. In his late forties, and with appearances on over 150 albums by others to his name, he explains: “I wanted to find something that’s more myself.” Short Stories will be released on the Canadian Cellar Live label. Bassist Archer grew up in upstate New York. His first instrument was the guitar, both in a teenage rock band, and sitting as a local jazz gig which happened to include Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It is temping to wonder what path the Orielles would have gone down in a world where the coronavirus never occurred. The Halifax trio had just released their second album, Disco Volador when the pandemic struck, and wiped out any hope of touring the record. Instead they reworked material from the record for use scoring a film, and have now returned with last year’s Tableau album as a significantly different beast.That was evident all throughout this set in Glasgow, the final night of their UK tour. When they finally played a track from their first record Silver Dollar Moment, dropping in Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Maybe you’ve heard the Native American parable about the two wolves. An old Cherokee’s grandson is grappling with internal tensions; self-hatred and self-aggrandising. For Phoebe Bridgers, one-third of indie supergroup boygenius (usually styled with no initial capital letter), this analogy sits at the heart of album standout ‘Not Strong Enough’. In it, the trio, completed by Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, let out the divine line “Always an angel / Never a god,” adding a wry smile to the delivery.Subverting male hero worship is one of the (many) things that’s so refreshingly brilliant about a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the church of Mulvey. The sold-out venue is packed with a svelte crowd, mostly ranging in age between about 30 and 45. Nick Mulvey is playing a new number which has an air of lockdown-inspiration about it, with its lines about “missing every one of you” and “feeling grace in solitude”. The audience may not know the song, but they’re still in thrall, transported, a good few with eyes closed, hands reaching upwards as in evangelical service, swaying from side-to-side. One dark-bearded man and his guitar are held in esteem beyond the usual fandom.Mulvey, long-ago in Portico Quartet, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mille Petrozza is roaring into the mic, teeth gritted, black hair flailing. Behind his growl-screeching a triumphant martial riff is holding the “tune” and behind that, never-ceasing drum beats, an exercise in pure velocity.“The failed, the outcasts, the sagacious and wise will form a bond, impeccable art crafted through aeons of time,” thunders Petrozza, in a rare popular musical use of the word “sagacious”. “Hail to the Hordes” runs the chorus to the 2017 song, and writhing before Kreator, there they are, the hordes, a mass of denim and leather and skin, buffeting around the mosh-pit like Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Rock'n'roll rejuvenators, Eurovision winners with more of their songs streamed online than there are people in the world, the glammy young Roman rockers have opened for The Stones in Las Vegas, delivered a city-stopping sold-out show at Rome’s historic Circus Maximus and been hailed as “America’s New Favorite Rock Band,” in the Los Angeles Times. They recorded a lovely interpretation of Elvis’s late-Sixties hit “If I Can Dream” for Baz Luhrmann last summer, and their raucous, gritty, upbeat and confrontational third album, emerging from that audience explosion of the past year or two, is a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Iggy Pop is one of rock’s great survivors but his fans are divided into two categories; those who claim he hasn’t done anything worthwhile since the late-Seventies and those, like this writer, who find much to enjoy, right up to the present.Every Loser-era Pop takes a break from the less visceral directions his solo career has pursued for the last 20 years, the jazz experiments and the knowingly crafted hat-tips to his Berlin years. Instead, while laced with delicious, crooned West Coast rock slowies, such as the lost sunrise sadness of "Morning Show", it's also righteously rooted in goofy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
CVC stands for Church Village Collective, a six-piece who hail from the countryside near Cardiff. They were the best live act I saw last year (of a long list which includes Melt Yourself Down, Paul McCartney, The Prodigy and Wet Leg). It was a joyously raucous and contagious gig, front-loaded with Seventies rock vibes and a sense of fun, so I’m intrigued to hear if their debut album can live up to it. But they’re a different proposition on record. The raucous rock wildness is missing, but the Seventies are there in a mellower, cheesier form.The best bits of Get Real, recorded in guitarist Read more ...
Cheri Amour
In 2016’s abrasive album opener, "Dead Weight", frontwoman Mish Barber-Way laments over multiple miscarriages as her biological clock ticks away like a malevolent metronome.How much has changed in the last six years, then, and none more so than for Barber-Way. The track in question was taken from the band’s last official release, Paradise. A record that saw Deap Vally’s Lindsey Troy step up as a touring bass player and the Vancouver trio – completed by drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou and guitarist Kenneth William – unintentionally entering into a hiatus.They had every intention of Read more ...
India Lewis
Arriving to the second night of two shows in the same venue, you would expect it to be a little quieter. But Wet Leg’s second outing at the O2 in Kentish Town was anything but – their burgeoning reputation (they are supporting Harry Styles next year) ensuring an excellent and enthusiastic turnout. The crowd was mixed, but with more than a smattering of the bald(ing) 6 Music dads that are now standard fare for any emergent alternative pop acts. There were two warm-up bands, described by one of the two frontwomen of Wet Leg with glee as the chance to organise their own mini festival Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilko Johnson, who has died aged 75, enjoyed an astonishing afterlife while he was still alive. After Julien Temple’s Dr. Feelgood film Oil City Confidential (2009) restored his crucial former band's profile, a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013 perversely flooded Wilko with the wonder of life, leaving this melancholy soul content for perhaps the first time.Renewed, surreal popularity climaxed when Wilko played Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny” for surely the last, tear-soaked time at Camden Koko that March. And yet, a doctor's suspicion of his continued vitality revealed a less Read more ...