punk
Kieron Tyler
Earlier this year, the Peter Laughner box set was more than an archive release. Its diligence and scale forced a wholesale reinterpretation of the evolution of America’s punk-era underground scene. What it collected – aurally and in its book – demonstrated Laughner was more of a pivotal figure than he had so far seemed, and that his actions and vision resonate more than four decades on from his death.Moving through a different musical landscape, the CD compilation The Daisy Age cohesively soundtracked for the first time how hip-hop opened itself up to seemingly unrelated music (and non-music Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Britain is unpleasant to look at right now, ugly and foolish, so why not lock down with some tuneage. Below is the best plastic that’s hit theartsdesk on Vinyl over the last month, all genres, all the time. Watch out for the forthcoming Christmas Special where we’ll endeavour to find the seasonal good cheer we’re not currently feeling.VINYL OF THE MONTHKimyan Law Yonda (Blu Mar Ten Music)It’s true to say that theartsdesk on Vinyl prizes originality over familiarity. One of our mottos is that comfort is the enemy of creativity. Kimyan Law – AKA Nico Mpunga – is the Vienna-based son of a Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As the number of sweaty bodies increased towards the front of the Barrowland stage, IDLES singer Joe Talbot had a direct message. “Keep safe” he implored on several occasions, like a concerned dad warning his kids, or perhaps a shepherd guiding his flock. For all that IDLES are a rowdy, raucous live band, there is undoubtedly a caring side too, evidenced throughout a night that was part rock gig, part good time party, and occasionally a wayward turn into a karaoke club.For all that there is tedious debate regarding the band’s authenticity (a decision earlier this week to launch their own beer Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Time moves fast in the music business. It has only been a matter of months since Fontaines DC were playing the far smaller confines of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, and here they were at a sold out SWG3, celebrating the success of debut album “Dogrel”. If that record is one of the finest released this year, then this gig was not quite the victory lap hoped for, albeit still a show that displayed evidence of their quality.The record itself is rich in thoughtful lyricism, the nuances of which were somewhat lost in a live setting. That was not particularly problematic, because the sheer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago it would have been hard to envisage proto-punk maniac Iggy Pop being a star feature of the EFG London Jazz Festival. His last few albums, though, have been heavily flecked with jazz, and let’s not forget that as far back as The Stooges’ 1970 album Funhouse, free jazz sax squalling was part of the mayhem. Tonight doesn’t veer into that kind of transgressive noisiness but is still far more than just, as the promotion suggests, a run-through of his often elegiac latest album Free.Once his band are onstage, including album co-creator, New York experimentalist Noveller (Sarah Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a first for this column, what’s cropping up is a cassette reissue. The Clash’s third album is so familiar, going into what it is or was in any depth is redundant but it’s worth considering what’s going on here.London Calling was originally issued on 14 December 1979 and is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Naturally, it’s hitting the shops again. The definitive reissue came out for the 25th anniversary in 2004, when the album was teamed with rehearsal recordings taped on cassette at Vanilla Studios, a DVD of The Last Testament: The Making of London Calling documentary, promo videos, film Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rough Trade’s first album was Stiff Little Fingers’s Inflammable Material. The label followed up its February 1979 release with Swell Maps’s A Trip to Marineville, The Raincoats’s eponymous debut, Cabaret Voltaire’s Mix-Up and Essential Logic’s Beat Rhythm News Waddle Ya Play? Inflammable Material was avowedly punk but though they could not have emerged without the punk upheaval, the others inhabited their own musical continua. There was a further difference: Inflammable Material charted – on the proper charts – while SLF's idiosyncratic labelmates could never have done so.Rough Trade’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Prior to this week, it had been 35 years since hardcore punk firestarters Black Flag had set foot in the UK. That said, it was not without some trepidation that I made my way to one of Birmingham’s more compact venues to see a band who had once been genre-defining, get on stage and do their stuff. After all, Black Flag’s golden years were more than a generation ago, in the mid-1980s, and with a very different line-up. Iconic vocalist, Henry Rollins has long since hung up his microphone to write books, tour his spoken word show and appear on all-manner of TV documentaries – mainly about punk Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Ol’ Black Eyes is Back Tour celebrates Alice Cooper’s 50 years using his stage name. He’d been around under other names before 1969 but Alice Cooper – originally the title of the band rather than the man – achieved success as the Seventies began by combining trash-glam drag with stompin’ riffy music. He’s famed for his theatrical shows but needed to be on especially fine form tonight to match support acts who are both riveting.First on are MC50, a supergroup iteration of Sixties Detroit countercultural rockers MC5, consisting of original MC5 guitar warrior Wayne Kramer, Soundgarden Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Punk rock, more so than any other genre, comes with a built-in age limit. There’s only so long you can play weeknights at basement venues for a share of the door and travel expenses; only so many years your back can withstand so many nights on strangers’ sofas. Those that don’t age out, sell out: their youthful excesses repackaged to shill hatchbacks and low-fat spread. Thank god, then, for The Menzingers: a four-piece born in the Scranton, Pennsylvania punk scene who opted to channel their 30s into roots-rock with a latent edge, capturing the free-fall into adulthood proper with a certain Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Elizabeth Bernholz, known on stage as Gazelle Twin, comes straight from a line of musical visionaries – rebels and misfits whose influences fleet through her songs like will-o’-the-wisps. Here is the formal, clever ennui of The Stranglers, the wild, cathartic howls of Pink Floyd’s anti-establishmentarianism, and the unearthly arcs of Kate Bush’s otherworldly electro-folk. She chimes too with more contemporary outsiders: the sardonic flat-line of a knowing Metronomy, the spangled freneticism of MIA., Fever Ray’s bleak gut-swell propulsion, and hints of Björk’s operatic, overwhelming Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In March of this year Edwyn Collins released his ninth studio album, Badbea, his fourth since two life-altering cerebral haemorrhages derailed him in 2005. It’s a vivacious collection that runs the gamut of what guitar pop can be, from acoustic strumming to psychedelic riffing to lo-fi punkin’, all catchy as burrs. His set is peppered with it. By the time he reaches the encore, even the slow, elegiac title track, with its gloomy references to “a ruined monument to life and death”, holds the audience rapt.Clad in a Fred Perry-style white shirt with red trim, Collins initially appears on stage Read more ...