punk
Thomas H. Green
Jeremy Cunningham (b.1965) is bass player and a founding member of The Levellers, as well as being a visual artist in his own right. During the 1990s The Levellers, and most especially their 1991 album Levelling the Land, became a phenomenon. The group were punk-influenced folk-rockers whose songs were often polemic and political. It was no coincidence that their main flush of popularity was during the premiership of John Major. They became a focus for anti-government feeling, especially among those affiliated with the travelling and festival communities (remember Major’s “New age travellers Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Damned may very well be the last men standing from the first wave of UK punk – albeit with only Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible still there from the original line-up – but with their new disc they haven’t even thought of resting on their laurels and churning out endless variations on “New Rose” and “Smash It Up”. Clearly the musical heritage industry is going to have to wait awhile for them yet.Evil Spirits is only The Damned’s 11th album in 41 years and their first since So, Who’s Paranoid? in 2008. It sees Tony Visconti take on production duties and the return of early Eighties bassist Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sometimes music reaches a point beyond which there's no point in going. Thus it is with Napalm Death who, 30 or so years ago, hit on a formula for furious noise generation, and though they've shifted line-ups many times since then, continue to make more or less the same racket to this day. OK, there are aficionados who will be furious at this allegation. Ah, they'll say, in 1997 Napalm Death almost entirely abandoned grindcore for pure death metal, and in 2003 they created an entirely new sound called “deathcrust”. But really, nothing significant has changed.And that is just fine. In fact, it Read more ...
joe.muggs
For some a lack of development is failure; not for Kim Deal. Her songwriting and voice have influenced hordes of indie bands from the Eighties until now – indeed the “angular” clang and arch drawl of bands indebted to Pixies, and The Breeders, her band with sister Kelly, is as great a cliché as blues licks were in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet still, on this reunion album for The Breeders' 1993 lineup, the voice, sound and structures remain utterly distinctive and gloriously alien, a world away from the imitators, just as they shone out as different from all around them during The Breeders' Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many hard rock aficionados say that Motörhead’s greatest work was all with the “classic” line-up of Lemmy, drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor and guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke (who died last week aged only 67 - this review was written before that news came through). While there’s no denying their 1976-82 output was storming, Motörhead’s later career contained multitudes of gems that were its match. The band’s guitarist for this period, for 31 years from 1984 until Lemmy’s death, was Phil Campbell. He now releases the debut album by a band he formed with his three sons shortly after his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Now that the 40th anniversaries of 1976 and 1977 as the years which birthed punk rock have themselves become history, surveyors of rock’s rich tapestry will inevitably turn to what came next. The year 1978 and what followed punk are easy targets and, in terms of labels, post-punk is accepted as a next wave out of the traps. Stylistically, of course, it’s a meaningless designation: all post-punk really signifies is that something came after punk and here’s a handy handle for it.Proof of the five-CD set To the Outside of Everything's issues grappling with this amorphousness is acknowledged by Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Eindhoven art punks Radar Men from the Moon have been around since 2010 with a sound that has knitted together space rock, strange electronics and shoegaze flavours with a psychedelic view point. Subversive III: De Spelende Mens, however, is a double album that marks a considerable sonic change, with the band largely dropping the rock elements of their sound, favouring instead a darker electronic approach that charts similar territory to last year’s Death in Vegas Transmission album and The Bug vs Earth Concrete Dessert collaboration. More experimental and less groove-oriented that 2016’s Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
In March, Bristol’s Idles drove up and down the country, leaving painfully small quantities of their debut album Brutalism in each independent record shop they went into. The lucky among us who managed to get a first-pressing copy of the beautifully packaged LP felt a part of something small and exciting, something important on the verge of blowing up. Now, lauded by the music press and owners of their own Wikipedia page, it’s fair to say that Idles have well and truly conquered 2017.Fundamentally, they are a punk band, and Brutalism is a punk album, dripping with distortion, speed, and anger Read more ...
Will Rathbone
You say you want a revolution? Good luck locating one amid the tonally muddled Inside Pussy Riot. The immersive production from Les Enfants Terribles takes audiences on a promenade-style journey through the terrifyingly true story of Nadya Tolokonnikova, the Russian activist who (along with bandmate Maria Alyokhina) was sentenced to two years in a Siberian prison in 2012 after performing 40 seconds of an anti-Putin protest song in a Moscow church. The setting for the piece is the Saatchi Gallery in affluent Chelsea and a stone's throw from not a few Russian oligarchs: ah, the irony of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1976, Polydor Records was actively considering signing the Sex Pistols. The label’s Chris Parry checked them out live in Birmingham during August. In September, he had a prime spot behind the mixing desk at the 100 Club’s punk festival from which to consider British punk rock’s figureheads. However, the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren signed them to EMI. Moving on, Parry began pursuing The Clash and recorded demos with them that November. They went on to sign with CBS.Despite being led up the rock ‘n’ roll garden path by the Pistols and The Clash, Parry didn’t give up on punk and, following Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Four albums in, Detroit’s Protomartyr have built up quite a following over the last five years. From the now-hard-to-find No Passion All Technique to Relatives in Descent, their lauded new album, Protomartyr’s precise post-punk has remained as thunderous as it is rich. As part of their current European tour promoting the release of Relatives in Descent, the band have come to the Deaf Institute, one of Manchester’s coolest mid-size venues, to bathe us in its murky waters.Oh Boland, the sole support band, sound like the musical child of the Modern Lovers and the Strokes. With insistent drums Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary thingsArcade Fire: Everything Now ★★★★★ A joyous pop album that depicts a world in tragic freefallAutarkic: I Love You, Go Away ★★★★★ Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel's latest collection is a triumph of head and heartBrian Eno: Reflection ★★★★★ Slow-motion cascades Read more ...