Various Artists: Too Slow to DiscoToo Slow to Disco is about the five years from 1975 onwards when men and woman alike sported billowing white shirts, had wind-swept, pouffed-up hair and sang frozen-nosed, freeze-dried songs in sensitive voices about love, love and more love. Fleetwood Mac defined the mellow, cotton-wool-shrouded sound of a California-dominated wave of singers and songwriters who weren’t going to break a sweat about anything despite being strung out on coke. The by-word was mellow.This fascinating compilation makes the case that the cocaine cowboys and lush ladies Read more ...

When you have quite as much going on as 10-piece (in their current form) experimentalist Canadian indie band Arcade Fire do, it’s hard to know where to look. It’s a fact they’re aware of, and it seems like they even riff on it quite heavily with the overwhelming presence of the fragmented, fractured aesthetic of their latest album Reflektor at Earls Court, on the first of their two-night run. A lesser band might struggle to hold attention given the amount they’re asking their audience to engage with - and the sheer size of Earls Court, which felt like it could almost be large enough for their Read more ...

If they ever wanted somebody to make a sequel to Marty Robbins's Gunfighter Ballads and usher in a rockabilly revival for good measure, Jack White is the man. The 11 tracks on this new album - the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss - reek of rage, lust, drink and gunpowder (among other things), and most of them crash along like a herd of stampeding buffalo.Identifying every ingredient White has smuggled in could take years, but he squeezes bags of mileage out of crashing piano chords, guitars that sound like steel girders being hammered out of shape and country fiddles that yowl like mating cats Read more ...

What sometimes gets lost in the great blur of testosterone and hype surrounding Kasabian’s public image is that a decade ago they released a self-titled debut that’s one of the most exciting albums of the 21st century. A bunch of hairies from a commune in Leicester with a sexy guitarist and a good line in drug-endorsing, anarchistic, Sixties-style patter, they turned out to be one of those bands who decide, week-by-week, which of their heroes they fancy emulating. Like Primal Scream before them, sometimes the results spectacularly surpass mere imitation.If their last album, 2011’s Read more ...

Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied. Their reformation was one of the most convincing in recent years, in part also due to quickly bowing out after returning and the favour they brought to the listening public by not writing any new, Read more ...

The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby stadium (I didn’t conduct a scientific poll of the gender split, but it had certainly never been easier to use the Gents at Murrayfield.)Everything was bright and brilliant and giddily over-sized, from the piercing screams that greeted every banal utterance (“We love you, Scotland!”), to the price of the merch: £10 for a flimsy plastic lanyard is pretty Read more ...

According to Chrissie Hynde's press release, Stockholm has a kind of Abba-meets-John Lennon vibe. That may seem like the kind of gobbledegook statement you'd expect from an artist going solo but at least it kind of hints at the influence of producer Bjorn Yttling and guest presence of, uh, Neil Young. More than anything, though, Stockholm just sounds like a tenth Pretenders album, and there’s little wrong with that.Hynde was once described as having a voice half-way between Elvis and Dusty Springfield. Remarkably, at 62 she still does. Fans are already claiming that the power-pop of Read more ...

They've performed together on stage and in the studio since the first Waterson:Carthy albums of the early 1990s, but this is the first time Martin and Eliza Carthy have recorded as a duo, and they've kept it lean and clear with just their voices, Eliza's fiddle and Martin's guitar – each element distinct enough by itself, but together creating a very pure, personal kind of austere beauty. There's no excess baggage, and the tunes are handled with the kind of expertise, love and assured interpretation that comes with a lifetime's immersion.The opening “Her Servant Man” is a succinct Read more ...

For those not in the know, the Supersonic Festival is Birmingham’s annual knees-up of noisy avant garde music drawn from a broad range of genres that is curated by local promoters and heroes, Capsule. This year, despite the event being reduced to two days from the usual three, there was doomy, sludge rock; electronic weirdery; pseudo film soundtrack music; screaming guitars; the legendary Bill Drummond and the mighty Swans. To some extent, the line proved to be gold to the hipster community of the West Midlands (and further afield) with a shocking amount of blokes sporting beards and Read more ...

Any fears that Howling Bells’ short hiatus, or the new motherhood of frontwoman and lead songwriter Juanita Stein, had softened the band’s deliciously dark yet melodic songwriting must surely be assuaged by the huge, squalling riff that opens new album Heartstrings - and its lead track, “Paris”. While the song itself is a gorgeous, languid meditation on Europe’s romantic capital (“oh Paris, every song’s about you, every romance calls you”) it’s the sonic power of the four-piece’s simple guitar-drums-bass approach that makes its mission statement clear.Loud but never knowingly jarring is as Read more ...

Once upon a time, Matthew “Matisyahu” Miller was the Hasidic reggae singer. There was only one, and the beard he sported for the first three albums made him pretty easy to spot. He still calls himself the “Hasidic reggae superstar” (on “Watch the Walls Melt Down”), but now, for this fifth studio album, he’s sleek, smooth and groomed, like any successful performer from LA, with a cosmopolitan stylistic palette to match.  The generic diversification is, it seems, deliberate. While reggae, rap and hip hop have been converging for some time, and the Jewish sounds have always been there, he Read more ...

Various Artists: Holland-Dozier-Holland - The Complete 45s Collection, Invictus, Hot Wax, Music MerchantAs Holland-Dozier-Holland, Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland wrote and produced for The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes and every other top-flight Motown act between 1962 and 1968. Their credit was behind “Baby Love”, “Nowhere to Run”, “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, “Where Did Our Love Go” and many other classics. But that wasn’t enough for the trio. At Motown, they increasingly felt, as the book with this package puts it, “overworked and under-appreciated”. Splitting from Read more ...