CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
“I can still taste you and I hate it/That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it/You took the first slice of me and you ate it raw/Ripped at it with your teeth and your lips like a cannibal/You fucking animal.” The opening lines of “Cannibal” the first track on Self-Titled, the solo debut from Marcus Mumford – are the first indication this might not be the album you’ve been expecting. Even if you’re already aware of the childhood abuse the singer suffered, and which inspired this collection songs, prior knowledge does little to prepare you for the visceral punch those Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marina Allen’s singing voice fluctuates between the conversational and the flutingly melodic. In one song, she can be asking “Why do I sing my song for you” in a no-nonsense Randy Newman manner and then shift into a series of spiralling, ascending arpeggios. Centrifics, her second album, is about contrasts.While the LA-based Allen is most probably aware of Judee Sill and Laura Nyro, there’s a jazziness (especially on “New Song Rising” and “Foul Weather Jacket Drawing's" vocal vamping) and a fondness for songs with multiple counter melodies which places her as more than a Seventies-influenced Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If anyone was going to produce a raucous musical response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was always likely to be Gogol Bordello. After all, the band has both Ukrainian and Russian members (among other nationalities), they have a tendency to champion the underdog and aren’t timid about flagging up injustice.New album, Solidaritine is indeed Eugene Hutz and his gang’s take on the things that are presently taking place in Eastern Europe. However, while it’s clear where Gogol Bordello’s sympathies lie, they don’t resort to sloganeering or explicitly calling out the Butcher of Moscow Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Suede were both prototypes and outliers of the Britpop pack, and their 2010 reunion managed a rare, creatively substantial second act; given their resurrection after guitarist Bernard Butler’s fractious 1994 exit, this may even be the band’s epic, open-ended Act 3.Where their first three reunion albums restored Suede’s sense of conceptual art, Autofiction brings back the pop, the glamour and fizz of their early singles and feverish gigs. Rather than rehash that past, it looks to post-punk for its attitude and sound, imagining a Suede born into the hard monochrome of 1979, not the hedonism and Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The Star Feminine Band are from Benin, all of them under 18, the youngest only 12. They hail from a village in the north of their small country tucked between Togo and Nigeria. Their pop-inflected mix of high life, Congolese rhumba and other trans-African styles is as ebullient as it comes, and probably very infectious on the dance floor.Their second album features once again guitars, electronic keyboards and percussion. It’s mostly up-tempo, and as with so much African music, as well as in the musics of the African diaspora, the fun of the dance is inseparable from messages about how to live Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Those talented internationally-renowned musicians are just like the rest of us, you know? They had a rubbish time during lockdown too – turns out it was the great leveller after all. Santigold’s latest album (her sixth, the first for four years) is the direct result of being stuck at home with three kids under six. But rather than sending her crawling up the walls (although there is a bit of that) it’s made her reassess her creative direction.Quite why Santigold hasn’t broken through more universally is a mystery to many. Perhaps the mix of her punk ethos, echoes of dancehall, slightly “arty Read more ...
Tom Carr
Away from the spotlight of mainstream music the metal scene thrives, unbothered with how much attention it picks up. When bands like Architects reach number one in the UK charts, it is huge, but unimportant. Instead the scene is preoccupied with its own endlessly shifting subgenres and sounds.Enter Parkway Drive, an Australian metal band who spent the first part of their career firmly within the "metalcore" subgenre. Born from an aggressive merging of metal with hardcore punk, it melds the ferocious energy of hardcore with the intricate riffs and musicianship of metal – a heavy match made in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Is Ozzy Osbourne finally over the hill and ready to knock this rock’n’roll thing on the head? It’s a question that has been asked many times since he was unceremoniously dumped by Black Sabbath in 1979.Ozzy seems physically and artistically indestructible, even though few will remember albums like Under Cover with great affection. He’s even become an international treasure along the way and recently helped close the Commonwealth Games with “Iron Man” and “Paranoid” – and ex-Black Sabbath confederate Tony Iommi laying down the riffs.Fortunately, his first album since 2020’s Ordinary Man is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 skeleton of How Do You Burn?, it mostly shows love for the rock form itself, and the life it traditionally offered. The ghosts of the Nineties, when the Whigs bloomed and American rock last defined an era, haunt this record. So too the Seventies, when the Stones dropped clues to an apparently seedily splendid existence through albums of implicit Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
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 reference. But, of course it’s literally in his DNA. Jude is his seventh album and first since 2011. To be honest, I thought it was all over after "Too Late for Goodbyes" (1984), so this is a pleasant surprise (and I didn’t know he’d been Grammy nominated). Firstly, his voice is much less "John-like" than in those days when he troubled the charts. He’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
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 cracking into falsettos over grandiose post-U2 rhythms, really was quite a major cultural movement, wasn’t it? Easy to mock – and indeed the target of some real hatred – but absolutely inescapable, and as defining of its time as any hipper sound.Keane in particular exemplified the ostentatious sensitivity – and Tom Chaplin’s choirboy tones were up there Read more ...
Barney Harsent
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 has won hearts, minds and sales in roughly equal measure.Confounding expectations from the start, the new album is neatly (nearly) bookended by two instrumentals, the brooding “Messenger AD” and its penultimate partner piece “Messenger HD”. The first brings to mind heyday John Carpenter (or Stranger Things depending on your age). Clocking in at Read more ...