punk
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is an unexpectedly wonderful album. A five-star rating might seem a bit much but then judging music in the same way as sport or exams is a bit crap anyway. So let’s say 5/5 compared to other Christmas albums and, yes, this is at the very summit. Ever. Then again, it’ll be useless from 2 January until next December.Making a Christmas album is like writing haikus or cooking soufflé - it follows a precise formula, absolutely requiring key elements that are incredibly hard to quantify correctly and, most especially, make even faintly original.The backstory here is that smashingly affecting Read more ...
howard.male
“It’s cultural imperialism,” a middle-aged gentleman felt compelled to say to me, presumably because I was the bloke with the notebook. “Then all pop music is cultural imperialism,” is what I should have fired back at him, had I not been so immersed in the transcendental racket of tussling brass and distorted guitars that had almost made him inaudible. But instead I took the scenic route of pointing out that this legend of 1970s Ethiopian jazz would hardly have spent the last seven years playing with these white Dutch musicians if he had felt he was being exploited.As I finished the case for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 9 September, 1985 The Jesus and Mary Chain played Camden's Electric Ballroom to a ceaseless hail of plastic pint pots. After 20 minutes, the songs gave way to formless feedback and they sloped off the stage. Although Yuck weren’t born then, the significance of playing the same stage can’t have been lost on them. Carrying a torch for the pre-grunge fuzz-rock that was shoegazing’s ugly sister, Yuck know a thing or two about what they’re drawing from.Yuck’s set ended in formless feedback and there was no encore. The house lights were quickly switched on and that was it. Singer/guitarist Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“My first album was a personal love letter to God,” Josh T Pearson tells me, looking like a cross between Johnny Cash and Moses. No wonder, then, that it took him 10 years to record another. On this year's release, Pearson had moved on, talking failed love like a punk Leonard Cohen stranded in the wilderness. Face to face, Pearson is, however, quite the Southern gent: the Last of the Country Gentlemen, as he calls himself in the title of the new album. In a west-London café, he recounted how he got here, and why he is nervous about this Saturday’s big gig at the Barbican.Pearson grew up in Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The passing of Jackie Leven, who died last night from cancer, comes with a sense of real sadness. One of our most distinctive and original singer-songwriters, the Fifer maintained a doggedly low commercial profile throughout almost four decades spent weaving his rich, rather brave musical tapestry. With the abrasive, unclassifiable pre-punk band Doll By Doll and later as a solo artist, Leven often specialised in difficult subjects. A song on one of his recent solo records was called “The War Crimes of Ariel Sharon”, and his music was typically peopled by Serbian prostitutes, Earls Court Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Whose idea was it to do the gig in this shithole?” asks Captain Sensible towards the end of the night. He’s right. The East Wing is truly an atmosphere-free venue, a carpeted, low-ceilinged conference room that’s part of the much larger Brighton Centre complex. It’s easy to imagine it filled with municipal administrators milling about, the stink of coffee and the rustle of paperwork. Instead, it’s packed to the gills with men and women, mostly in their late forties and early fifties, mostly clad in black, lots of leather and badges.The Damned have undoubtedly played worse. They’ve had a Read more ...
matilda.battersby
“Rude boy! Rude boy! Ruuuude boooyyyy!!” The chanting from the crowd began soon after the booing subsided. The boos were in response to a picture of Margaret Thatcher which was flashed on a big screen as part of a short filmed history lesson about the late-Seventies malcontent that gave birth to the joyfully irreverent early British ska bands of which The Specials are surely kings.The crowd was made up of (and I hope they forgive me for saying this) rather sizeable blokes in their early forties, with shaved heads, a handful of whom were wearing pork pie hats. Original rude boys. The booze was Read more ...
howard.male
How thrilling to hear you again, gentleman. Can it really have been 30 years? Yet within half a song, the emotional and cerebral connections are re-established in my brain as post-punk’s least punky band present their shiny new songs for our amusement and amazement. However, my job is to resist the inexorable pull of nostalgia: some objectivity is required if this review is to be of any worth to anyone under 45. In other words; do Devoto and co still cut the mustard in the 21st century?There’s nothing here as John Barry bombastic as “Shot by Both Sides” or as icily disconnected as “Permafrost Read more ...
Russ Coffey
When a band of a certain vintage comes in from the cold suddenly to record a new album you can reasonably expect one of three things: total nonsense, a half-decent throwback or, if you’re very lucky, a proper comeback. Eighties art-metallers Jane’s Addiction have already had one pretty impressive return this millennium. That was 2003’s Stray, their first original release since 1990’s classic Ritual de lo Habitual. The question fans of Lollapalooza music have been asking in the last few months is, can they pull off the same trick again?So far, reactions to the record have been polarised Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Friday 9th SeptemberA ferry adds to the fun. It may seem rather childish but the fact you have to take a ferry to the Isle of Wight makes the whole Bestival experience seem more of an adventure. Sitting on the open air deck with my youngest brother Enrico, the wind tempered by a warm, bright sun, and a bottle of cider passing between us, the only perturbing issue is the amount of wax jackets making the journey to the festival, Barbours and the like. When did the wax jacket become acceptable? When I were a lad they were only worn by Sloanes and men with shotguns Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
WOMAD is in its 29th year, and ticket sales have gone up 29 per cent, we are told, with over 35,000 sold. World music, always rather beyond fashion, is thriving, at least in this live festival incarnation in Wiltshire. One criticism, according to The Independent among others (made by trendy middle-class people in a fit of self-loathing, generally), was that there were too many Cath Kidston tents and it has become too bourgeois. But there was enough strangeness and idiosyncrasy on display to undermine the idea that WOMAD has become complacent in its middle age.In fact, WOMAD has expanded Read more ...