rock
Thomas H. Green
CVC stands for Church Village Collective, a six-piece who hail from the countryside near Cardiff. They were the best live act I saw last year (of a long list which includes Melt Yourself Down, Paul McCartney, The Prodigy and Wet Leg). It was a joyously raucous and contagious gig, front-loaded with Seventies rock vibes and a sense of fun, so I’m intrigued to hear if their debut album can live up to it. But they’re a different proposition on record. The raucous rock wildness is missing, but the Seventies are there in a mellower, cheesier form.The best bits of Get Real, recorded in guitarist Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Actually, Spotify tells me the album I’ve streamed most this year is Motordrome, the third album by Danish pop star MØ. When I reviewed it back in January I was underwhelmed by its doleful moodiness, but, showing how wrong a quick couple of listens can be, something about its vaguely remorseful, indie-tinged, girl-pop melancholy grabbed me deeper than I’d realised and kept drawing me back.Some years, my Album of the Year is clear and obvious. It’s the one that stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, listened to with giddy addiction. 2022 has not been such a year. In all honesty, my Album of Read more ...
India Lewis
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres is American critic Kelefa Sanneh’s ambitious survey of musical history. As such, it risks remaining only a surface-level summary of the seven genres he describes. I was wrong to worry, though: despite its broad coverage, Sanneh’s study is informative and personal, providing overviews of but also covering smaller diversions and developments within rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop.Each chapter loops back to the other genres to show their points of divergence, before travelling forward to explore the roads of sub- Read more ...
Mark Kidel
As our favourite rock stars become elders, there has been a steady flow of autobiographies, some ghosted, some authentically authored; more or less confessional, revisiting the ups and downs of life-journeys lived beyond the fatal 27th birthday that seems to have knocked an uncanny number of them out of play.Patrick Duff, the lead singer and songwriter for the Nineties indie band Strangelove is an unlikely survivor. Strangelove, emerged at the tail-end of Britpop, were much admired by Radiohead and Suede. They almost made it big. The band were very good, and their music has stood the test of Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Growing up in Sweden, sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg developed ways of combatting the biting cold and bleak darkness of winter. As well as writing during wintertime, they turned to the open landscapes and pervasive desert heat of the USA to inspire their music. Perhaps it is this that brings such a warm sheen to their presence.On a stage ablaze with the iridescent shimmer of a huge sun backdrop, the duo open with “Palomino”, to a retro film screen of horses running free and wild. The Nevada aesthetic continues with “Angel” and “It’s A Shame” accompanied by Super 8-style films of golden Read more ...
Tom Carr
We Were Promised Jetpacks is a band name that seems off the cuff at first glance. This could be said for the Scottish indie-rock darlings' latest effort, an EP that reworks some of their record from last year, Enjoy the View – as remixed material may hold lukewarm appeal.But A Complete One-Eighty gave Jetpacks the chance to revisit their first album as a three-piece and push some of the songs in directions they couldn’t previously envision. Though far from a household name, Jetpacks’ sound is unmistakable: soaring guitar chords and leads, thundering drums, full basslines, and Adam Thompson’s Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“You’re filmin’ a movie or something – can you explain this?” the radio DJ turns to Neil Young, a laugh underpinning his question and setting the scene: light, jovial.“We’re just makin’ a film about…” Young pauses for a second. “I dunno, just the things we wanna film… I’m making it like I make an album, sort of… It’s like… I’m cutting it, instead of… so it’s personal, like an album.”“So some day someone’ll be able to go to a theatre and see it maybe?” the DJ asks.“Yeah, I hope so, maybe pretty soon,” comes the reply. This reasonably edited conversation occurs toward the closing act of Read more ...
India Lewis
Arriving to the second night of two shows in the same venue, you would expect it to be a little quieter. But Wet Leg’s second outing at the O2 in Kentish Town was anything but – their burgeoning reputation (they are supporting Harry Styles next year) ensuring an excellent and enthusiastic turnout. The crowd was mixed, but with more than a smattering of the bald(ing) 6 Music dads that are now standard fare for any emergent alternative pop acts. There were two warm-up bands, described by one of the two frontwomen of Wet Leg with glee as the chance to organise their own mini festival Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilko Johnson, who has died aged 75, enjoyed an astonishing afterlife while he was still alive. After Julien Temple’s Dr. Feelgood film Oil City Confidential (2009) restored his crucial former band's profile, a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013 perversely flooded Wilko with the wonder of life, leaving this melancholy soul content for perhaps the first time.Renewed, surreal popularity climaxed when Wilko played Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny” for surely the last, tear-soaked time at Camden Koko that March. And yet, a doctor's suspicion of his continued vitality revealed a less Read more ...
Tom Carr
Jamie Lenman is as cult an icon as cult icons can get. The former guitarist, song-writer, frontman of Reuben, a band unfortunately most notorious for breaking up, but still dearly beloved by a devoted, passionate fanbase.Lenman has since carved for himself his own niche as a solo artist, kickstarting his solo venture with 2013’s double-sided debut album Muscle Memory. A handful of albums and an EP have followed, cementing his crown as one of the UK’s lesser-known but underrated alternative rock stars.Returning with his fourth album, The Atheist, Lenman sets his stall out on a smoothed-out Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When most of us fall victim to things beyond our control, the impulse is to howl into the abyss, scream to the stars, wave our fist at clouds. Most of us, of course, aren’t Neil Young.While the raging wildfires that destroyed the singer’s home in 2018 are unlikely to be the sole driving force behind this collection of environmentally-focused songs (he hitched his horse to that wagon decades ago), they certainly seem to have focused his ire and given him a theme to roll with for World Record, his 42nd studio album.Following the success of 2021's Barn, Young sticks to familiar ground with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Very little points to anything specific. Parts of “Superseded” nod towards the 1968 Pretty Things’s track “Eagle’s Son”. Elsewhere in the set, a circular bass guitar figure is reminiscent of a motif from Spirit’s “1984”. But for a band so explicitly looking to rock’s psychedelic lineage, the influences are effortlessly subsumed into the whole to become mostly invisible foundations rather than noticeable elements of the superstructure.This London show by Nick Saloman’s Bevis Frond is nominally to promote last year’s album, Little Eden. The encore is its final track “Dreams of Flying”. Read more ...