rock
Tom Carr
From three young lads making music to escape adolescent boredom, inspired by heavy doses of Nirvana and Deftones, Muse now regularly make stadiums around the world their own with seas of thousands adoring fans their home. Since 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations they have also continuously refined their larger-than-life brand of stadium rock. Taking straight up alt-rock and arming it with an extravagant presence, somewhat reminiscent of Queen, they never shy of regularly dipping in and out with distorted, fuzz-laden riffs.On 2018’s Simulation Theory they toyed with a synthesised sound Read more ...
mark.kidel
Demi Lovato doesn’t do things by halves. She has one of the most powerful voices around, as suited to the yang of punchy hard rock as it is to the sensual yin of R&B or or the contagious sweetness of girly pop.Self-professed gender fluid, her latest album showcases a perennial love of metal: pumping rhythms, hard-edged guitars and a heavy dose of aggro – but her brand of anger is tinged with an appealing touch of vulnerability. The material is as provocative as ever, with a showers of the F Word, used as an adjective as well as a call to arms. The album is not called Holy Fvck for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month’s reviews take in everything from New York new wave pop to apocalyptic electro to kitsch exotica. There are no genre boundaries at theartsdesk on Vinyl, just a constant desire to play music loud, whether new or reissues, then share what it felt like. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHCongotronics International Where’s the One (Crammed Discs)Crammed Discs is a label that understands how music can connect different cultures and sounds. They put their money where their mouth is when they conjoined crossover African percussion-led outfits Konono No.1 and Kasai Allstars with exploratory indie Read more ...
Katie Colombus and Caspar Gomez
FRIDAY 22 JULY by Caspar GomezWhen my regular festival pal Finetime and I have set up the wibbly, inflatable-poled tents he bought from Lidl, we settle to drinks, his from a chill-box, mine from a 35-pint container of Pilton Labyrinth scrumpy. We attune to the neighbours. Next to us is a tent-corral proudly flying a flag featuring a pink unicorn with penises for legs, spunking out rainbows. They are discussing the history of the Soviet Sputnik programme of the late 1950s. The people from the tents next door, that is. Not the unicorn’s penis-legs.As we will learn, this is the way people Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jack White’s last couple of albums, Boarding House Reach from 2018 and Fear of the Dawn from April this year, were both driven by experimentalism, dipping into electronics, hip hop, noise and more. They were both, to differing degrees, admirable in intent, coming from an artist perceived as zealously retro, but they were also only partially successful.Entering Heaven Alive is a less wilful beast and, in terms of enjoyably straightforward songwriting, the better for it. It will, naturally, and as is undoubtedly intended, be viewed of-a-piece with Fear of the Dawn, since the latter only came Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Sweetness never lasts too long at a Haim gig. No sooner had Alana Haim, the youngest of the Californian siblings, finished a speech about her delight about being back in Glasgow by announcing she was going to “smell the f****** roses” then bass-playing elder sister Este piped up with “I’m smelling my armpits. They are ripe.” It summed up a chat-heavy show that at times felt like part gig, part stand-up comedy try-out.For all the banter, which reached such an amount that Alana quipped at one stage she felt all they’d done was talk, the trio have an assurance about playing large venues. An Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We music journos miss stuff too. This writer had not come across New Zealand-based Canadian singer Tami Neilson before, despite the fact she’s been around for over a decade and this is her sixth studio album. How did I miss her?Kingmaker contains the best kind of raw heartfelt country and scalpel-sharp lyricism, catchy songs spiked with a sassy rockabilly twang that propels them towards fresh territory. It boasts direction and energy which, with any justice, would see it racking up sales well beyond the niche. In short, an absolute zinger of an album.Neilson hails from a family of singers, Read more ...
Tom Carr
Despite not matching the success of their fellow New York post-punk colleagues, The Strokes, Interpol have nonetheless carved out a respectable path for themselves since their 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights. Occupying the darker edges of indie rock, they are the shadier counterpoint to the eccentricities of Julian Casablancas and co, their albums consistently making the UK Top 10 for the past two decades.Returning after four years with their latest effort, The Other Side of Make-Believe, its origins have a familiar-sounding tale to many recent albums: recording began in 2020, each of Read more ...
joe.muggs
James Bay couldn’t be more unhip if he had pelvic removal surgery. He is so middle of the road that he could be a cat’s eye. Everything about him is old before his time – he was inspired to pick up a guitar by hearing “Layla”, he sings in a husky transatlantic semi-Celtic voice, he exists in a continuum of soft rock that runs from the start of AOR through U2, David Gray and the Coldplay imitation explosion of the 00s through to Ed Sheeran and Louis Capaldi.And he is also very, very, very good at doing what he does indeed. This album makes no bones about his positioning. The opener “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the beginning of this film, Mick Jagger says: “What most documentaries do is repeat the same thing over and over… all the mythology is repeated until it becomes true.” He’s right, as he so often is. This latest attempt to prise open the enigma of the Rolling Stones’ indefatigable frontman reveals nothing a reasonably observant Stones fan won’t already know.The film is the first of a quartet, the others being about Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and the sorely-missed drummer Charlie Watts. Watts aside, they do at least contain new interviews with their subjects, who are all reliably Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” That’s the rule, right? Unless, of course, what happens is that you form a pop-rock act with a remarkable ear for a route-one hook and a direct line to the emotional core of teenagers everywhere. In that case, you definitely don’t stay in Vegas. You take the world by storm while leaving critics largely scratching their heads and saying, “I don’t get it”.Mercury – Act 2, the follow up to last year’s Mercury – Act 1 (and released, confusingly, in a two-disc set with its older sibling), won’t change any of that for frontman Dan Reynolds and co. Fans will Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion Twittering threepenny-bit reports on Glastonbury, but you haven’t taken this trip, I promise. So stroll in, fall over, pick yourself back up, take it all in, sniff it all up, drink it all down. Let’s do this.THURSDAY 23rd JUNEFinetime, my regular Glastonbury partner and photographer, is very proud of the tent he’s bought me from Lidl. My own tent Read more ...