rock
Joe Muggs
Few would have predicted it back when they were gooning around in over-tight Adidas t-shirts, but with the benefit of hindsight it makes sense that Blur should have the most convincing longevity of the Britpop generation. Why? Because more than any of their contemporaries, and despite all the personality clashes and narcotic breakdowns, they were genuinely a band. Yes, Damon Albarn was the leader, but he never eclipsed the other three in the way that Jarvis or the Gallaghers did. Even the raging bellend Alex James, though musically more or less pointless, was gravitationally part of the Blur Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s no doubting the precocious talent of Laura Marling. At just 25 she recently released her fifth album, Short Movie, which matched the spiky introspection of song-writing previously driven by folk melodies with a new rock-orientated sound. Inspired by her two-year sojourn in LA, from which she returned late last year, the album tells of the usual romantic yearnings and scorned or broken love affairs, mixed with tales of everyday encounters with new age Californian mystics. A sense of both the expansive West Coast landscape and of cosmic space meets altered consciousness, prevailed. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I often think that, once a band hits certain milestones – longevity, moderate commercial success, critical acclaim – it can be difficult to know where to begin. I don’t mean the big bands, with the songs you’d recognise if you heard them in an advert or at a festival, their big hits acting as gateway drugs to those who’d like to find out more; but rather those mid-level indie bands beloved by those in the know and yet whose names prompt glazed looks when your colleagues ask you who you went to see at the weekend. By all means, after almost 20 years and nine albums together, Calexico should be Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Flesh Throne Press is the sixth album from heavy doom-rock duo Pombagira. Guitarist and singer Pete and drummer Carolyn Hamilton-Giles’s massive sound is characterised by portentous riffing soaked in reverb, vocals that could easily be mistaken for prime time Ozzy Osbourne, and sluggish but powerful drumming, all basted in early '70s production values. While Flesh Throne Press could, at a stretch, be described as meditative, it’s certainly not unobtrusive background music and needs to be played very loudly indeed.The obvious touchstones for Flesh Throne Press are the sound of classic Black Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The best singer-songwriters, you might say, survey life's experiences with a forensic eye. That’s certainly true of Laura Marling. Her new album Short Movie chronicles the singer's recent stint in LA where she'd relocated for a couple of years. Marling's adventures are catalogued with a satisfying mix of introspection and free-form vibes. That, of course, was also partly true of her last offering, Once I Was an Eagle. The difference here is that her hopes and disappointments are expressed with a Seventies rawness that also hints at an inner rock-chick.Artists rarely Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When a documentary about Irish rock music starts with footage of late-period Bono shuffling about awkwardly dressed in black, my first impulse is to check my iTunes in case he’s surreptitiously shat another album into my computer. The second is to reach for the remote. Thankfully though, this was just a glimpse of what was to come down Ireland's rocky road. I had more than enough time to steel myself as we sped back in time to a point when the fledgling blues scene was first making an impact in the country.In the South during the 1960s, the Church held sway and, with it, a tight grip on the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
I first saw Spectres last October at the 10th birthday celebrations for their label, Sonic Cathedral. That night, they struck me as noisy, spiky and fun. If that sounds like faint praise, it really wasn't meant to be – noisy, spiky fun is in my all-time top three funs. Now, they've gone from bottom of the bill to headline act in less than six months on the back of an album so incendiary it should come wrapped in a fire blanket (well, it beats a tote bag any day) and, oh my… how they have grown. Really, this band’s development needs to be measured in cat years.They step out, plug in and the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It would probably be best to start this review with a mention of the band, The War on Drugs, whose 2014 LP, Lost in the Dream, saw them realise their potential in a flurry of "Best Of" lists and almost unbelievable hyperbole. However, before we get fully into that, I should state, for the record, that I’ve always hated Brixton Academy. The rake plays havoc with my calves and the beer tastes homeopathically weak, while sound spirals and muddies as it travels into the gods before falling back to earth like a plague of shit brown noise. This is why the support band suffered dreadfully last night Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With The Jesus & Mary Chain reformed and currently touring their epochal debut album, Psychocandy, theartsdesk reaches into its archives to offer up a rare and very extensive interview with lead singer Jim Reid from 2010.Jim Reid (b 1961) is lead singer and, with older brother William, the creative driving force behind The Jesus and Mary Chain. Together they created a furore in the mid-Eighties, bursting onto the scene with punk churlishness, a uniquely noisy sound and riots that exploded at their every gig. It seemed for a moment as if a new Sex Pistols had arrived.Instead of burning out Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Julian Cope’s albums are usually fairly expansive affairs which employ a vast array of instruments, an audience with the Arch Drude is a more intimate affair these days. There’s no backing band and the man takes to the stage armed only with a 12-string acoustic guitar, a microphone and a few effects pedals. There’s also a big bass drum set up on stage with “You can’t beat your brain for entertainment” written on the skin – but that’s just a prop and doesn’t get played.Cope started up by launching into “I’m Living in the Room They Found Saddam In” from 2005’s Citizen Cain’d album, and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In interviews, Sleater-Kinney have been at pains to point out that their first album in nigh-on a decade is not a “reunion”. It’s certainly not a word I’d reach for to describe No Cities to Love: it’s too cosy a word – one that conjures buried grudges and a comfortable rediscovery of the things that made a band great in its youth. But there were no grudges behind Sleater-Kinney’s “indefinite hiatus” in 2006, and the music across their seven-album discography was never comfortable. There was little chance of them starting now.Taking a little of the fire of 2002’s politically charged One Beat, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Magma: Köhntarkösz, Köhntarkösz Anteria, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré“They were a Seventies phenomenon,” said snooker ace Steve Davies of Magma. “But they were a bit too far out there for most people, even if you liked progressive music. I didn't dare put them on the communal record player at sixth-form because they would have been booed off. Maybe it's because they were French.”Magma – the band Davies declared his “true obsession” – are still going strong under the guidance of their visionary drummer Christian Vander. John Lydon was another fan. The vinyl-only reissue of three of their albums, 1974’s Read more ...