rock
Thomas H. Green
This debut album came out a couple of years ago in New War’s native Australia but is now receiving a full international release courtesy of All Tomorrow's Parties. It deserves it. The quartet from Melbourne give rock, indie, punk - and a whole lot else - a dramatic shake-up, notably boasting lyrics by frontman Chris Pugmire that are intriguing, literate and sometimes poetic. The band also add weight to their driven sound with keyboards and effects utilised in a way that recalls the explosion of millennial New York bands such as Interpol and Out Hud.Try these lyrics - from "Revealer" - for Read more ...
Russ Coffey
As fans of Dylan’s Bootleg series will testify, “odds and ends” albums may require a small modification of expectations. High Hopes falls into a similar category: it’s a collection of 12 re-recordings, outtakes and covers of material that the Boss couldn’t find a home for in his previous 17 albums. Listeners may not find the experience especially consistent, but, still, there are some real nuggets here.Much of this is down to guitarist Tom Morello. Last year, Morello toured with the E Street Band whilst Steve Van Zant was off acting. Chemistry developed between the Rage Against The Machine Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Country music in the 21st century is the weirdest thing, and not much of it seems to have to do with the country any more. At its commercial end, it sells billions of records by men with tight T-shirts and women with very white teeth who all drive gigantic 4x4s, making gigastars (in the US at least) of the likes of Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift. Elsewhere there is rootsy bluegrass for urban hipsters, avant-garde classical-electronica-folk, and a vast swathe of “alt.country” and Americana acts that blur the lines between indie rock and retro country.It's in this last category that Shonna Tucker Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s panto time in the UK and what better way to get into the spirit than the Goth Christmas Roadshow that is The Mission and Fields of the Nephilim? Here are two bands who were part of the goth scene that sprang forth in the second half of the Eighties in black cowboy hats and blacker shades, with a mission to move things away from post-punk austerity and back towards Seventies excess.In the Eighties, Fields of the Nephilim (pictured below in their heyday) adopted a stage show that included industrial volumes of dry ice and the fierce strobe lights. The music was a loud dirge and Carl McCoy’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now twenty five years since the release of the Waterboys’ most popular album, Fisherman’s Blues. To mark this auspicious occasion, Mike Scott has persuaded EMI to release a six-CD expanded version, Fisherman’s Box, which has 120-odd tracks of the type of music that, let’s not forget, did not receive universal acclaim in 1988 but has significantly grown in stature since then. He’s also called in the guys who recorded these folk, gospel, country and bluegrass flavoured tunes and has hit the road for a proper celebration of their “raggle-taggle gypsy” years.The Birmingham leg of the tour Read more ...
Tim Cumming
And so Dylan’s tour of European theatres, opera houses and concert halls ended on Thursday night at the Royal Albert Hall, his first dates here in 46 years. I’ve seen him plenty of times over the past 30 years. This was the best of them. Dylan’s found a way to use his voice again, and his group is so nuanced to its needs, it’s a pure pleasure to hear. Charlie Sexton plays a warm and refined lead, not rock'n'roll at all, and there’s a quiet glow between all the players; it’s as if they’re facing the same way, looking at the same colours.Appropriately, "Things Have Changed" opens it up as the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“There is a misconception that we have called ourselves the greatest band on earth.” Jack Black, the self-styled “lead singer” of Tenacious D, is all for dispelling a persistent rumour about a band which has, if he’s honest, done practically nothing to make him a famous name in Hollywood. “People have marketed us that way,” he explains. “You won’t find it anywhere in the albums. You won’t find it in any of our songs.”It’s true, you won’t. A semantic confusion may have initially arisen the first time the band ever performed in public, at a place called Al’s Bar in Los Angeles in 1994. The only Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Dave Edmunds is one of a generation of rockers who came of age in the 1970s and excelled in channeling decades of American popular music: cue the pub rock bands, think Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello. There is a mixture of total knowingness and a nostalgic yearning for innocence that characterized the power pop of the period and a return to the three-minute single after the symphonic excesses of pomp and prog rock.Dave Edmunds channels The Beach Boys, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Otis Redding on this newly released album, most of which was originally available on his 1994 release Just Plugged. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Anyway, anyone who's ever been anyone in the great pop and rock malarky has been memorably photographed by Sheehan (or "painted with light," as he might facetiously put it). His work has appeared in Melody Maker, Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times and Sunday Times, Time Out and many other places Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes TV doesn’t need to be “challenging” or “groundbreaking” to be thoroughly worthwhile. The first episode of Sky Arts' new “…talks music” series saw the familar format of a live, seated interview applied to one of pop music’s highest achievers: Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. TV producer Malcolm Gerrie led proceedings in an attractive theatre in front of an audience of students. Most memorable were some blistering live demonstrations of Buckingham’s craft.Gerrie’s interview style may have been a little more One Show than Parkinson but still he kept the singer/guitarist well at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Grand claims and superlatives were not lacking in this examination of The Who's fabled rock opera. "This is a quintessentially important creation," said Des McAnuff, the man who staged Tommy on Broadway and in London's West End. "This might just be the first pop masterpiece," wrote pop critic (and Pete Townshend's pinball-playing buddy) Nik Cohn in his review in 1969.But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is studio album number 10 for the seasoned Seattle-ites, and on a first listening you might feel inclined to flip it into the bin marked "solid but unexciting". Give it a bit of time to breathe though and it starts to reveal its strengths.Among these are the lead guitar playing of Mike McCready, something of an unsung hero in the annals of axemanship but a chap eminently capable of blowing the bloody doors off in a variety of styles. For instance in "Mind Your Manners", one of the disc's standouts, he unleashes a blistering riff-and-chord barrage in a bring-back-the-Dead-Kennedys style, Read more ...