Reviews - Autumn 2011
The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico (Deluxe Edition)
Brian Eno once stated that, despite hardly anyone buying this album on its release, everyone that did buy it seemed to have formed a band. Ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about one of the three most influential albums of all time (what are the other two? You work it out, dear reader). Without this slice of plastic there would have been no glam rock, no krautrock and no punk...
Roxy Music - Roxy Music
Art and rock; what a thrilling concept. It is sometimes hard to believe as they now seem so much part of the establishment, just how dramatic an inroad Roxy Music (their very name a pun on ‘rock’ as well as music to evoke the glamour of the cinema) made as they seemingly emerged fully-formed in 1972 with the single “Virginia Plain” and this, their debut album...
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense Special Edition
It was a show about enlargement. Whether in David Byrne’s now iconic ‘big suit’ – an outfit better suited to a power-dressing Joan Collins that set the bar for the 80s shoulder-pad obsession at ridiculous heights – or in the way the band builds from a solo Byrne on an empty stage with a boombox and an acoustic guitar for Psycho Killer to a stage full of horn sections, backing singers and ex-Funkadelic players making Take Me to the River a blitz of sound and colour...
The Cure - Bestival Live 2011
When The Cure – the band Robert Smith formed with schoolmates in Sussex sometime in the late 1970s – played 2011’s Bestival back in September it marked their first UK show in some two years. But little had changed in the band’s world – unsurprising, really, as few contemporary bands can claim to have spanned features in Sounds, Smash Hits and NME (collecting a Godlike Genius Award along the way) with such enviable ease...
The Feeling - Singles 2006-2011
One of The Feeling’s many admirable qualities has been their refusal to chase credibility or the approval of pop critics. From the moment they launched their surprise takeover of 2006’s radio stations, they have been shameless – in the best possible sense – in their desire to reach as many people as possible with their glossy, ebullient pop songs. Unfortunately, that same shamelessness has led to many dismissing them as irony merchants or chart chancers...
Seasick Steve - Walkin' Man The Best of Seasick Steve
When Seasick Steve broke commercially with 2006's Dog House Music, his second LP, breaching the UK top 40 and immediately improving the Bronzerat label’s coffers several times over, it was an entirely predictable turn of events. After all, a 65-year-old who’d spent large portions of his life as a hobo, working odd jobs as a carnie and a cowboy, and who played bizarre self-customised instruments consisting of car parts, duct tape and carpet was exactly what the mainstream was crying out for...
Wham! - The Final
The story of Wham! is the story of 80s life – fame, making pots of cash and having amazing hair, a willingness to go BIG and wave two fingers at your non-fun contemporaries while you eat the globe in the time it took them to make their own albums...
Gorillaz - The Singles Collection 2001-2011
Think of Blur’s Damon Albarn and one thinks of Britpop, which is rather unfair, given that he’s spent the last 15 years working on projects associated with Mali (Mali Music), Iceland (the 101 Reykjavik soundtrack), China (Monkey: Journey To The West), the Democratic Republic Of Congo (Kinshasa One Two) and more...
The Darkness - Live at the 02 Academy, Birmingham Nov. 2011
It was only earlier this year that British glam rock revival band The Darkness announced a reunion and promised what would be its third studio album. The flamboyant falsetto of frontman, Justin Hawkins and extravagant stage shows harkened back to a golden age of arena rock like Queen and Rolling Stones...
P J Harvey - Let England Shake
The title of Polly Harvey’s seventh album, 2007’s White Chalk, seemed to address England’s psycho-geography by way of Dover’s iconic coastline. Perhaps that’s projection. But her eighth most definitely does. It’s a concept album, folks...
Tom Waits - Bad As Me
It’s been five years since Tom Waits released Orphans, a triple album that mixed new songs with a clear out of oddities and outtakes, making Bad As Me his first album of all-new material since 2004’s scabrous and sonically inventive Real Gone. Couple that with his reputation as one of the greatest musicians of the last 40 years and it’s fair to say that expectations for Bad As Me are high...
Joe Bonamassa - Live at the Hammersmith Apollo, Oct. 2011
Joe appeared on stage in classic black suit, white shirt and the customary shades - looking far too slick to pass for either gangster or businessman - totally in a class of his own - visually and musically. The second this accomplished virtuoso struck the first guitar string it was aural bliss from start to finish. Every note picked out individually like a gem - perfect, rich and resonant...
The Cure Return to their Roots
The Cure may be the best live band to come out of the 80's “New Wave” genre. The band has toured in one form or another, consistently, for over three decades. Their marathon concerts are legendary and it is not uncommon for a Cure concert to include a 15 minute or longer improvisation of a single song from their catalogue of jam ready classics like “A Forest”...
Etta James - The Dreamer
There aren’t many artists who get to officially make a retirement statement. Most stars just gradually fade away, or sometimes go supernova in a suitably spectacular fashion. Perhaps David Bowie has retired. Or is he merely taking a Miles Davis-styled sabbatical? For health reasons, the veteran Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora has recently announced her final bow, and now the same situation has arrived with Etta James...
The Jesus and Mary Chain - Darklands
When you’ve opened your musical career with a record as caustic, reactionary and as brutal as Psychocandy, just where the hell do you go next? Jim and William Reid, the brothers whose relationship had given The Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut (and accompanying gigs) much of its bittersweet volatility, chose to surprise everyone, including probably themselves, with Darklands...
Can - Tago Mago 40th Anniversary Reissue
Former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki is still a regular face in the gig venues of the world. His modus-operandi is to turn up in any given city and recruit a band of local musicians to provide the improvised backing to his shamanic, often-indecipherable exhortations. He’s therefore not changed much in the years since Can bassist Holgar Czukay discovered him busking outside a Munich cafe and asked him to join the group...
Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow
Six years after Aerial’s bursts of summer sound, Kate Bush’s winter album arrives, each track exploring the long Christmas months. They reflect a season which brings out the profound and absurd in equal measure – the feelings of longing and loneliness that emerge as the dark nights bed in, the party-hat silliness that pops up when the same nights stretch out...
Thea Gilmore and the Words of Sandy Denny - Don't Stop Singing
The Sandy Denny this writer met in 1977 was gossipy and lively, and her tragically premature death the following year robbed the British music scene of a rich and unique voice. Until now, she has remained in the shadow of her Island contemporary Nick Drake...
Amon Amarth - HMV Forum
Amon Amarth is the ultimate hell-raising metal band from Sweden and right at the top of my list for some time now although the live concert was a first. There are no holds barred – this is pure Scandinavian battle music mania from the moment these Norsemen march on stage...
Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu
In many ways Metallica have for a long time been not one, but two bands. In the summer months they are the world’s premiere full-blooded rock act, content to bask at such locations as Yankee Stadium in the legacy afforded them by albums such as Master of Puppets and songs like Enter Sandman. But as a corollary to this there exists a group whose creative heart beats daring and strong...
The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions
Finally it's time to see what triumphs, reality or myth, the destination or the journey. We've waited almost 45 years for this, the near-as-dammit definitive version of one of the great lost classics. So was it worth the heartache, the horse-trading for bootlegs, even the filler surrounding the odd SMiLE relic on flaky later albums like Smiley Smile or 20/20? No doubt about it...
Slipknot - Iowa: Tenth Anniversary Release
Paul Gambaccini, a man often referred to as ‘The Professor of Pop’, recently opined that the rock age, like the jazz age, had passed. This wasn’t to say that the genre is incapable of throwing up interesting fresh offerings every now and again, but that essentially there was no longer anything new under the sun...
Machine Head - Unto the Locust
On Burn My Eyes, Machine Head’s 1994 debut album, there featured a song with the not entirely user-friendly title of Real Eyes, Realize, Real Lies. Essentially a two-and-three-quarter-minute guitar riff, the track was rendered intriguing by the fact that its lyrics comprised soundbites recorded from the darker thoroughfares of America’s meanest streets: voices of the poor bemoaning police brutality, police radios alerting squad cars to explosions of gang violence, and gangbangers telling reporters why it was they hated other gangbangers who were, for all intents and purposes, identical to themselves...
The Best of Ash
It's fair to say things haven't gone as Ash might have hoped when they emerged back in 1992 from the backwaters of Downpatrick, so young their parents had to sign their record contract and so fresh they practically invented pop-punk...
40 Years of Queen
The book, entitled '40 Years of Queen' has been compiled by esteemed music journalist, Harry Doherty and the book will showcase moments in the bands history through photographs along with unique pieces if memorabilia such as backstage passes, handwritten lyrics, ultra-rare posters, original tour itineraries, handwritten letters, limited-edition records, invites to the now-legendary tour parties plus artefacts from personal collections of Queen members Brian May, Roger Taylor & John Deacon...
Why Pink Floyd?
Dubbed "Why Pink Floyd?," the campaign of reissues, deluxe box sets, re-mastered original albums, bonus tracks galore and abundant rare artwork will see deluxe treatments of the band's music thrust into the marketplace - a marketplace in which demand for that music is still high...
Nirvana - Nevermind: Twentieth Anniversary
Released in 1991 within three weeks of Nevermind, Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho told the story of boy interrupted 'Mike'. A classic Van Sant character, Mike is a vagrant prostitute prone to bouts of narcolepsy, his fits presaged by visions of his missing mother, whom he deifies. A typically solipsistic Van Sant film, it's always Mike's world we are in - to the point that his isolation is felt to the bones. The role was played by a reluctant icon of the time, the ill-fated River Phoenix, who commanded the film yet seemed lost within the fabric of it. Indeed the character of Mike is lost too, but what he does have is the drifter's limitless freedom...
Peter Gabriel - New Blood in 3D
Peter Gabriel has always been one for pushing the boundaries of technology. Whether pioneering the use of the Fairlight to create music from the smashing of TV screens in the early 80s or providing video cameras to document human rights violations more recently, he has consistently found ways to make the hardware serve the cause, rather than let it dictate what he is allowed to do...
God Bless Ozzy Osbourne
Aaah well my first thoughts having seen the preview of GOD BLESS OZZY is that it should be called GOD BLESS SHARON, how she put up with his excesses for so long I can't imagine and in no small measure she kept him alive to become (can you believe it, a National Treasure)...
Wilco Johnson Live at the Islington Academy
What a night! The Academy in Islington is a really fantastic venue for gigs like this, small enough to feel really intimate but big enough to get an enthusiastic crowd, and my were they enthusiastic, true mostly guys and generally mature but then what would you expect? The evening started with a really exceptional blues set by Ian Siegal, a considerable number were there to hear him I discovered chatting to some of the audience, the rest of course for Wilko himself who delivered his usual rocking tracks with panache, backed by Norman Watt Roy and Dylan Howe who were equally amazing and enthusiastic...
