Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2023 i Classic Rock

Wow. 1973 really was a terrific year for music, wasn’t it? The number of incredible albums that have celebrated their golden anniversary in 2023 is kinda mind-blowing. This month we take a deep dive into two more stonecold classics that reached their half-century this year. On September 28, cover stars Status Quo’s Hello! album had its 50th birthday, and just one week later, on October 5, Elton John’s epic double set Goodbye Yellow Brick Road reached the same milestone. Elsewhere this issue we hang out with Joe Bonamassa in a French castle, put the world to rights with The Darkness’s Justin Hawkins, try to discover what makes Steven Wilson tick, find out just what was in that secret package Steven Tyler gave to The Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston… and much…

THE CO-FOUNDING LEAD guitarist of FM, Chris Overland has died suddenly at home at the age of 66. Together with vocalist-guitarist brother Steve, Chris was an original member of the band Wildlife, which for a while also included former Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke. The Overlands co-formed FM in 1984. The band’s albums include the two cult classics Indiscreet and Tough It Out, and they toured with Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon, Gary Moore, Status Quo, Tina Turner, Meat Loaf and more. Mildly disenchanted with the band’s bluesier direction, Chris left FM in 1990, and became a professional guitar tutor. Years later, he said his biggest claim to fame was hearing a song he’d co-written, Bad Luck, playing in the café in Coronation Street. Chris’s brother Steve said: “A part of…

The baby grand piano upon which Freddie Mercury wrote Bohemian Rhapsody was sold for £1.74 million at a recent auction of possessions owned by Mercury’s former partner Mary Austin. A portion of the proceeds went to HIV/Aids charities the Mercury Phoenix Trust and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The Black Crowes release a deluxe expanded edition of their second album The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion on December 1. Its bonus features include previously unreleased studio recordings, rare B-sides and a 1993 live show from Houston. Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford and metal queen singer Doro Pesch have recorded a duet version of the Jim Steinman-written power ballad Total Eclipse Of The Heart recorded by Bonnie Tyler in 1983. “It’s very heavy,” Doro comments. “I get goosebumps when I hear…

Former Judas Priest guitarist KK Downing swears he will never again play with the band. He claims that being “segregated” from the rest of the band at last year’s Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction was the final straw. “I was glad that I [participated] because I kind of earned it,” Downing told broadcaster Eddie Trunk, “but it just didn’t feel like it used to – far from it.” Ozzy Osbourne is to undergo what he swears will be his final surgical procedure since his serious fall in 2019, which aggravated injuries he suffered in a 2003 quad bike crash. “It’ll be the final surgery,” he says. “Regardless of the way it ends up, I’m not doing it any more. I can’t.” Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready is working…

It’s almost 9.30pm, and Joe Bonamassa has vanished. The night air is hot. We’re in the wings at Théâtre Jean-Deschamps, a vast open-air amphitheatre inside the 13th-century citadel of Carcassonne, a hilltop town in the Languedoc region of southern France. Barely half an hour ago Bonamassa was sitting here on a flight case, Diet Coke in one hand, cigar in the other, chatting to bassist Calvin Turner about this and that. The base-level confidence, perhaps, of someone who’s been gigging professionally since childhood; a man who’d played with John Lee Hooker and BB King by the time he hit puberty. “We could be talking about cymbal stands at nine-twenty-five p.m.,” he says. “By the time I go on, that’s it. I’m the other guy.” It’s extraordinarily picturesque here. A gothic…

‘There were several roads nearby, but it did not take Dorothy long to find the one paved with yellow bricks. Within a short time, she was walking briskly toward the Emerald City; her silver shoes tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow roadbed.’ The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, 1900 July 1973. It can now be confirmed. Elton John’s rocket ship has officially left Earth’s atmosphere. His latest hit-laden album, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, released at the start of the year, is his second in a row to top the charts in both Britain and America. Now his uncharacteristically barnstorming new single Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting is in the UK Top 10, and Elton is on his way to becoming an authentic rock god – bigger than…

Persistent soft-rockers hit the bullseye a second time. Confusion reigned in 1988 when Romeo’s Daughter released an immaculate debut album produced by the celebrated Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange in cahoots with John ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ Parr. Were the UK-based, female-fronted band rock, pop or a hi-tech AOR wet dream? Although the public never really embraced Romeo’s Daughter as the band deserved, singer Leigh Matty, guitarist Craig Joiner and drummer Andy Wells didn’t give up, and Slipstream is their first album in eight years and fifth overall. It’s also the best thing they’ve done since that eye- and ear-catching introductory statement of 35 years ago. My favourite moments from Slipstream rotate steadily, each of its first four selections, including Over You, Inseparable and the soft-rock master class How Does It Feel,…

Seattle alt.rockers ride off into the sunset with their eighth and final album. Because their Seattle contemporaries – Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam – were grabbing all the headlines at the time, it’s easy to overlook how successful Candlebox were with their selftitled debut album of 1993. They never matched its creative or commercial heights again. Now, to mark its 30th anniversary, they’re splitting up, with a farewell tour and this album to act as their swan song. Frontman Kevin Martin is clearly in no mood to inspire the next generation, though. Opener Punks is a spiky, incongruously catchy warning to today’s bright young things that they won’t be flavour of the month for long, and that chances at the big time are gone the moment they arrive. It’s a moment…

Thrash metal lives.   Thrash metal turns 40 in 2023 – old enough for it to have said all it has to say – twice over. Nervosa certainly aren’t bringing anything new to the party. Centred on Brazilian founder and guitarist Prika Amaral but very much an international (and all-female) operation these days, this fifth album follows a familiar pattern: vocals roar gutturally, guitars wail and shred, and a barrage of drums hammers like a construction site at 7.30am. But what Jailbreak lacks in originality it makes up for in energy. Suffocare and Seed Of Death might be meat-andpotatoes extreme metal, but at least they’re served up with a savage intensity. Recent line-up changes have seen Amaral step up as singer, and she spits out Endless Ambition and Kill Or…

The Surface RED BULL US modern metallers show their class on fifth album. ‘I’m not dead yet,’ Beartooth singer Caleb Shomo howls on the opening title track of the band’s fifth album, his voice equal parts insecurity and defiance. The Ohio band may have risen through the metalcore scene, but their frontman and chief songwriter is a hard rocker at heart. Strip away the roared vocals and the slightly plasticky, of-the-moment production, and the likes of Riptide and the ‘whoah-oh-oh’propelled What Are You Waiting For beat with a melodic heart. Shomo is the hub around which everything revolves here. It’s his voice and hi-wattage charisma that separates Beartooth from their modern-metal contemporaries, even when the angst and self-laceration becomes overwhelming to the point of cliché. But it’s his lived…

Fiftieth-anniversary new live version of their celebrated live album. Playing one of your albums live in full and in sequence is a thing these days, as is then releasing the recordings. But that’s doing studio albums. Releasing a new live album that’s one of your live albums played in full and in sequence is, many (most?) might say, somewhat pointless. Wishbone Ash’s celebrated 1973 live album Live Dates captured the band at their peak, flushed with the success of the previous year’s now-classic Argus, delivering impressive, high-flying performances of The King Will Come, Pilgrim, Blowin’ Free, Throw Down The Sword, lengthy closer Phoenix and the rest. Live Dates Live, with okay vocals, guitar solos, overall performances and everything else, is, inevitably, always going to come off second-best, and does so…

Mysterious psych tribe palm us more heady chant-rock pharmaceuticals. It seems a small miracle that Sweden’s Goat have been together 10 years and reached album number five with their mythology largely intact. Still little is known about these ritual-masked hypno-rockers supposedly from the cursed town of Korpilombolo, and on Medicine they fully play on the mysticism, allure and death-cult menace that allows them. One minute they’re intoning: ‘I will find a way to find you… I’m going to relieve you of your soul’ over sitar and backwards guitar, like the monster from It Follows taking the form of 1968 George Harrison, the next, to You’ll Be Alright’s tones of psych-era Floyd and no little jazz flute, they’re offering comfort and reassurance: ‘I’ll be right there.’ Goat’s merging of blues-metal drones,…

Second from Biff & Son. A follow-up to 2021’s Red Brick City, the lockdown project by Saxon’s Biff Byford and his son Seb Byford. Seb (on guitar and most lead vocals) is the star, but Biff can’t help weighing in. The old man, who sounds plenty capable on bass, seems over-keen to broaden his horizons – with the cod-grunge How Much Can You Take and Castaway, and some would-be punkish moves late in the running order – but every time his voice is heard he resurrects Saxon. Shut up, dad! It’s a shame, because Seb’s voice is stronger, and the best tracks here are those on which he sings the most: the brilliant swaggering opener Dreams Of Yesterday, Shadows Of Life and the slower, bluesy Never Love Again. ■■■■■■■■■■ Neil…

Compelling return to the Crime scene. Formed in 1977 in Australia by lifelong mainstay Simon Bonney, Crime & The City Solution moved through line-ups and cities to Melbourne, where he befriended The Birthday Party, following them to London in 1983. Along with violinist partner Bronwyn Adams, Bonney’s new CATCS, including Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard and brother Harry, released four albums between ‘86 and ‘90 before splitting. After re-forming CATCS for 2013’s American Twilight, Bonney delivered aid programmes until lockdown inspired writing about his traumatic experiences then recording the killer in Berlin with producer Martin J Fiedler. Harrowingly dense slowies like Rivers Of Blood and Peace In My Time can be uncomfortably soul-baring, Bonney’s dramatic vocal performances evocatively embellished with synths and unsettling counter voices. Killer becomes the ominously reflective…

Nothing half-hearted about the latest from Heart vocalist’s non-sororal project. These are exciting times for fans of Heart, with Ann and Nancy Wilson currently working on the band’s first album in seven years. But for those for whom the wait is too much to handle, Ann’s pipped it to the post with this new album from her other group, Tripsitter. Another Door is deeply tasteful, the vibe woozy, sunny and dreamy – the perfect canvas for that powerful, soulful voice, which demands to take centre stage. There’s something almost proggy about the opening synths and pulsing bass lines – fitting, given that the album’s artwork was created by Storm Studio – but there’s plenty for those looking for the harder stuff, with Rain Of Hell and Rusty Robots blowing in…

Joe Bonamassa Blues Deluxe Vol. 2 J&R ADVENTURES What a difference two decades makes. Back in 2003, when Joe Bonamassa released his first Blues Deluxe, he seemed every inch a busted flush, having been jettisoned by two labels and his booking agent. Fast-forward to 2023 and a different concern hangs over this second covers set: can a financially secure middle-aged star summon the pencil lead of a 26-year-old gunslinger with his back to the wall? While Vol. 2 is unfailingly upbeat, the opening brace – amolten take on Bobby Bland’s Twenty-Four Hour Blues and a spirited spin through Bobby Parker’s It’s Hard But It’s Fair – suggest Bonamassa no longer feels the need to burn off our eyebrows. That (relative) lack of scorched-earth fretwork might rankle eternal adolescents, but if…

Foo Fighters guitarist finds country roads to take him home. Chris Shiflett has always combined being a Foo Fighter with assorted side projects. Recorded in Nashville with Cadillac Three leader Jaren Johnston (who’s written for Steven Tyler and Meat Loaf as well as country giants Keith Urban and Tim McGraw), his incessantly upbeat third solo album is a romp. It blends an ever-present country twang with a barroom honk, some appealingly plaintive vocals, and a barrage of sizzling guitar, especially on Black Top White Lines, which almost breaks into Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well. There are hints of Americana, a diversion into near-reggae on Damage Control and, on Parties, turbo-charged pop-punk. In a sense it’s the perfect extracurricular activity: worthy in its own right, but non-threatening. Since none of the 10…

Teen Jesus And The Jean Teasers HI Love You DOMESTIC LA LA A debut characterised by engaging fast-paced brevity and a sharp, easy charm, I Love You is no-nonsense, Australian-dipthonged double-X-chromosomed pop-punk effortlessly sold by barbed lyrical hooks and subconscious-grabbing ear worms. Ripper. 8/10 Stepmother HPlanet Brutalicon TEE PEE An appropriately titled act of untrammelled sonic savagery from an Aussie power trio fronted by Witch’s Graham Clise. It’s a bit Damned, a bit early Misfits, but mostly the sort of thing that’ll cause you to break the furniture. Or a leg. Scream For Death’s a lovely tune. 8/10 Nova Doll HDenaturing BLACK THRONE/TARANTULA How bleak can Barrie, Ontario be? Every magma-paced stoner assault on this debut from Heavy Petter/Angry Spells guitarist/ vocalist Casey Cuff’s solo project is about death. Even…

Project 10 years in making featuring Dave Gahan, Nick Cave and more.   This is the fourth volume in a series conceived in 2006 by the late Gun Club guitarist Cypress Grove, honouring the memory of Jeffrey Lee Pierce by inviting guest artists to rework his material, not all of it completed. This collection shows the reach of Pierce, thematically and materially, with contributors ranging from Deborah Harry, in a straightforwardly affecting duet with Nick Cave, to rapper Dynamax Roberts, featured on the Def Jam metal-style track Bad America. Highlights include Dave Gahan embarking empathetically on a ‘river of sadness’ on Mother Of Earth, and Suzie Shapiro’s tremulous, spectral Secret Fires. It’s poignant that two of the guest artists have passed away themselves, adding to the shadow of death cast…

20th-anniversary reissue of Lowestoft rockers’ debut, including unreleased tracks. It’s hard to imagine now, with The Darkness long-since clasped to the nation’s collective bosom, that anyone could forget frontman Justin Hawkins’s appearance as Chameleon on The Masked Singer. But back in 2003 there was still a degree of critical scepticism about a band whose combination of hardrock riffs and falsetto vocals seemed clearly tongue-in-cheek. This typically OTT reissue (formats include five vinyl and four CD/DVD variants) of their 2003 debut album is a timely reminder of how necessary they were, not least as a light-hearted counterpoint to the po-faced Detroit garage scene prevalent at the time. The stats speak for themselves: a global hit, Permission To Land scooped up three Brit awards and an Ivor Novello, went five times…

In July 1972, King Crimson went through another of their metamorphoses. With guitarist Robert Fripp, as ever, at the dark core, the constant, Yes drummer Bill Bruford joined, as did Family’s John Wetton on bass and vocals, David Cross on violin and viola and Jamie Muir on sundry instruments. Having road-tested new material over several months, Lark’s Tongue In Aspic was released in 1973. This new edition, featuring stereo and surround-sound mixes by David Singleton and Steven Wilson, as well as instrumental versions and multiple takes of each track, brings out all facets of an album that in its segmentation and classical aspirations is undoubtedly prog, but is fiercely compact for all that. It is truly unpicked, unpacked here. The instrumental title track, in two parts, commences with a faintly…

The Gangster of Love goes deep diving. Something of a master class in how to write a hit song – and The Joker was a big one, five times platinum – comes with illuminating spoken commentaries from Miller, and contemporary live acoustic goodies like Dear Mary and Nothing Lasts, from his great album Recall The Beginning… A Journey From Eden. Spread over three LPs, it’s inevitably one for the fans, but a whole side dedicated to the evolution of Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma might not be overtly captivating for everyone, even if it emphasises Miller’s dedication to his craft. Mixed in with the Capitol studio punishment, you get up close and personal items like a hotel four-track demo of I Don’t Mind, a twanged-up Lidi and…

Fifty years of sprinkling fairy dust over pop legends. Producer Tony Visconti fully deserves this spotlight being shone on his favourite works, even if 77 of them, spread across this four-CD/six-vinyl collection only scratch the surface. Mark Paytress has coaxed a lifetime of stories out of Visconti for the 78-page booklet’s track-by-track. Visconti also writes a modest foreword in which he salutes his mentor Denny Cordell. Visconti was alongside Cordell as mixing engineer on Joe Cocker’s Beatles cover With A Little Help From My Friends (included here), before setting out on his own to produce the debut by Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a year later Bowie’s Space Oddity album. He produced 10 studio albums for Marc Bolan and 11 for Bowie, so, fittingly, those two artists dominate with four songs by…

The Folk Implosion Music For Kids DOMINO Lou Barlow and John Davis’s perfectly pitched soundtrack to Harmony Korine/Larry Clark’s summer of ’95 indie zeitgeist-shaker returns – sounding utterly splendid – across two vinyls, bolstered with UNKLE and Dust Brothers remixes. A slacktastic, Sebadoh-y lost gem. 7/10 Jackson C Frank My Name Is Carnival MOONCREST When it comes to a hard-luck life, that Jackson’s went ‘furnace explosion-schizophrenia-depression-blinding-death’ probably says enough. He was also a handy singer-songwriter active on the 60s UK folk scene, produced by Paul Simon, and these are his best bits. 7/10 Stackridge Mr Mick (Expanded) CHERRY RED I want to like Stackridge. On another planet they could be Cheap Trick, XTC even. They’ve got the chops, but are cursed with an innate wackiness. Dora…, The Stanley, and what’s…

Long-overdue account of the rise and fall of the Black Country glam rockers. As Bob Geldof says in his intro, Slade somehow “slipped through the cracks of pop history”. Although, as this account amply demonstrates, they are widely loved and respected by fans, critics and bands alike, they have been too easily reduced to the annual serving of Merry Xmas Everybody they provide. Author Daryl Easlea sets this straight. He traces the band’s humble Black Country origins, their various metamorphoses from hippie to skin to glam, knocked into shape by manager Chas Chandler. Perhaps the most interesting section is of their late-70s decline – having spent too long trying to break the USA, which simply didn’t know what to make of them, eclipsed by the Bay City Rollers and punk,…

Life…? And Napalm Death ROCKET 88 Memoir of the stubborn, enduring grindcore warhorse. A self-confessed loner, Shane Embury never looked like the average rock star. How appropriate, then, that the tumbleweed-haired Shropshire lad became the longest-serving member of a band that never truly fitted in. This autobiography follows Embury from buying Slade’s Gudbuy T’Jane, to multiple Peel sessions, making the cover of NME, the BBC’s infamous metal documentary Arena, and travelling the world playing more than 5,000 gigs as a horror movie-obsessed, booze-guzzling noisenik. Just like his group Napalm Death – the missing link between Killing Joke, the Dead Kennedys and just about any extreme metal act of note – there are many layers to Embury, who in recent years became a family man, was advised by doctors to quit…

BORN IN CRESSKILL, New Jersey, Gary Wright had what seemed like two separate careers, first as a keyboard player and vocalist with the British blues-rock band Spooky Tooth, with whom he released three albums between 1968 and ’69, and secondly via his huge solo hit single Dream Weaver, which reached No.2 in the US in 1976. He later admitted that the song was influenced by George Harrison, having played keyboards on the former Beatle’s album All Things Must Pass. Wright released a solo album, Extraction, in 1970 and, following a Spooky Tooth reunion tour in 2004, performed live frequently with his own group or as a member of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. His most recent solo record, Connected, was released in 2010. Wright was 80 years old at the time…

THE ROCK AND Roll Hall Of Fame has fired co-founder Jann Wenner following an interview with The New York Times in which the 77-year-old disparaged black and female artists. Wenner was promoting a book called The Masters, which collates a selection of his interviews for Rolling Stone magazine. When challenged about the fact that it featured just white males, Wenner commented that women were not “articulate enough on this intellectual level”, and that Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield were unable to communicate their musical “genius” as well as Bono, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend – the so-called “philosophers of rock”. Wenner later apologised “wholeheartedly” for what he termed “badly chosen words”. “The very idea of a book called The Masters…

“We’re a no-frills rock band. No backing tracks, no gimmicks. We leave it all on the stage. We really do go for it.” WHEN PEARL JAM’S Stone Gossard contacted James Joseph on Instagram offering to sign his band, he didn’t believe it was him. “I didn’t even reply for a day or two,” says singer/guitarist Joseph. “I said, ‘Oh yeah? That would be fun – tell me more.’ Next thing you know, we’re on a Zoom call with him.” Now James And The Cold Gun’s self-titled debut album is out on Gossard’s revived Loosegroove Records (which released Queens Of The Stone Age’s debut back in the day). Gossard had heard the Welsh rockers’ tune Long Way Home on Seattle’s KEXP Radio – atune they had donated to a charity compilation…

Since forming in 1996, Toronto’s Danko Jones have thrived on volume – and on the visceral energy of being in rooms together. So when the pandemic forced them to make their previous album Power Trio entirely remotely, it paved the way for a new creative mode. “When I heard Blue Jean, Denim Jumpsuit, which was the first song we wrote apart from each other, it blew me away,” the titular frontman says. “It’s one of our favourite songs we’ve ever written. It had a groove, a bounce, everything in my head that I wanted to hear.” Accordingly, their new album Electric Sounds, a fiery fistful of Motörhead-meets-Misfits punk’n’roll, was made in the same way (save a few jam sessions last summer). We caught up with Jones in Budapest as the…

Bob Young considers him “the glue that held Status Quo together during some difficult times”. But not everyone shares that opinion – to a very particular fan, his keyboards brought the much-loved Frantic Four to an end. Say Hello! to Andy Bown. It’s hard to believe that Hello! turns fifty this year. I had a blank about my first contribution, so I looked it up and I now realise, thanks to you, I haven’t been with Quo for forty-six years, it’s fifty. Fifty fucking years! There’s much worse things I could have done with my time, but… How did you come to join the band? At first I preferred being as I was, still a hired gun. Quite early on, Bob told me: “You really should do this,” but I…

It was one of the greatest, silliest rock images of the early 2000s, and perfectly summed up The Darkness: their showboating lead singer Justin Hawkins, wearing a shiny catsuit, riding over the audience on the back of a white tiger stage prop, like a cross between Dave Lee Roth and Mowgli from The Jungle Book. The Darkness were a loud, unashamed, spandex-clad rock band in the era of Coldplay and The White Stripes. Their 2003 debut album, Permission To Land, reached No.1 in the UK; its flagship single I Believe In A Thing Called Love went to No.2, and they even challenged Slade and Wizzard with their seasonal hit Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End). The brainchild of brothers Justin and guitarist Dan Hawkins, it was elder sibling Justin’s…

They might have formed a decade ago within the city limits of Nashville, Tennessee, but The Cadillac Three often feel like the antidote to the glossiest excesses of modern country. Gritty, hooky and infused with the hickory smoke of southern rock, the power-trio line-up of Jaren Johnston (vocals/guitar), Kelby Ray (bass) and Neil Mason (drums) has triumphed on stages from Download to the Grand Ole Opry, with a sound perhaps best described by the title of their 2020 fourth record Country Fuzz. While this year’s The Years Go Fast brings together some of their heaviest material to date with the “pain, hurt and craziness” of the covid era, a chat with mouthpiece-in-chief Johnston is a delight, with the singer spinning war stories with an easy wit that makes it clear…

Dutch symphonic metallers return in pleasingly familiar form. Bands often insist: “It would have been so easy for us to have made another [insert name of successful album here].” But in truth, repeating a winning formula is a tough ask, and the pressure of doing so can often be relieved by taking a stylistic left turn. So respect to these Dutch symphonic metal stalwarts for unashamedly focusing on their strengths and playing to them on this eighth studio album. The combined assault of We Go To War followed by the title track deliver the key elements of vintage Within Temptation: huge, yearning-to-the-heavens choruses reaching out from gutpummelingly heavy rock riffing. While elsewhere the band’s integration of influences such as post-hardcore are in evidence on the scatter-gun invective of Shed My…

Rock blueprint’s first album of original material in 18 years. According to Mick Jagger, Hackney Diamonds producer/bassist Andrew Watt “kicked us up the arse”. Watt’s USP is his ability to put artists back in touch with who they actually are. He recently coaxed the remarkable Every Loser out of Iggy Pop by asking him: “Are you ready to be yourself?” And it seems he’s done it again, because the Stones haven’t delivered an album this quintessentially Stonesy in 40 years. That said, Hackney Diamonds is no museum piece. It’s a 21st-century record for a 21st-century audience that, with an oldschool 48-minute duration, only ever leaves the listener hungry for more. Opener and lead single Angry benefits from a contemporary production that doesn’t go too far. Watt plays it just…

Boogie-loving Swedes keep fighting the good-time fight.   There are some kinds of music that simply have to be consumed live, preferably with several alcoholic drinks consumed. Swedish institution Diamond Dogs specialise in exactly that kind of barroom boogie, and doubtless several of the tunes on this twelfth studio album will be sung along to loudly and lustily in concert. But in the studio, even though they’ve recorded them live, the tracks just sound a bit… meh. Get A Rock’N’Roll Record hits the spot squarely enough by resembling Chuck Berry on steroids, and when they add a glam-metal chorus on Rising From The Ruins or filter in Georgia Satellites-style southern boogie on Keep Drippin Down they start to strut more compellingly, and the touches of fiddle on Blight The Life…

Massachusetts metallers hit the comeback trail. In the 12 years since Staind’s last, self-titled album, singer Aaron Lewis has repositioned himself as a country-singing, ‘MAGA’-hat wearing, anti-woke warrior, with all the angry-white-man bullshit that comes along with it. Thankfully the politics have been parked for his band’s eighth album. Instead it offers an impressively muscular update of the two-parts-grungeto-one-part-nu-metal formula that made Staind’s name around the turn of the millennium. Lewis’s politics may be divisive, verging on the toxic, but he’s got a hell of a voice, shifting from angsty rage on the propulsive modern metal of Lowest In Me and to the mournfully powerful delivery of stately ballad Better Days (the latter sounds like a fleshed out update of their massive 2001 hit It’s Been Awhile), while Hate Me…

Same but different: Rival Sons complete their Yin & Yang pairing of Darkfighter with Lightbringer. Californian rockers Rival Sons follow up the release of Darkfighter earlier this year with an exploration of those emotions we are prone to burying. Mercy explores the kinetic nature of anger alongside Redemption, declaring: ‘trauma hides what it doesn’t destroy’. The opening track links the record with its ’sister’ in an explosive, almost nine-minute epic, decrying: ‘I wanna be a darkfighter, lightbringer till the end’, although for all the emotional angst, archetypal Rival Sons does prevail. Sweet Life injects a dark groove into your bones but leaves enough room for Jay Buchanan’s lungsingeing vocals. Closing a record that scoops out the grit of human emotion and handles it at uncomfortably close range, Mosaic is the…

Psychedelic raves from the grave.  Yet another band whose plans were derailed by the pandemic. Five years have passed since Graveyard’s Peace album, but the minimally titled 6 finds the heavy-rocking Swedes returning in rude health. Their second album from the line-up of vocalist/guitarist Joakim Nilsson, guitarist Jonatan Ramm, bassist Truls Mörck and drummer Oskar Bergenheim, this is a more inward-looking and melancholy Graveyard, world-weary yet able to fire things up when it matters. Tracks like the ramshackle Twice, Just A Drop and the soulful, ever-building No Way Out are driven and focused, but the dominant feel is raw, mellow and groovy – Bright Lights finds the band drifting lysergically down desert highways, Sad Song easily lives up to its title, and the superb Breathe In Breathe Out features Nilsson…

Sparkling seventh studio album from multi-tasking songsmith. Brian Protheroe might forever be best known for 1974’s existential hit single Pinball, but his 50-year career has spanned both music and the performing arts. A successful actor who has appeared in Spooks and Midsomer Murders, among other things, he is also the narrator of Channel 4’s long-running series First Dates. The follow-up to 2020’s Desert Road finds the venerable 79-year-old in a rich vein of form, pinballing (!) between folk ballads (Salisbury Boys), witty odes to Mozart (Wolfgang!) and soulful meditations on life (Sentimental Tale), all sprinkled with choice one-liners. The bonus ball comes with jaunty Wings-style power-pop gem Over Your Love, in which he confesses: ‘That cosy life is not for me, I’d rather be solitary’, a free-wheeling troubadour to…

Eccentric former Nymphs singer returns. Gloryland is Inger Lorre’s first album since 1999’s Transcendental Medication. It’s less raucous and more country/Americana in style, but still edgy thanks to Nashville multi-instrumentalist Buddy Woodward co-producing alongside LA punk veteran Paul Roessler. Lorre has overcome a lot, not least her addictions and the loss of her friend Jeff Buckley. Such torments inform reflective opener More Real, which she says is “about the wisdom earned through suffering”. Similarly, the haunting pianolaced lament Song For Elliott Smith pays tribute to the lonerfolkie singer who died in violent circumstances in 2003. Black Sons echoes Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks, and her extraordinary voice ranges from deep fury to high register. She sings equally brilliantly on Death Is A Horizon and Learn To Die. More…

Deftones frontman’s side project returns with album two. On their formation in the early 2010s, Chino Moreno described this un-Googleable band (stylised with three crucifixes) as“minimal and soothing… the stuff I like listening to when I’m not screaming my head off”. On this follow-up to 2014’s self-titled debut, he’s still creating an introspective mood, even if the threat of hardcore eruption seems to bubble under the surface. There’s a mournful stripe of melodic sadcore informing Invisible Hand, while Ghost Ride taps into Massive Attack’s brand of claustrophobic technoir soul, and although the guest appearance of rapper El-P on Big Youth shows you can take the boy out of nu metal, etc, as the title track shuffles somnambulantly into the sunset, a seductively sombre mood is retained. ■■■■■■■■■■ Johnny Sharp…

Southampton goth rockers’ neck-biting third.   Like cats and new curtains, eventually all goth rock bands can’t help but try their claws on a vampire album. After the fallen-angel narrative of second album Sex, Death & The Infinite Void and its coda EP American Noir, this third concept album from Southampton’s muchcelebrated Creeper goes for the goth jugular with its tale of anti-hero Spook and his ‘Armageddon girl’ and ‘bloodlust baby’ Mercy, a merciless vampire who turns Spook into her undead sidekick on the Steinman-esque nine-minute opener Further Than Forever – essentially Bat Lured Into Hell – and then takes him on a gory, murderous 45-minute feeding frenzy. That’s pretty much it narrative-wise. Creeper’s major plot twists here are stylistic, letting their diabolical duo loose on a shapeshifting array of…

Piano man Adam Weiner and co. whip up a garage-rock storm. You’d have a job getting mugged on the streets of Manhattan these days, but for many of us the stylised New York that lives in our imagination has all the grit, glitter, danger and creative freedom depicted by its golden age of music, art and cinema in the late 70s. It’s a nostalgic version of the Big Apple brought back to life by LCC’s Adam Weiner, who grew up across the river in New Jersey and cut his teeth playing piano in the city’s drag bars. Populated with hustlers, nighthawks and sexually fluid scenesters, Art Dealers hums with life, its garage rock’n’soul bolstered by female backing vocals straight from the (whisper it) Phil Spector school, with Are You Gonna Run?…

Long Island emo kids grow up beautifully on album eight. The US East Coast emo scene of the early 2000s was fascinating because no one seemed to be in charge. Hordes of suburban kids were forming bands in parents’ basements, falling in love, falling out with friends and bandmates, and airing all of that dirty adolescent laundry in public on their subsequent albums. Taking Back Sunday, one of the genre’s long-standing success stories, who’ve never been short on internal band politics themselves, are growing older with admirable grace on this, their first album in seven years. The passage of time is apparently on their mind as they take a look at the acceptance of ageing while retaining a youthful lust for life on S’old, and on Quit Trying frontman Adam…

A sharp left turn onto the dancefloor. Sorted! If King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard startle only by the sheer number of their records, then be prepared for something completely unexpected. After tackling psychedelia, thrash metal, folk-rock, garage nuggets and prog among many other styles and genres, the Australian sextet twiddle the knobs for a journey into electronic music. And, in keeping with its protagonists’ track record of simultaneous releases, the album comes in extended and standard versions. The former wins out as the band stretch out to explore the possibilities of the studio. Twenty-minute opener Thela sets the pace and tone with an excursion that takes nods from the German pioneers of the 70s including Kraftwerk and Harmonia. Elsewhere, King Gizzard swerve to deliver pumping trance with Swan Song…

A no-no from the ex-Yes man. Trevor Rabin reinvented Yes when he joined as guitarist in 1983 and wrote their smash hit Owner Of A Lonely Heart, and his stamp was all over Yes’s 90125 album released that same year. The South African multiinstrumentalist had not previously been known for his prog tendencies, but what the hell – he stayed with Yes for more than a decade. Rio, Rabin’s first solo album of vocal material in 34 years, is hugely accomplished but too convoluted by half. To make an incongruous Ian Dury reference, this is less Clevor Trever, more clever-clever Trevor. Opener Big Mistakes has a Mellencamp flavour, and Paradise is at its heart a good ol’ blue-collar stomper, but before long the self-indulgent spectre of Olias Of Sunhillow looms…

Goodbye Sam.  It wasn’t all about David Lee Roth, y’know. With Sammy Hagar as frontman, the ‘Van Hagar’ incarnation of Van Halen eclipsed the 1974-85 DLR era in terms of sales. The Collection II covers the four consecutive US No.1 albums released during Sammy Hagar’s initial tenure with the band: 5150 (1986), OU812 (1988), For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (1991) and Balance (1995). A fifth disc offers a collection of studio rarities. And yet it was all about Roth, really, wasn’t it? Van Halen’s first five albums with Diamond Dave had a swaggering pizzazz; these days this stuff with Hagar sounds a bit… meh. A bit corporate. A bit rock-bynumbers. A bit… uneventful. Apart from Why Can’t This Be Love?, the keyboard-dominated mega-hit from 5150, it’s hard to name many other…

When Tyler met Steinman. With her raspy voice and shaggy blonde ‘do, Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler was hailed as the female Rod Stewart when her two mid-70s singles Lost in France and It’s A Heartache made the UK Top 10. But there were then long lean years before she hit the big time again, in 1983 with her fifth album Faster Than The Speed Of Night, produced by Jim Steinman, the Spector-inspired genius behind Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell. Bonnie, like Meat, could really belt out a tune, and she gave everything she had on Total Eclipse Of The Heart, a typically OTT Steinman number, a No.1 smash on both sides of the Atlantic and one of the quintessential 80s power ballads. Elsewhere on an album focused on the…

Forgotten boy’s forgotten tracks. When it comes to the alternative mix, the rare track, the previously unreleased gem, few artists have a back catalogue quite so peppered with off-piste gems as Iggy Pop. Since the messy post-Mainman demise of The Stooges coincided with their lead vocalist being embraced by the nascent punk scene as its blood-spattered godfather and various incarnations of material that might have constituted Raw Power’s successor made their way to market via often questionable means, Iggy’s haphazardly distributed first drafts have only served to accentuate his reputation as an unimpeachable outsider. There are, therefore, a fair few after-the-fact Iggy releases that you might be welladvised to avoid, but this isn’t one of them. It kicks off with a quartet of alternatively mixed selections from The Idiot (’77)…

Anthem-packed alt.rock sister act classic returns in slightly expanded vinyl repackage. Never mind all those tiresomely selfserious, greasyhaired grunge blokes, The Breeders captured the liberating punk-pop euphoria of early-90s US alt.rock with much more charm, charisma and humour on their platinumselling second album. Rooted in the volatile sibling chemistry and perfectly imperfect intertwined voices of Kim and Kelley Deal, a band that began as a Pixies side project made one of the decade’s defining albums. Thirty years later, Last Splash remains a near-flawless, sonically rich feast of swoony girl-group harmonies, revved-up super-fuzz guitars, winking Led Zeppelin homages and deliciously sarcastic lyrics (‘If you’re so special, why aren’t you dead?’). Unassailable anthems Cannonball and Divine Hammer sit alongside gloriously weird, woozy heart-twangers like No Aloha and an achingly tender, country-adjacent cover…

Her breakthrough album, 25 years on. In the age of the deluxe, overstuffed box set, it’s a little strange to have an album’s 25th-anniversary edition that isn’t heavy on unnecessary paraphernalia and studio tracks not deemed worthy of inclusion first time round, but the five unreleased tracks here are worth the entrance fee. The original album still stands up, with the slower songs – the ones that allow Tedeschi’s extraordinary voice to sail and soar – having weathered best. So the sublime version of John Prine’s Angel Of Montgomery tucked away towards the end of the record feels much weightier then the opening, Creedence-ish chug of Rock Me Right, and the hazy, meandering title track makes the following rattle through Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean feel rather slight. Guitarist…

One for the steam trainspotters. The initial rush of post-punk euphoria and XTC’s glorious run of hit singles had, by 1984, exhausted both the band and the charts. XTC ceased touring in 1982 to salvage songwriter and frontman Andy Partridge’s health. Meanwhile, the discopop takeover was in full swing, rock was slithering into its hairspray phase, so what better time to release a clattering industrial pop album about Swindon’s railway works? The Big Express is as complicated and clever as XTC’s other records, artfully framing both the personal and the political. This World Over, the strongest song on side one, describes the aftermath of a nuclear attack on London. It isn’t until side two’s opener The Everyday Story Of Smalltown that the album shakes off a depression and sparks into…

Sonic Youth guitar genius takes us on a wild trip down memory lane With Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore helped to redefine what rock music could be, creating beauty from ostensibly ugly noise; a bright, burning ball of post-punk, no-wave light whose influence has rippled down through the generations. Basically, he has every reason to brag. And yet, in his exhaustive memoir, we’re 100 pages in before the seeds of the band are even really sown. Instead, much of the book is a love letter to rock’n’roll, and particularly the New York punk scene of the 70s and 80s, which he threw himself into with wild abandon, driving into the city weekly in his battered VW Beetle from his home in rural Connecticut. Much of his early wide-eyed admiration is…

Priceless memorabilia bolsters early rock tragedy. “Eddie Cochran was one of the reasons rock‘n’roll went on to change the whole world for a while,” Lee Bullman declares in this intimately illustrated biography of the charismatic California-based rocker who gave late-50s teenagers (and future rock bands) anthems including Twenty Flight Rock, C’mon Everybody, Summertime Blues, Somethin’ Else and Three Steps To Heaven before perishing in a car crash on his 1960 UK tour with Gene Vincent. The book is stacked with priceless photos capturing the photogenic multi-instrumentalist ultimate rocker once seen as the only challenger to Elvis’s throne, and Bullman succinctly details a hugely promising career cut tragically short, citing future Beatles among teddy-boy rioters in Liverpool and 13-yearold Marc Bolan carrying Eddie’s guitar at Finsbury Park Empire. Any book that…

700-plus Gnome-free pages of Dave. There have been an awful lot of books written about David Bowie. Way more than anyone, even the most obsessive fans, should ever really need. The story’s been told, not least by French journalist Jérôme Soligny – he published his first Bowie tome, Une Histoire, back in ’85 – again and again. We all know it. And yet, it seems, we don’t quite know it enough. Which is why Bowie fans will lap up this nicely presented breeze-block of a volume – using the word advisedly; a second (‘83-’16) is on its way – with open arms and insatiable curiosity. Rainbowman piques interest because it’s not just another biog. Drawing on abundant interviews with crucial eyewitnesses to Bowie’s life and career (Lou Reed, Iggy…

Jack Sonni December 9, 1954 – August 30, 2023 Known affectionately at the time as the “other guitar player in Dire Straits”, Pennsylvania -born Jack Sonni joined the band in 1984, not long before they took off globally with the following year’s album Brothers In Arms, and was with them for four years. Sonni was 68. Cause of death has not been announced. Steve Harwell January 9, 1967 – September 4, 2023 Steve Harwell was the singer with the multimillion-selling, Grammy-nominated US punks Smash Mouth from the band’s inception in 1994 until his retirement in 2021 due to ongoing health issues (Smash Mouth continue to the present day). The 56-year-old died of liver failure. “Steve lived a 100% full-throttle life, burning brightly across the universe before burning out,” commented the…

The sound of Marsupilami conjures up myriad atmospheres, mainly esoteric in nature. It’s like a soundtrack to macabre rituals being carried out in ancient forests during medieval times, but filtered through the console of a late 1960s UK recording studio. It’s similar to other otherworldly albums by cult legends of the era such as Jan Dukes De Grey, Black Widow and acoustic demons Comus. Apocalyptic winds and eerie chanting start the journey to this enigmatic debut album by the strangely named Dorset clan of jazz-influenced folk hippies. Occult vibes weave in and out of mystical tunes, where dark pastoral backdrops collide with psychedelic sparks and early-prog motifs. Tasteful use of flute and keyboards add mesmeric layers to their signature style. Witchy female and male vocals are rich in presence and…

Will Gould, aka William Von Ghould, aka the singer with goth-punk bloodsuckers Creeper, is getting lost in alcohol and the mythology of rock’n’roll. It’s 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and we’re sitting in a bar called Disorder in his adopted home city of Manchester. He picked the bar because it’s named after the opening song on Joy Division‘s Unknown Pleasures album, although you can throw a dart in Manchester and hit a bar that’s named after a Joy Division song. We’re three pints deep – or is it four? – into a drinking session that will continue for a few more hours and several more pints, and he’s in full swing. “Where has all the character in music gone?” he’s saying, with a passion that’s only partly fuelled by alcohol.…

When Steven Wilson was a teenager living in Hemel Hempstead, he read a short story by the American science-fiction writer Thomas M Disch. An outspoken satirist, atheist and gay man in the 60s (he ultimately committed suicide in 2008), Disch was a troubled individual. The story in question, Descending, is a punishing, bleak tale of an unrepentant layabout who takes the down escalator in a shopping mall and finds he can’t get off it. For Wilson – who also became fascinated by serial killers and the darker reaches of humanity – that image had a lasting impact. You could call it a precursor to the menacing, industrial shades of his catalogue. Chiefly, though, it planted in his head the idea of the never-ending staircase. From Porcupine Tree’s first ‘proper’ album…

We never struggle to fill the pages of Classic Rock. If anything, the hard part – especially in recent, release-heavy weeks and months – is often deciding who to cover. For every band or artist you’ll read about in the magazine, there are almost always several other, eminently worthy candidates that we couldn’t fit in. So while festival headliners – and, yes, surefire cover stars – are thinning on the ground, the meat of the rock landscape is in very, very good shape; an embarrassment of first-class, below-the-surface riches that most of the world doesn’t take a look at. Maybe that’s changing. Maybe bands/ artists and styles proliferate so quickly these days (for free, mostly online) that we just don’t have the same idea of the ‘megastar’ we once had.…

The apocalypse is nigh(part 182). Do KK’s Priest (featuring ex-Judas Priest guitarist KK Downing and Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens, Priest singer 1996-2003) provide a credible alternative to the real thing? They do not. The Sinner Rides Again, the band’s second album, suffers from the same faults as their first. In Downing’s eyes (and ears), nothing has changed in the heavy metal world since Priest’s Painkiller in 1990. It’s all grinding desperation and lankhaired perspiration. There’s no light and shade, only doom and demolition. If you’re gonna get mauled by a lion, at least make it interesting. This album is so one-dimensional that one begins to question the very existence of the Spider-Verse. Echoes of Accept and Manowar exacerbate the archaic vibe. We’ve heard it all before – and better. The album’s…

British melodic rock flag bearers stick to their guns eight albums in. Wait around long enough, and everything comes back into fashion – with the exception of melodic rock. Thankfully, Vega never got the memo. The British five-piece’s eighth album is an exhilarating slab of 80s-influenced hard rock that wears its love of good oldfashioned tuneage and choruses the size of the Empire State Building with rightful pride. Singer Nick Workman belts out Heroes And Zeroes and Don’t Let Them See You Bleed like he’s playing to the back row of Madison Square Garden. Vega aren’t going to shift Bon Jovi or Def Leppard numbers of records, but that’s hardly their fault. Fashions come and go but quality endures, and Battlelines has quality in spades. ■■■■■■■■■■ Dave Everley…

First album since 2020 from longtime festival stalwarts. Written and produced by OT main man Ed Wynne, with assistance from his brother Silas, and helpers including Saskia Maxwell on flute, Lotus Unfolding is another heady trip around planet Ozric, designed to sooth and energise. Each track takes you on a similar upward trajectory, where the skies are radiantly blue throughout, the earth below verdant. But like those people who walk through life with a permanent smile on their face, it’s impossible to resent them, or their dedication to raising the spirit. From the scampering synths and Orb-like sky-sweeping ascension of Storm In A Teacup, to the Weather Report-like colour and velocity of Green Incantation, to the fluttering flute of the meditative title track, to the fast-cut evocative guitar of Crumplepenny,…

Because there was so much wrong with the original. At the start of this Redux’s version of Brain Damage, Roger Waters asks: “Why don’t we re-record [the album]?” before answering his own question: “He’s gone mad.” As it turns out, the actual record – timed for the 50th anniversary of The Dark Side’s release is fine: neither a massive gutting of the original nor a slavish copy. It opens with Waters intoning the lyrics of Free Four from Floyd’s Obscured By Clouds, and takes it from there. Time now sounds like a boulder rolled up a hill, weary and aged. Brain Damage and Us And Them are half-crooned and very effective. The music of On The Run is now the backing track for Waters reciting a story about good and…

Greased-up, chin-punching shin-kicking rock’n’roll. Roughly 10 years ago I was one of the blessed few who witnessed the Jim Jones Revue burning a Dublin club to the ground. ‘Incendiary’ is too small a word for it. Jones’s new incarnation, the All Stars, continue that holy work. This debut album is filthier than a mechanic’s rag, sleazier than a Soho spiv, and scuzzier than a tequila hangover. It’s rock’n’roll as the gods intended. Recorded in Memphis, because of course it was, it flings it up in fine style. The sinuous honk of It’s Your Voodoo Working and the rump-shaking ramalama of Gimme The Grease lay it down, then the Stone-Age  of Troglodyte and the aromatic howl of You Got The Best Stink (I Ever Stunk) – song title of the year…

Ex-Sisters/Ghost (et al) guitarist’s third solo album. Hard-working and talented gun for hire Chris Catalyst has an impeccable CV of jobbing guitarist positions, but it’s high time that his talents as a songwriter and multiinstrumentalist were recognised. Hopefully Mad In England, his third solo album, will help achieve that. Lyrically it’s a sardonic 21st-century Paul Welleresque meditation on the English condition. Musically the crunching pop-rock of the title track and Butterfly Or Bull is reminiscent of classic British guitar rock from the Manics, New Model Army and The Wildhearts. But saying that is possibly a disservice to his extensive diversity of sounds; Stop is Britrock-meets-Sleaford Mods, How? is Flaming Lipsstyle psyche, My Family is a poppunk number, albeit tongue-incheek. If there’s anything negative to say about Mad In England,…

Guns N’ Roses bassist delivers full-beam brilliance on his third solo album. Middle age suits Duff McKagan well, given that there was a time when it looked like he might not make it this far. He was walking the line long before he joined Guns N’ Roses, fleeing his native Seattle in his early twenties to escape the influx of heroin ripping through the punk scene in which he’d come of age, only to arrive in LA and plunge headfirst into the alcoholism that ultimately led to the exploding pancreas that almost killed him at 30. It’s all here on Lighthouse. Broadly following the same rootsy path as 2019’s stripped-back Tenderness, it dials back some of its predecessor’s more countrified elements, occasionally pouring a shot of punk rock urgency into…

NYC riff machine sets off the alarm. When the Devil was handing out great riffs, Tommy Victor must have had some pretty good scam going whereby he kept returning to the front of the queue wearing a variety of convincing disguises. His band Prong have been making great records since the early 90s, and their last few albums have been particularly strong. State Of Emergency is slightly snottier and more aggressive than 2017’s Zero Days, but the New York trio’s trademark sound is as unpretentious as ever. With riffs hewn from concrete and choruses the size of skyscrapers, tracks such as Disconnected and Compliant scratch the same itch that fuelled Prong’s mid-90s commercial peak, but with a much bigger sound. Hectic opener The Descent and the fiendishly catchy Non-Existence are…

Nick Oliveri takes on the world.   You don’t so much listen to a Mondo Generator album as feel it – and you’ll be feeling album number seven long after the dying notes of raging closer For A Day have faded to nothing. Frontman Nick Oliveri says this is their heaviest album to date, and that’s saying something, because the previous six weren’t exactly lightweight. This 20 minutes or so of abrasive riffing and migraine screaming is like sticking your head in the devil’s own cement mixer. Oliveri is not happy, although it’s not easy to tell what’s pissing him off in Rubber Room, Unglued and I Want Out – the pandemic, personal stuff, death, take your pick – as he wails and screeches like a rabid grizzly bear over…

Satanic doo-wop duo’s second lacks devilish charm It’s not a bad USP, to be fair: rock’n’rollflavoured doowop vowing to reclaim Satanism from heavy metal. But can such rehashed R&B still possess the listener? On God Is Dead, tracks such as Burn Your Bible and Let’s Have A Satanic Orgy are Spector-style soul tunes reproduced with loving attention to reverbdrenched detail, even if they’re dedicated to desecration rather than to innocent teenage heartbreak. Sentiments such as Be A Slut (Do What You Want) are also likeably provocative, but they lack the (black) magic ingredient: strong enough tunes to make the lyrics stick in the memory. Ignore the words and you could be listening to lacklustre Shangri-La’s out-takes. And no one’s going to sell their soul for that any time soon.…

Proto-metal for the postmodern world. If ever a band lived up to their name, Portland’s Hippie Death Cult are it. They sound exactly like that, like a strung-out weekend at the Spahn Ranch under an unforgiving sun, one day bleeding into another in a rolling orgy of chemicals and fuzz pedals. This is their first album since the band thinned down to a power trio, with bassist Laura Phillips taking over vocals. She has a powerful, melodious roar, reminiscent of Purson’s Rosalie Cunningham. It is a worthy complement to Eddie Brnabic’s frequently startling guitar work, which slips effortlessly from proto-metal crunch to headspinning Helios Creed-esque space-rock freakouts. Opener Arise is all chunky riffs and headbanging propulsion, and Toxic Annhilator sounds like a speed-freaked Black Sabbath, but the bulk of the album…

Extra volume and intensity from Irish troubadour. The new Glen Hansard record begins with overloaded guitar and soon arrives at a great squalling chorus. The Feast Of St. John sounds like Neil Young and is a reminder of Hansard’s love for the late Jason Molina. It’s four years since Hansard’s previous album, This Wild Willing, which was broody and inward-facing. He has explored many musical approaches since his folk-grunge combination with The Frames in 1990, and it’s great to hear him in noisy surrounds again, even inviting Warren Ellis from the Bad Seeds to raise the intensity on that opening track. The mood varies across the record: strident on Bearing Witness, intimate like Leonard Cohen on Sure As The Rain. There’s an fiery tribute to his fallen comrade Mic Christopher…

Psychonauts’ 2010 collaboration remixed. The Orb’s Alex Patterson made the connection between dub’s low end, the luxuriance of ambient music and the cosmic expansiveness of space-rock long ago. Binding these threads together, The Orb really had less to do with the dance music of the early 90s and more with the elongated suites of Klaus Schulze’s pioneering mid-70s electronic material, and elements of the Black Ark’s output. With that in mind, the only surprising thing about his collaboration with Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour on 2010’s Metallic Spheres was that it took so long to happen. Metallic Spheres In Colour finds those first sessions remixed by producer and Killing Joke bassist Youth, and in doing so he’s effectively fashioned a new album that goes further than the original. Ramping up…

The runt of Bowie’s 70s litter? Yes but no. David Bowie’s 70s were so jaw dropping, that his covers album Pin Ups is easily dismissed. When it was released 50 years ago, six months after Aladdin Sane and seven before Diamond Dogs, Bowie was so prolific that it wasn’t even the time-buying exercise that covers albums tend to be. Instead, as this halfspeed mastered vinyl edition shows, it was a full stop: his last Ken Scott production and, with drummer Woody Woodmansey already departed, the last gasp of the Spiders From Mars. Instead, a homage to the British bands (and Australia’s Easybeats) that initially fuelled Bowie. His own music would rarely go down these roads again (almost another full stop), but the vocal arrangements on Sorrow were wondrous, he hurtled…

The wilderness years. Ronnie Dio helped make so much great music in the 70s and 80s as singer with Rainbow and Black Sabbath and then as boss of the band he named simply Dio. In this new box set, however, there is thin gruel – the last knockings of Dio, begun with what is surely the worst album of Ronnie’s entire career. Angry Machines was released in 1996, in the wake of grunge and with nu metal on the rise. Boldly, but unwisely, Ronnie attempted to move with the times, delivering a dark and largely tuneless album. From that nadir he bounced back in 2000 with the concept album Magica, on which he reunited with bassist Jimmy Bain, guitarist Craig Goldy and drummer Simon Wright, and returned to the classic…

New, audiophile edition of jazz-rock pinnacle. The delivery of Aja in 1977 was a triumph of Steely Dan’s studio progression. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker retired the touring band, leaving a minor part for guitarist and co-founder Denny Dias. Instead they dialled up scores of brilliant session players and jobbing jazz figures. Everything was layered, scrubbed and obsessively tended, yet miraculously it sounded great. A song like Peg may have been filtered through the work of seven in-demand guitarists, but the mood is fresh and the humour wins. Deacon Blues, a study of mid-life disappointment and the yearning for a more creative flight path, is destined to mooch around popular culture for ever. The lyrics are a perfect combination of soul and snark. Black Cow makes light of male insecurity,…

Challenging early-90s works join reissue campaign. After a transformative 1980s in which he evolved from bluesy boozy barfly with a polarising voice to incomparable sound sculptor with a really polarising voice, Tom Waits, finally on maps that existed outside his own head, decided the 90s were not, for him, about safe bets. Recorded in an echoey cellar, 1992’s Bone Machine (7/10) was even more obsessively percussive and perversely Beefheartian than its forerunners. It was also, because his vision was true, cohesive, unlike some of his more scattergun albums. Fixated on the inevitable decay of the human body, over unnerving rhythms Waits (aged 43) growls about primal fears and poetic death wishes. Almost as a mercy, the album lightens up at the end, and the Keith Richards cameo on That Feel…

There’s Joni and then there’s everything else. Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue will for ever stand as the untouchable apogee of the singer-songwriter genre, a thing of delicate beauty that is also, somehow, as strong as steel. But for some of us, Mitchell got even better with the run of albums from 1974’s Court And Spark – asizable hit record – through the following year’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns to Hejira in 1976. Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975), the third in an essential series, concentrates on the first two albums in that immortal trilogy, as well as 1972’s nearly as marvellous For The Roses. It is an embarrassment of riches, not least the variety of exceptional live material, both solo and in the company of…

First-hand memories of London’s mid-70s gig circuit, by those who were there. Opening with a fictionalised account of an average night on North London’s gritty music scene in 1974 – with references to Sounds, Scarecrow and Charlie & The Wide Boys – this fascinating account of the capital’s pre-punk music scene is so full of period detail you can almost taste the Watney’s Red Barrel and feel the sticky pub carpet beneath your feet. Featuring reminiscences from former members of Ducks Deluxe, Rocky Sharpe And The Razors, Fumble, Bees Make Honey, The Fabulous Poodles and Roogalator, among many others, it paints a picture of a vibrant, multi-faceted scene unfairly dismissed by the Year Zero agitators of punk as an irrelevance. Madness, for one, wouldn’t have existed without it. As Kilburn…

Scotch on the rocks. Few would argue against the opinion that Rod Stewart hit a creative peak in 1971 with his album Every Picture Tells A Story, then fell into straw-boater naffness from about 1975 as he became part of the Hollywood jet set. Sean Egan’s exhaustive examination of Stewart’s glory years is unfortunately padded out with endless archive criticism, tedious explanations for the benefit of non-British readers (Harrow is an “upscale London neighbourhood”) and line-by-line analysis of song lyrics. It may be foolish to sing, from a studio in West London, of buffalo dying in frozen fields, or twisting syntax to make ‘coax’ rhyme with ‘jokes’, but there is something mean-spirited about the reduction of Mandolin Wind and Maggie May. There’s little in the way of fresh interviews…

Guitar slinger to the stars fires some telling shots. It’s not easy being a sideman for hire, even when you’re at the peak of the game. Take Kevin Armstrong, who’s assisted Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Sinead O’Connor and Morrissey, among others. A man who woke up in a squat on Saturday morning then played Live Aid that afternoon. Sure, there’s limited responsibility, and, as Armstrong attests cheerily in this unlikely page turner, drink, drugs and women (in the case of Propaganda, actual band members) may be available. Yet there’s artistic and commercial insecurity, financial skulduggery, depression, and the sense of what might have been, as Armstrong reflects on his band, Local Heroes S.W. 9, whose 1980 album Drip Dry Zone still deserves full-scale rehabilitation. Bowie and Iggy emerge…

“I no longer need singers. Over my career there was only a small [period of time] when I used singers. It’s just easier to do it myself.” Love him or hate him (and probably for more than one singer who’s worked with him since he came along in the 80s it’s the latter), you can’t ignore the one-time fastest guitar in the west. Before coming to Europe you play a month-long co-headline US tour with Glenn Hughes. As Hughes is a bit of a hero of yours, how do you see that panning out? I’ve known Glenn since I was eighteen years old. My first show in America was with him back in 1982. So being out on the road together will be lots of fun. Your current tour is…