Review Corner

Category: Rock

  • While She Sleeps: You Are We

    This is metalcore, a genre of music in which talented musicians who can play to a high standard and have a great singer deliberately reduce their potential audience by adding screaming and grunting. Go figure. It’s their career, but always baffles us. (Like a talented genius writing music reviews for a weekly newspaper and ……

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    Seafoam Green: Topanga Mansion

    This wonderful — and there’s no other word for it — album is a debut from Liverpool-based, Dublin-born singer/songwriter Dave O’Grady but he’s clearly a man who’s spent his life making music. Early plays reminded us of Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, whose New Earth Mud has been a staple in the Review Corner since its…

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    Brian May and Kerry Ellis: Golden Days

    This is basically the best pub band in the world. You go out for a pint and there’s a band playing covers. The guitarist is ace, though he has a lot of hair and mutters about badgers. His cover of Parisienne Walkways is brilliant but a bit OTT, the Moore/Lynott original beefed up a little…

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    Fleetwood Mac: Tango in the Night

    You should all have heard this, or parts of it. It was the Mac’s second-best selling album after Rumours and some of the tracks are as well-known as the Rumours classics — Seven Wonders, Caroline, Tango in the Night, Little Lies and Family Man among them — so there’s not much to say on the…

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    Maximo Park: Risk to Exist

    The Review Corner are big fans of Max Park, but this album has divided us. The hard-core fans find it a little too formulaic in places, the less ardent among us think it’s their best album, main songwriter Paul Smith upping his game quite some way. There’s no predictable indie material, which they tend to…

  • Banks and Steelz: Anything But Words

    This came out a while back, and we steered clear of an album featuring a rapper we never heard of and a man from a second division indie band. This is Interpol’s Paul Banks, who’s joined together with Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA (we’re not sure where the Steelz comes from, hence our ignorance) for an album…

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    As Lions: Selfish Age

    As Lions don’t so much roar as stride about cockily, following the alpha male around, not quite hard enough to take him on. (In more than one way: the band’s Austin Dickinson is son of Paul Bruce, the definite alpha male of British rock). It’s derivative and predictable, and never varies from its format of…

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    Frank Carter and The Rattlesnakes: Modern Ruin

    A friend in music radio once told us that some pretty decent bands fail because their members are so unpleasant — be mean to venues, music journalists and sound engineers and your career will be short lived. By the same token, Frank Carter must be the nicest man in music. Despite a decade-long career that’s…

  • Avenged Sevenfold The Best of 2005-2013

    According to the interweb, this is a compilation banged out by the record label to spoil AX7’s latest release on a new label. Warner Bros sued them (or tried to) when the band said they wanted to leave because a majority of the executives who signed the band to Warner were no longer at the…

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    Neil Young: Peace Trail

    We read a bad review of this and feared it would be like some of his recent releases — his work rate is admirable while his quality control is not — but it’s very good. It’s not up there with his best but it’s listenable and more casual fans of Young will find much to…