Category: Rock n roll
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The Black Angels: Wilderness of Mirrors
The Black Angels play psychedelic rock that’s somewhere between stoner and space rock, with a blend of sounds. Opener Without A Trace has the echoey smack of Led Zep’s When The Levee Breaks, guitars droning solidly, the surprisingly gentle vocals out the front (a little Stone Roses) and the drums gently Bohamesque. History of the…
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Pet Shop Boys: Discovery (Live in Rio 1994)
The album opens with a brief and tender Tonight Is Forever before Ab Fab’s Edina Monsoon cries: “Lights! Models! Guest list! Just do your best, darling!” and they launch into I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing. The album then trawls through the hits, Domino Dancing early on, and Rent, Suburbia and King’s Cross…
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My Grito presents … Mas Alto! A Charity Compilation
This is in a good cause and is a more-than-decent album. The cause: sadly not a local one but still good: the album is raising cash for No Us Without You, a US charity providing food security for undocumented back-of-house staff and their families. “Undocumented hospitality workers are the backbone of the hospitality industry,” says…
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Pottery: Welcome To Bobby’s Motel
This a fine album, interesting and meaty, with added cowbell for those who feel modern music lacks such percussive adornment. The title track kicks it all off, opening with a frantic snare roll and then the speeded-up soundtrack to a Tarantino movie, lots of tom toms, psychedelic guitar and a voice-over about dreams, then, after…
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Buddy: The Regent Theatre, Hanley
There is musical theatre and then there is Buddy – so full of hit songs that it feels like a concert. Upbeat, energetic and hugely entertaining, Buddy charts the period from musical trailblazer Buddy Holly switching from country music to the rock ‘n’ roll that made his name, to the last day he played. For…
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Arabnormal: Arabnormal
Arabnormal is led by Younes Faltakh, formerly of Belgian alternative rock band The Hickey Underworld, from Antwerp. (The name comes from a song that appears on the album Plays Pretty for Baby, by Washington DC punks Nation of Ulysses). Belgian music is good, and while you might not have heard of Review Corner favourites Castus,…
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The Murder Capital: When I Have Fears
The year has been good for albums from our newly-invented genre of blinder punk: a style of raucous, gothic, riff-heavy rock that litters the soundtrack of Peaky Blinders, a show that has become increasingly Tarantino for its tunes. The days of it being Nick Cave and a few string sections are long gone. The Murder…
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Le Cygne Noir: Shadow of A Wrecking Ball no
This zombie apocalypse concept album came out on Friday 13th and is destined to go down as a classic; cult classic maybe, but classic nonetheless. To say it’s ambitious would be an understatement; it’s huge in scope and styles but the album that keeps coming back to you as it plays is … Pink Floyd’s…
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Craig Finn: I Need A New War
The song title is not a proclamation of bellicose intent but a lyric from a track about a man who is lost and simply needs a reason for getting his life back on track. That twist is typical of the songs and the approach of this album, which is both muscular and tender. We listen…
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Delta High: Superfluidity
This is an album that closes with a song called Hey Ho Rock ‘n’ Roll: Delta High have perhaps realised that triumph and disaster are both impostors, to misquote Rudyard Kipling, and just want to have fun. Delta High take in a variety of sounds and styles. The band’s Neil Jackson — who lived two…
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