As the frontman of epic British drone-pop band The Verve, Richard Ashcroft proved himself the spiritual descendant of rock & roll icons like Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison – rivetingly charismatic, menacingly serpentine, and possessed of an almost shamanic intensity, he embraced and articulated the anthemic fervour of rock music with a power and eloquence…
Here we go again, with six smashers due out in the next two weeks. Performance is the new album from White Denim, a band who have long pulled hard at the parameters of rock & roll, admitting garage punk, soul, psychedelia, prog, jazz and blues while holding onto its vital good-time core. There simply is…
Elvis Costello And The Imposters have made a sensational new album that ranks alongside the best work this singular artist has ever produced. Look Now is beautiful in its simplicity, reflective in its lyrical vision, surrounded by melodies and orchestrations that are nothing short of heavenly. It’s the first album Costello has made with The…
Our 6 summer sizzlers for 3 & 10 August start with James, who are releasing their 15th(!) studio album, Living In Extraordinary Times. As Tim Booth puts it: “We knew something was up when Leicester City won the league then Brexit, then Trump. It’s as if we’d slipped into an alternate reality, a Philip K Dick…
Put simply, True Meanings, the fourteenth solo album from Paul Weller and the twenty-sixth studio album of his career, is a record unlike any he has ever made before. This is an album characterised by grandiose yet lush, delicate orchestration: an aesthetic to which Paul’s voice, never sounding better and singing some of his most…
We kick off our recommendations for 20 & 27 July with the news that Ty Segall & White Fence are become one again, regrooving what we once called Hair into what is now Joy. Rock is dead, according to them, so experience the commencement of on-beyond rock: music made with old tools but emitted from…
For the first time since 2007’s Our Love To Admire, Interpol have opened themselves up to the input of a producer. For two-week spells between December 2017 and April 2018, they travelled to upstate New York to work with Dave Fridmann – famed for his work with Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, MGMT, Spoon, Mogwai, and…
We lead off 13 July’s new releases with Back Roads And Abandoned Motels, on which The Jayhawks play their own versions of songs written by front man Gary Louris with and for other artists, including Dixie Chicks, Scott Thomas, Carrie Rodriguez and more. PBS’s Sessions At West 54th brought the hottest and hippest acts to…
While overseeing the soundtrack for T2 Trainspotting, Underworld’s Rick Smith arranged a meeting with Iggy Pop in a room at the Savoy Hotel on London’s Strand to discuss working on collaborative music for the film. Their respective tracks ‘Lust For Life’ and ‘Born Slippy (Nuxx)’ had perfectly bookended the first Trainspotting film two decades before.…
Mogwai’s first venture into the world of the feature film soundtracks is for Kin, directed by the producers who bought you Stranger Things and Arrival and released on the same date. Mogwai fans won’t be disappointed and it will appeal to lovers of sci-fi film soundtracks. Note: The LP will be available on heavyweight red…