Innehållsförteckning för April 2020 från Classic Rock

WELCOME Sometimes things can get a little, er, fractious at Classic Rock HQ. You see, we share an office with our chums from sister magazines and websites Metal Hammer, Prog and Louder, and while usually it’s an amazing place of bonhomie and banter, ever so occasionally hackles and voices are raised over what makes its way onto the office stereo. And in instances such as those, there are but a few albums we can throw on that will bring the peace (by, er, kinda bringing the noise). One such record is, unsurprisingly, AC/DC’s majestic Back In Black, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and is the album we’re celebrating this issue. Four decades ago last month, AC/DC singer Bon Scott tragically passed away. Despite being in shock, rather than…

NEWS Chris Darrow July 30, 1944 – January 15, 2020 South Dakota-born multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow was a member of the American country act the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (whose members over the years have included Jackson Browne and Bernie Leadon), also of The Corvettes who backed Linda Ronstadt. The 75-year-old died of complications following a stroke. Joe Payne Died January 24, 2020 Fear Factory’s Dino Cazares described his former Divine Heresy collaborator as “a great friend, a great band member and an incredible musician”, adding: “At 35 he is another one gone way too young.” Cause of death is still unknown. Wes Wilson July 15, 1937 – January 24, 2020 You may not know Wes Wilson’s name, but you’ll have seen some of the iconic gig posters that he designed…

MY FIRST LOVE T.Rex ELECTRIC WARRIOR By Wayne Hussey The Mission man on the appeal of Marc Bolan’s glam squad. Like everybody who was a kid in the sixties, I loved The Beatles. But my first real musical love was T.Rex. A life-changing band for me. I’d started to have a tentative interest in pop music in 1971, when I was twelve or thirteen, and I remember hearing Get It On on the radio. But the transformative moment was watching Top Of The Pops in early 1972, when Telegram Sam had just been released. I thought: “Yeah, that’s it, that’s what I want to do.” I think it was a mixture of the music, the glamour, the screaming girls. That’s when I started to think: “Girls like pop stars more…

Pedaljets Twist The Lens ELECTRIC MOTH Kansas City post-punk veterans’ late peak. Intermittently active since 1984, Pedaljets are steeped in the pre-Nirvana underground of The Replacements and Mission Of Burma. They’re more than foot-soldiers now. From Placid City Girl’s mellow early R.E.M. jangle to Down Town’s drilling post-punk, and from the broad slash of brassy, fuzzed guitar that transforms Sleepy Girl, to the big, Beatlesque piano ballad What Only Cats Chase, this has the swagger of a band in their prime. Mike Allmayer’s sympathy for often female lives lived in secret resistance to an unfriendly world, where days end ‘like a horse shot from underneath you’, are his songs’ beating heart. They’d have made instant sense when Pedaljets began under Reagan, and they do now. Nick Hasted…

Johnossi Torch/Flame BMG Stockholm pop-rock duo find glitter in the gloom for album number six. When existentialism and self-disgust meet gleaming, pop-flecked indie-rock, often it can be a beautiful thing. Swedish duo Johnossi – guitarist/vocalist John Engelbert and drummer Oskar ‘Ossi’ Bonde – mine the darker recesses of their minds for this, their sixth album in 15 years, but there is so much life in their music that the scales balance perfectly in the middle. So for every moment of reflection, as on the searching piano ballad title track, there’s a majestic buzz-and-riff rocker such as The Beat, which Weezer would have been proud of in the 90s, let alone now that they’ve gone completely off the boil. Much credit must go to Hives and Refused producer Pelle Gunnerfeldt, who…

Gorilla Riot Peach OFF YER ROCKA Elephantine debut from great rock hopes of Manchester. There are no half measures on this outstandingly confident debut full-length album from Mancunian five-piece Gorilla Riot, which starts with a bluesy swagger and builds to an all-out attack, a dizzying mix of grunge intensity, southern rock groove and the pure, breathless power of three guitarists working in perfect harmony to create an ever advancing wall of noise. Soundgarden and Alice In Chains are clear influences, particularly on frontman Arjun Bhishma, whose impressive range and deep, rich timbre owe a debt to both Chris Cornell and Layne Staley, while shades of Kyuss’s stoner stomp entwine with the us-against-the-world attitude and riffing melodicism of blues rock, resulting in a sound as timeless as it is irresistible. Expect…

Wishbone Ash Coat Of Arms SPV A timely return to form. Last year marked Wishbone Ash’s 50th anniversary. But as the estranged ‘classic’-era members didn’t unite for that, then the chance of them ever doing so stands at slim to none. Nonetheless, the current Ash, led by guitarist/vocalist Andy Powell, plough ever onwards. In contrast to the overly bluesy direction of their latter-day albums, Coat Of Arms has pleasing, prominent overtones of their classic sound. Powell has credited recent addition Ben Abrahams (guitar) with re-energising the band, and, sure enough, strident opener We Stand As One bursts out of the traps with a renewed edge and hunger, twin guitar riffs to the fore. The blustery title track and the folky Empty Man hit the mark with intricate long-form arrangements, allowing…

Greg Dulli Random Desire BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT Afghan Whigs frontman stretches his wings on debut solo album. With the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers, Greg Dulli has been one of rock’s foremost investigators of the dark and vicious face of love and lust, steeped in soul and in alcohol-laced contrition. Having come up through the grunge era but never really fitting in with the sound of the time, it’s fitting that his first solo album is a master class in mining the musical spectrum, taking in everything from Prince’s carnal yelps on Scorpio to a sparse, desert-bound echo of Nick Cave’s devil-baiting gothic drama on A Ghost, somehow combining it with a backbone of Dr John hoodoo in a manner that seems entirely natural. Taken as a whole, though,…

Syteria Reflection SYTERIA/CARGO Breezy, good-time music. The second album from Syteria, and they’ve shaped a sound and style that now firmly belongs to them. You can still sniff the occasional influence (Girlschool, Suzi Quatro, Blondie), but for the most part this is Syteria shaking off the shackles and letting their talent run riot. The vocal harmonies throughout give the songs real commercial appeal, but beneath the surface lies grit and fire. Jackie Chambers’s guitar flashes and snarls, while Julia Vocal’s voice veers between sensitive yelps and more earthy sensuality. The high-stepping Make Some Noise sets the wagons rolling, and everything here is a short, sharp jab; the band get into the viscera of a song and straight out. From the hyper Guilty to the concrete riffage of As If, Syteria…

Burning Witches Dance With The Devil NUCLEAR BLAST Swiss speed-metallers up their wicked game. Dance With The Devil is an absurdly exciting and wickedly nail-shard heavy metal record, full of dazzling musicianship, giant tunes and an overall sense that the Swiss quintet are giving the none-more-classic a significant sonic upgrade. New vocalist Laura Guldemond asserts herself from the off, imbuing explosive opener Lucid Nightmare with a presence and punch that their previous records occasionally lacked. These are easily the best songs the band have written. A glowering undercurrent of classic German thrash drives fiercer moments like Wings Of Steel and Six Feet Underground, while the sheer euphoric wallop of the title track and the Accept-like stately bludgeon of Necronomicon prove that Burning Witches kick large amounts of arse at any…

Vinnie Moore Soul Shifter MIND’S EYE/CARGO UFO guitarist’s ninth solo album, his follow up to 2015’s Aerial Visions. For Vinnie Moore’s latest solo album he’s brought along Rudy Sarzo, Jordan Rudess, Richie Monica and others for the ride. It’s at its best in the fast lane; Funk Bone Jam, for example, an exhilarating tour around the traces left across fretboard history by Hendrix in his happier moments, or the chatty, wah-wah-heavy white funk of Kung Fu Grip. Unfortunately, during the making of this album, rock colleagues began dying on Moore, taking the wind out of his sails, including Chris Cornell, eliciting the subdued salute of Mystified, and Gregg Allman, whose demise is marked by the wistful Soul Rider. David Stubbs…

Collateral Collateral ROULETTE MEDIA/CARGO So close to being a powerhouse debut. This is an album that frustrates. Because Collateral should have come up with something that thunders, roars and makes you wanna dance, but the production lets them down. This Brit band have everything to make an impact. Their songs are melodic, seizing the ground between Lizzy, Gun and Nazareth. The instrumental dexterity is effortless and full of character. And Angelo Tristan’s vocals are charismatic and sparkling. All the ingredients are there for an album to have us raving, but the sound is flat, lacking the requisite dynamic. So what might have been a classic first album ends up being just good. However, blast out songs like Midnight Queen, Mr Bigshot and Lullaby, and you can feel the fizzing excitement…

Body Count Carnivore CENTURY MEDIA Ice-T’s latest rap-metal monster has plenty of bite but not much meat. Ice-T’s groundbreaking rap-rock collective has always been an inspired concept, drawing fruitful parallels with the lurid fantasy violence of heavy metal and the real-life horrors of African-American ghetto life. Fronted by a natural showman and powered by the ferociously deft guitar work of Ernie C, Body Count are also reliably thrilling live. And yet this guest-heavy seventh album, marking the group’s 30th anniversary, is a hit-and-miss affair padded out with too many Fred Durst-style shouty tantrums: ‘If you were starving I wouldn’t fix you a bowl of hot shit!’ bellows Mr T in No Remorse. How rude. On the positive side is a pleasingly warty tribute to Lemmy in the shape of a…

Snake Oil & Harmony Hurricane Riders ZERO ONE ENTERTAINMENT Acoustic debut that’s been a long time coming. Five years on from the original team-up between Dan Reed (Dan Reed Network) and Danny Vaughn (Tyketto), it’s odd to think that this is their first album together, especially when the creative chemistry is so sublime. Taking the original acoustic approach of their live tours and adding bass (Bengt Jonasson) and drums (Robert Mehmet Sinan Ikiz), the result is essentially a 70s-style classic rock album with the volume turned down. And they make it sound so very easy – Little Hercules, Damned If You Do, Last Man Standing, the entire album sounds utterly cohesive and natural, each song finely honed to bring out its own character and soul. Hopefully album number two doesn’t…

Starbenders Love Potions SUMERIAN Atlanta quartet widen their retro rock references on expansive second album. Despite the unavoidable schoolboy-snigger potential of their name, Atlanta-based neo-glam quartet Starbenders demonstrate impressive command of a wide range of retro-leaning pop-rock registers on this second album, which is hard-edged in places but generally melodic and often couched attractively in lush, Spector-sized arrangements. On the gorgeously gushing, punked-up girl-group heartbreaker Can’t Cheat Time and the glitter-sprinkled stomper Never Gonna Die, the group’s superbly named singer-guitarist Kimi Shelter channels the spirit of Siouxsie and Debbie Harry, with nods to vintage new wave and ballsy sleaze-metal along the way. She even sounds like a satanic Steve Nicks on the equally deliciously titled Bitches Be Witches, which blends hippie-tinged harmonies with slashing guitar solos. A fuzzy-warm, soulful, saloon-bar…

Bruce Springsteen Vinyl Reissues COLUMBIA/LEGACY What an interesting turn-of-the-century he had. MADS PERCH/PRESS Human Touch, Lucky Town and The Ghost Of Tom Joad suggested that in shedding his New Jersey/E Street Band support network, Bruce Springsteen shed too much of himself. These five unpredictably selected reissues, lovingly transferred onto vinyl, tell the tale – not the whole tale, mind – of how he found himself again. 18 Tracks (’99, 6/10) was mostly taken from Tracks, 1998’s box of previously unreleased material, although why The Promise, one of the three exclusive tracks, was omitted from Darkness On The Edge Of Town is a mystery to this day. Returning to the East Coast, Springsteen reconvened The E Street Band, and Live At New York City (2001, 7/10) was taken from the Madison…

Big Star Reissues CRAFT RECORDINGS It doesn’t get much better than this. These are the two records that near-single-handedly invented the genre of power-pop and went on to be direct and major influences on alt.rock (R.E.M., The Replacements, Jeff Buckley, Creation Records et al). The timeless September Gurls, from Radio City (9/10), for example, is the song that invented Teenage Fanclub. You could (perhaps) argue that the painfully beautiful album Third is superior to the first two Big Star albums, but that’s about it. No one else comes close, despite the best attempts of acolytes such as The dbs and The Posies. Big Star were formed in Memphis in 1971 by songwriters Alex Chilton and Chris Bell (Bell left shortly after the release of #1 Record), and despite latterday critical…

Jethro Tull Living With The Past EARMUSIC CLASSICS Tull’s long song, live. Jethro Tull were always a very odd group: an idiosyncratic-sounding band who were hugely popular, a rock band who sounded at the same time like a folk band, and who wrote songs that sounded peculiarly timeless yet also completely of their time. Ian Anderson’s persona – part-vagrant, part-flautist – remains unique in pop, at least unless James Galway becomes homeless and his songs combine musical adventurousness with concrete riffs, and flights of fancy with down-to-earth lyrics. Tull’s success is both deserved and baffling, because they are at once pretty good and pretty weird. Which explains the existence of this, a live collection recorded at the beginning of the 2000s, at a point when the band had been going,…

Blue Öyster Cult 40th Anniversary: Agents Of Fortune FRONTIERS MUSIC Too little, too late. SHUTTERSTOCK Sometimes in life, you order caviar but get lemons. Like this. It’s no way to celebrate Blue Öyster Cult’s biggest seller, one of the finest albums of the mid-70s. That it‘s being released four years after the event it celebrates is the least of its failings. In 2001 Columbia Records delivered a full re-mastering of the original, with bonus tracks. This anniversary issue is merely the audio (and a bonus DVD) of a show shot for a YouTube subscription channel in 2016 on a small Hollywood studio sound stage, in front of an audience of “invited guests”. The ambient sound between songs reminds us how much the band’s star has faded. If Eric Bloom was…

Humble Pie Go For The Throat SFM Swansong recording from Artful Dodger’s other band. The final Pie line-up, where irrepressible frontman Steve Marriott and original drummer Jerry Shirley are joined by Anthony ‘Sooty’ Jones on bass and former Jeff Beck alumnus Bobby Tench on guitar, is too easily written off. The quartet recorded a brace of albums for Atlantic subsidiary ATCO between ‘80 and ‘81, of which this is the second. And while it’s a characteristically rough-and-ready collision of ragged rock heft and unvarnished R&B grit, Go For The Throat delivers lashings of visceral charm and emotional punch. A blistering assault on All Shook Up and slightly overcooked blues-hollering of the Small Faces’ Tin Soldier look better on the sleeve than they sound in the ears, but when Marriott affords…

THE HARD STUFF STUFF BOOKS & DVDS A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s Mike Barnes OMNIBUS A mammoth meander through prog’s golden age. Prog rock has enjoyed a critical reassessment in recent years, which basically means that several of the people who didn’t like it do like it now, while all the people who already liked it still like it. Maybe that’s because most of it is not the idiot sludge its critics (me included) made it out to be, all goblins and greatcoats, but a murky spectrum of invention and variety, bounded at one end by the commercial epics of Yes and Genesis, and at the other by the studied experiments of Henry Cow and Soft Machine. Prog is not so much a broad church…

Monsters Of Rock: The Official Illustrated History John Tucker RUFUS PUBLICATIONS A monster-sized Monsters tribute. More bands will play Download this year than played at Monsters Of Rock in the entire 1980s, but for rockers of a certain generation nothing will ever better the patchouli-scented, Ruddles-drenched version of Donington, when the acts that still headline today’s festivals were enjoying the first fruits of success. When crowds weren’t divided up by multiple safety barriers. When bottles filled the air like angry locusts. When Van Halen and Diamond Dave Lee Roth were still friends. When Thunder would happily pose backstage surrounded by topless women (the Thunderbirds, geddit?). When you only needed half a dozen bands and half-decent weather to put on a festival that people would remember the rest of their lives.…

This month’s contributors PAUL ELLIOTT This month Paul writes about AC/DC’s Back In Black (p26), which he first heard as a 13-year-old schoolboy and which he still rates as the greatest album ever made. His forthcoming book, Rock: 101 Iconic Rock, Heavy Metal & Hard Rock Albums, is published in September. ROBERT ALFORD Robert Alford’s photographs have appeared in the pages of Creem, Rolling Stone and People magazines, to name just a few, and this month we feature some of his great AC/DC photos from their Back In Black tour (page 26). Robert estimates he has worked with more than 500 artists and performers during his career. You can check out more of his work at robertalfordphotography.com MICK WALL A former editor of Classic Rock, Mick wrote the cover stories…

“These touching tributes help” Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson thank fans for their Peart love. A PETITION FOR a statue or plaque dedicated to the late Neil Peart to be placed at Lakeside Park in St Catharines, Canada has been launched. At press time 25,000 people had supported the idea. Rush made the location famous with the lyrics written by Peart for the track of the same name on their 1975 album Caress Of Steel. The family of the drummer, who died on January 7 after a lengthy battle with brain cancer, are said to be “fully on board” with the proposal. Peart’s band mates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have issued public thanks for the outpouring of emotion following Peart’s passing, saying: “The touching tributes help to lessen the…

BURIED TREASURE Riches from the rock underground LADIES W.C. Ladies W.C., Souvenir Records, Venezuela, 1968. Multicoloured or black vinyl version £1,400 + Ladies W.C.’s moniker was aimed at mocking strident censorship laws of their native Venezuela. Bassist/vocalist Stephen Scott was born in Caracas to American parents living there, but also spent his time studying in South Carolina, where he embraced the wild and happening musical times. Back in Caracas he teamed up with local musicians, including lead guitarist Adib Casta, whose wild fuzz guitar antics helped set these psychedelic punks apart. You want freak outs and fuzz-wah jams? Look no further than Ladies W.C. for all that and more. There are samples of toilets flushing, babies screaming, waves crashing and aeroplanes taking off, which add to the lysergic experience of…

Q&A Steve Harley The singer, songwriter, actor and more on folk clubs, never giving up, pop stardom and the problem with guitarists. Words: Ian Fortnam Since forming Cockney Rebel in 1972, Steve Harley has enjoyed an enduring portfolio career. Cult success soon translated into mainstream pop stardom as hit followed hit – singles including Judy Teen, Mr Soft, Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me), Here Comes The Sun, albums The Psychomodo, The Best Years Of Our Lives… and onward. Presenting Radio 2’s Sounds Of The Seventies, treading the West End boards in Samuel Beckett’s Rough For Theatre… He’s done it all. “I’ve led a charmed life,” says Harley as he prepares to release Uncovered, an eagerly awaited collection of acoustic reinterpretations. “And as long as I’ve got a…

GREAT DEAL, DONE DIRT CHEAP When Phil Carson signed AC/DC to Atlantic Records, he might well have made the deal of the century. He talks exclusively to Classic Rock about their rise to fame and how they rebuilt themselves with Back In Black. Words: Paul Elliott GETTY As the man who signed AC/DC to Atlantic Records in 1975, Phil Carson played a key role in the band’s career. He now manages Foreigner, another of the biggest-selling acts in Atlantic’s history. Speaking exclusively to Classic Rock, he tells the inside story of AC/DC’s rise to fame and how, after the death of Bon Scott, they rose again – with Brian Johnson and Back In Black – to become the biggest band in the world. It seems a silly question now, but…

STEVE HOWE THE CLASSIC Rock INTERVIEW STEVE HOWE He could have been known only as the guitarist who rode a White Bicycle with proto-psychedelic Brit-rockers Tomorrow. Instead he joined Yes, and with them, Asia, solo and more has enjoyed a hugely successful and acclaimed career as a member of prog royalty. Interview: Mick Wall Portrait: Will Ireland Steve Howe is one of those people to whom photographs no longer do justice. Approaching his seventy-third birthday, the polite, engaging English gentleman Classic Rock meets today in the restaurant of a London hotel is far removed from the cadaverous, wispy-haired figure of his publicity shots. He’s still scarecrow-thin and ghost-grey-skinned, but alert and warm in person. A lifetime of being one of the (many) leading lights in Yes, a group whose music…

Outlaws Dixie Highway SPV Enduring southern rockers ride on. In an era when a number of old-guard southern rock bands currently operate without a single founder member in their line-up, Outlaws feature their original line-up’s two survivors: Henry Paul (vocals/guitar) and Monte Yoho (drums). Paul outlined plans for a new studio album around the release of Legacy Live (2016), and the time invested in Dixie Highway pays off with a collection free of filler. True to their roots, songs like Macon Memories, Over Night From Athens and Endless Ride blend country-rock vocal harmonies and acoustic guitars with stinging electric riffs and twin leads. They bare their teeth with the title track and the defiant, anthemic Southern Rock Will Never Die, name-checking fallen bandmates and friends such as Ronnie Van Zant.…

Huey Lewis And The News Weather BMG First album of originals since 2001, and probably the last of his career. It was all going so well. Having sold more than 30 million records means having to make another one only when you fancy. So when Huey Lewis got most of the old gang together at their California studio, their goal was another good-natured album in the multiplatinum vein of Fore! and Sports. Things progressed swimmingly, until the moment when Lewis was diagnosed with Meniere’s disease, an incurable ear condition that makes singing impossible. With Lewis mercifully refusing to exhume sub-standard castoffs, Weather is seven songs and just over half-an-hour long. There’s no danger of The Power Of Love or Stuck With You being eclipsed, but the six originals and Eugene…

Neal Morse Band The Great Adventour INSIDEOUT Impressive live performance. Anyone who appreciates the flowing tones of Neal Morse and his band will love this live excursion. Shot in Brno, Czech Republic, the show, from the 2019 tour, is not only well constructed and beautifully executed, but also the way it’s been captured actually puts you right into the centre of the action. Morse himself proves to be more than a fine musician; he dons various masks and outfits to accentuate the differing moods within songs – and it’s surprising how comfortable he seems in such guises. The album is available on two CDs or a Blu-ray set, the latter also including a couple of documentaries tracking the band’s US and European tours. Malcolm Dome…

Five Finger Death Punch F8 BETTER NOISE Back to business for troubled Las Vegas metallers. The previous 5FDP album looked for a moment like it could be their last – delayed by label legal battles, amid on-stage inter-band bust-ups and an extended rehab stay for frontman Ivan Moody. But with the singer now clean and still reassuringly raging against all around him, F8 is an impressive show of renewed strength. The blend of metallic muscle, melodic hooks and grungey turbo-complaining is familiar, but it’s working as well as ever on Full Circle, and has a gut-level incision on heavier tracks such as Bottom Of The Top. There are even whiffs of power metal in the more anthemic flourishes, but their trump card is an immediacy of songwriting that many of…

Audrey Horne Waiting For The Night NAPALM Norwegian hard rockers’ career-spanning live set. The age of live albums as introductions to artists seems like ancient history, but these tracks recorded at a homecoming gig by Bergen-based Audrey Horne provide an enticing primer for a band that deserve to be better known outside Northern Europe. Although they pick songs from six studio albums here, they sound best showcasing the more anthemic sound of their more recent releases. This Is War is driven by a galloping, Maidenesque tempo and punctuated by twin-guitar motifs, while on Audrevolution they echo punkier compatriots Turbo Negro. Recent album cut Blackout, although no relation to the Scorpions song, has something of the Germans’ adrenalising, high-octane drive, and the title track from 2014’s Pure Heavy is an instant…

Ross The Boss Born Of Fire AFM Metal legend returns, oiled-up and ready for battle. While testosterone rockers Manowar prepare to hang up their loincloths for ever, the architect of their signature power metal sound, guitarist Ross ‘The Boss’ Friedman, shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down. Born Of Fire is the fourth album from the band that bears his name, and it’s a ripper, an orgy of musclebound fury that keeps one blood-crusted boot in the gritty world of NY punk and the other in the cosmic ballrooms of European melodic shred-metal. Vocalist Marc Lopes puts on one of the most acrobatic performances imaginable, swerving from bestial growls to operatic, glass-shattering screams in the blink of an eye. You get what you came for with blistering tracks…

Black Swan Shake The World FRONTIERS MUSIC Hard rock supergroup comprising members of Whitesnake, Foreigner, Mr. Big. Recorded in LA at bassist Jeff Pilson’s studio, it says something about Shake The World that it drew its energy and inspiration in part from Pilson watching the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s an album that channels and re-presents the long-established energies and tropes of stadium rock, it’s immaculately produced, and it contains not a single shred of originality. Granted, the title track bristles with revolutionary intent; ‘Stand together, we’ll be stronger/Change the world – right now!’ hollers Robin McAuley, no Fabian gradualist he. But trad metal stands unbent by these winds of change, on the Deep Purple-esque Big Disaster, the mandatory balladic breather Make It There and the turgid Divided/United. Even trad…

The Boomtown Rats Citizens Of Boomtown BMG First album in 35 year shows why they were big once. Has there ever been a band so deleted from rock history as the Boomtown Rats? Once hugely popular (the first new wave No.1 single), possessed of great pop skills and with a charismatic frontman, they never feature in anyone’s lists of anyone, despite making a string of superb, inventive records. Perhaps they went on too long, fizzling out in the mid-80s. Perhaps Bob Geldof’s achievements with Live Aid lessened the band’s own. Maybe this album, their first in 35 years and a set of extremely strong songs, catchy as hell and full of both excitement and intelligence, will bring them their due. Geldof remains an excellent lyricist, and songs like Trash Glam…

Harem Scarem Change The World FRONTIERS MUSIC Go Team Canada! Tough, powerful and effortlessly tuneful, Harem Scarem’s fifteenth studio album and the follow-up to 2017’s United finds the band doing what they do best: cranking out exceedingly well-crafted melodic rock. If it ain’t broke, and all that. Writing team Harry Hess and Pete Lesperance seem to be mining a particularly rich seam of inspiration of late, and this album absolutely does not disappoint, with songwriting that is imaginative and inventive while still delivering the expected golden choruses and irresistible harmonies. Mid-tempo rockers like Aftershock and Searching For Meaning are the order of the day, although Riot In My Head and Fire & Gasoline have a bit more zip and grit to them. And of course there’s the obligatory power ballad,…

THE HARDSTUFF ALBUMS Biff Byford School Of Hard Knocks SILVER LINING MUSIC Saxon singer shows light and shade on debut solo record. Two songs into Biff Byford’s first solo album, you’d be hard-pushed to find a reason why he decided to go solo and leave Saxon at home for a while when he set out to make School Of Hard Knocks. Opener Welcome To The Show echoes occasional Saxon set openers like This Town Rocks and Everybody Up, while the title track lifts the riff from Wheels Of Steel pretty much wholesale to underpin a (very well-spun) tale of Biff’s rise from the rough and tumble streets of Barnsley. Which, standing on the corner of a grainy northern town doing your best to keep your head down, is where it’s…

Luke Haines & Peter Buck Beat Poetry For Survivalists CHERRY RED R.E.M. guitarist and Auteurs frontman join formidable forces. Peter Buck met Luke Haines when he purchased, for £99, a painting Haines had done of Lou Reed, and the pair hit it off immediately. The upshot is this album, a fine melding of musical and lyrical minds. Haines, as ever, explores with impassioned relish some of the more fringe elements of popular culture and Western history; opener Jack Parsons tells the story of the ill-fated rocket scientist-turned occultist, while other subjects covered include Pol Pot and the last people in the world in search of Bigfoot. Musical allusions abound: Captain Beefheart, Johnny Ray, The Carpenters and Neil Young, with Rock’n’Roll Ambulance paying homage to the latter. However, the album really…

Swamp Dogg Sorry You Couldn’t Make It JOYFUL NOISE Ageing renegade forks into tear-streaked country. Psychedelic soul has been Swamp Dogg’s stock-in-trade for decades, but here the 77-year-old revisits the formative Nashville influence sparked by a vinyl-collecting granddad who “bought country records out the asshole”. Swamp certainly has a knack for the genre’s heartbreak; Sleeping Without You Is A Dragg belies its breezy Hammond organ lilt with a lyric about watching drinking buddies peel off at closing time for partners and warm beds. On Family Pain, slicing fiddles and a bluff, chickenwire guitar solo decorate a dark tale of addicts who have sold their furniture for crack. But it’s in the album’s back end that Dogg deploys the real lip-wobblers, duetting with John Prine on Memories’ salute to a girl…

Beat City Tubeworks Top Rock THE SIGN Yet more hi-octane Swedish punk’n’roll. If Swedish garage rock is what lights your fire, then you should be all over Beat City Tubeworks, whose second album Top Rock an exceptionally sparky example of Scandi rock’n’roll not completely dissimilar to early Hellacopters. Catchy and melodic yet bloodily raw and abrasive – a bit like buffing your lugholes with a particularly tuneful belt sander – Top Rock’s primal, 60s buzzsaw riffing is especially invigorating on the wantonly high-velocity Ivory Wave and the wonderfully titled 80s Forest Treasure = Hands of Sin. Elsewhere, BCT eschew pure speed for deft pacing and dynamics with Fading To Grey, Succubus and the swaggering Idiot Savant demonstrating the band’s impressive ability to switch gears and intensity, all the while sounding…

Simple Minds Street Fighting Years UNIVERSAL The stadium years’ ambitious black sheep, now artfully remastered. Frankie Goes To The Highlands was the rough MO for this 1989 hook-up with Trevor Horn. Largely recorded in Simple Minds’ new Loch Striven studio, the result embraced being Celtic and political, lost America, and now sounds a proggy, misty pulling away from muscle-bound stadium moves, and pop power. The title track, inspired by the fatal Glasgow stabbing of a friend of Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr, is sung in a husky clamour, words blurring, with folk and soul grace notes to its epic ambitions, the band’s Big Music now a searching sprawl. It’s massive and moving. Lou Reed cameos on This Is Your Land’s Clydeside anthem, and Midi technology and bagpipes are both embraced.…

The Allman Brothers Band Trouble No More: 5Oth Anniversary Collection UMC Multi-disc career overview from great American noodlers. Here’s a theory: the Allman Brothers Band established an undeniably classic sound without ever writing a truly classic song. One US Top-10 hit in 40 years is testament to that. But they nailed that sound right out of the box. This multi-disc set kicks off with the first recording the band made – a previously unreleased demo of Muddy Waters’s Trouble No More – and it’s already there: those jazz and country licks, that harmony, that slide, that friskiness, the effortless joy. Cut to 44 years later, and they end their final show at New York’s Beacon Theatre – and this collection – with the same song, sound essentially unchanged. Unlike 2016’s…

T.Rex Reissues DEMON Marc on wax. Clear vinyl, to be precise. While a motivated and indomitable artist, Marc Bolan, perhaps the ultimate efflorescence of the mod narcissus, chiefly fed on fame. And for a good 15 months (post-T.Rex’s Hot Love TOTP and pre-Bowie’s Starman TOTP, as glam birthed and blossomed all about him), he thrived, reigning supreme as the prettiest star in the pop firmament. But with Bowie’s ascent, Bolan’s career embarked upon a steady decline. Ziggy Stardust was Snow White to the Electric Warrior’s Wicked Queen. The Slider (1972, 9/10) captured Bolan at the apotheosis of his pomp (featuring back-to-back UK number ones Telegram Sam and Metal Guru), but by the Tanx (7/10) sessions of March ’73 the cracks were already beginning to show. Its songs (Shock Rock, Highway…

Last Great Dreamers Retrosexual RAY Silver anniversary vinyl for gritty 90s glam. Like their Britpop peers, Last Great Dreamers looked to the newly fashionable early 70s for answers, adopting Slade’s tartan-troos fashion and Ronno’s guitar swagger in a firefly-brief career, which culminated in this 1994 debut. Youthful yearning, not nostalgia, sets it apart, as terrace choruses and exultant glam solos soundtrack vignettes of homelessness and disaffection, set in the Camden Town stepped over by Britpop’s braying yahoos. From exam-stressed schoolkids to a girl watching Waterloo sunsets from a cardboard box, everyone grasps for salvation in rock’n’roll, here a kind of heaven glimpsed beyond the grimy streets. When Only Crimes’ full-tilt boogie ends with Marc Valentine enquiring, “Ready fellas?”, he knows he can rely on guitars at least to answer straight…

Rory Gallagher Check Shirt Wizard – Live In ’77 CHESS/UMC A battered Strat. A check shirt. He wore them both well. Cunningly stitched together from tapes of four UK shows in early 1977, this 20-track, two-CD/three-disc vinyl set captures Rory Gallagher, bassist Gerry McAvoy, drummer Rod de’Ath and keyboard player Lou Martin on their final world tour as a four-piece. There are, though, no tensions or shortcomings in evidence. Every song, old and (then) new, crackles with life, and the band are mole-grip tight. Calling Card, the sixth (of 11) studio album, was at the time recently released, and eight of its nine songs are featured here, including the bluesy title track, a scorching Secret Agent and Barley & Grape Rag as part of a five-strong acoustic set. Rory’s confidence…

Dio The Studio Albums Collection 1996-2004 BMG King Ronnie’s last hurrahs given a salutary polish. You won’t find many fans of the late, great Ronnie Dio claiming that 1996’s Angry Machines is one of his better albums. Even in newly remastered form it’s a difficult record to love. The tracks Black and Stay Out Of My Head are decent, Big Sister is just silly. Yes, Dio wrote a song called Big Sister. I know. Fortunately, the vast majority of this round-up of Dio studio albums is as magnificent as you would expect from metal’s greatest ever voice. Both Killing The Dragon (2002) and Master Of The Moon (2004) are far sharper and stronger than was acknowledged at the time. The latter in particular is full of sumptuous and gloriously melodramatic…

The Doors: Break On Thru – A Celebration Of Ray Manzarek Trafalgar 2016 LA tribute show with added archive clips. People will go a long way to see a live Amur Leopard. At last count there were less than 70 of them left in the wild. They’ve been listed as critically endangered since ‘96. So where does that leave The Doors? Since their co-founding keyboard player Ray Manzarek loped off to that great Venice Beach in the sky back in 2013, their number has reduced to just two. So seeing John Densmore and Robby Krieger play Doors tunes in the flesh (even when encumbered by Exene from X, Taylor from the Foos, that bloke from Gov’t Mule et al all doing their best Jim-Morrison-as-a-howling-drunk act) is something many would crawl…

Bad Company Bad Company MVD ENTERTAINMENT GROUP Forgettable look at definitive 70s rock supergroup. GETTY Great bands don’t always make for great documentaries. For all their brilliance, Bad Company’s story arc follows that of a thousand other groups: huge success followed by a downturn, split and eventual reunion. There’s little drama by the standards of today, let alone by those of the feverish 1970s. Bad Company is as pedestrian as its title. A 90-minute documentary originally released in 2014 to mark the band’s fortieth anniversary, it includes prosaic interviews with surviving members Paul Rodgers, Mick Ralphs and Simon Kirke (the sight of the trio laughing at their calamitous attempts to enlist a bassist is a warm high point). But it erases the decade-plus they spent with post-Rodgers frontman Brian Howe…

Jaki Liebezeit – The Life, Theory And Practice Of A Master Drummer Edited by Jono Podmore UNBOUND Halleluwah: tips from, and tribute to, the Can man. When Jaki Liebezeit, the hugely respected Can drummer, pioneer of the Motorik beat, died aged 78 in 2017, musician-producer Jono Podmore and journalist John Payne contacted his more recent collaborators, hoping to collate his theories of rhythm. These are extraordinarily detailed, if simple and effective in practice; the groove is explained with diagrams, dotdash Morse code, hand settings and accents. All of which may come as a surprise to more spontaneous, improvisational drummers, but should prove to be an inspirational textbook for trainees and tyros. Also present in a lovingly compiled tribute are a concise biography, full discography and a section on Liebezeit’s many…

the DIRT RIP Thank you and good night. Reed Mullin February 12, 1966 – January 27, 2020 A much-loved character in the metal community, Reed Mullin was the drummer with North Carolina-based band Corrosion Of Conformity. From their inception in the mid-1980s, the band played a variety of styles, beginning as a hardcore punk act and later developing southern rock strains. No cause of death has been confirmed. He was 53. David Olney March 23, 1948 – January 18, 2020 The worlds of folk and Americana have voiced shock and sadness after noted singer and songwriter David Olney, 71, passed away on stage during a gig in Florida. He had suffered a heart attack. Olney was cited as an influence by Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt and Emmylou Harris, all…

Why I Love BACK IN BLACK GETTY x2 By Jim Breuer The comedian and Beano impersonator reflects. “Back In Black defined my teenage years. There was a culture clash when I was growing up; y’know, it was new wave versus pop versus disco versus rock. I couldn’t stand half the things they played on MTV, but that album stood for everything I wanted to be. “I remember the first time I heard the chime of the ‘bong… bong… bong…’ Like: ‘Are we allowed to listen to this?’ And when the guitar kicked in, I got chills. Back In Black was real. It was powerful. It was energetic. You didn’t have to be a poser. It wasn’t singing about nonsense. This was street stuff. “First time I saw AC/DC, Yngwie Malmsteen…

WHEN GOTH WENT METAL They Were There The roster of our goth feature’s commentators. Andrew Eldritch Sisters Of Mercy frontman, who has been called the Godfather of Goth. The Sisters Of Mercy tour the UK this month. The run of dates begins on March 7 at Manchester’s Albert Hall. Wayne Hussey Guitarist in Dead Or Alive before joining the Sisters Of Mercy and then The Mission. The Mission’s extensive The United European Party Tour 2020 returns to the UK on May 2 at London Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Hussey’s first book, Salad Daze, was published in 2019. Nik Fiend Frontman with Alien Sex Fiend, who had five albums and 12 singles in the UK indie Top 20 charts from ’82-87. ASF’s 6-track Re-Possessed digital EP was released in November 2019, to…

Therapy? Greatest Hits (2020 Versions) MARSHALL Can’t go wrong with this. Twelve tracks drawn from this demented Irish trio’s 15-album career, re-recorded at Abbey Road to celebrate a 30-year anniversary and tour. It’s the band’s 12 most successful UK Top 40 hits, sprawling and brawling and lacking near none of their original malevolence, just maybe a bit more spit and shine. Frontman Andy Cairns sounds wired and ready for another 30 tumultuous years on beefed-up versions of Teethgrinder, Screamager, and Die Laughing (featuring the Manics’ James Dean Bradfield for a suitably impassioned singalong). His voice seems to grow deeper and more expressive with each passing decade. The bass menaces, drums thunder a maelstrom of intent on the mighty Trigger Inside. Some fans may decry the lack of rawness, a poppy…

Sepultura Quadra NUCLEAR BLAST Four is the magic number for the veteran Brazilian thrashers. Few bands have to battle their own history like Sepultura do. It’s been almost 25 years since talismanic frontman Max Cavalera quit, but every new album the band release is measured against the stellar run of records they put out between 1989 and 1995. Quadra, their fifteenth, won’t change that, but it deserves to be judged on its own merits. On that front it’s a top-tier modern metal album, one that mixes bloody-knuckled brutality with the kind of forward-looking experimentalism that long ago became their defining trait. It’s a concept album of sorts, apparently revolving around numerology in general and the number four in particular, although the specifics are vague. But there’s no doubting their intent…

Tame Impala The Slow Rush FICTION Funk and house get ghosted. Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker has built a mist-swathed empire by haunting pop history. Be it glam, prog, soft rock or disco, he’s drifted through its musty attic, breathing poltergeist melodies and dousing the grooves in synthetic ectoplasm. Five years after Tame Impala’s majestic Currents album, and with his head possibly turned by working with Kanye West, Lady Gaga and Mark Ronson in the meantime, fourth album The Slow Rush casts the same spectral psych web over classic funk pop and house, ironically utilising genres that famously live for the moment to explore the weavings of time and memory. Take Lost In Yesterday, an amorphous disco strut about cutting loose emotional baggage, or Tomorrow’s Dust, in which Parker faces a…

The Imbeciles The Imbeciles SELF-RELEASED Crazed post-punk-prog from masked gonzo wild men. If Wire were dragged across concrete and then mangled by barbed wire at the Tex-Mex border, the result might be this enigmatic Anglo-American band’s debut. Put down on two-inch tape in eight days in a haunted studio in Texas, there’s a resonant atmosphere to the recording, as if you can hear the room where it was dug up. One Hand Tommy’s inbred redneck gasps and synth whirrs recall how freaky the Pixies first sounded, after Stalking Boy’s spooky, cut-up Stooges drive has been razor-slashed to a stop. D.I.E. is pop music for kamikazes, all gliding doom. Most songs last two minutes, majoring in mood and compacted information. Chief Imbecile Butch Dante is new to music but grew up…

The Night Flight Orchestra Aeromantic NUCLEAR BLAST NFO get their wings. No longer in orbit but still defying gravity and the normal earthbound rules of rock, the Night Flight Orchestra return with the follow-up to 2018’s magnificent Sometimes The World Ain’t Enough. Although not billed explicitly as such, Aeromantic is effectively a concept album, thematically driven by the bittersweet consequences of jet-set romance, each of its 13 tracks a cinematic vignette in an ambitious, opulent aero-opera. The classic 70s and 80s rock is complemented by cheeky nods to ABBA (If Tonight Is Our Only Chance and This Boy’s Last Summer), Elton John (the fabulous title track), throbbing disco (Transmissions) and smooth 70s soul (Curves). Given that NFO stuff more ideas into a single song than most bands use in an…

Mondo Generator Fuck It HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS Business as usual from former QOTSA bassist. What Mondo Generator lack in surprises, they more than make up for with sheer exuberance. Even after an absence of eight years, their touchstones remain an unholy collision of hardcore punk and coruscating heavy metal, with the kind of screaming from singer/bassist Nick Oliveri that’s usually reserved for those moments in the middle of the night when the utter meaninglessness of existence becomes too much to bear. Hence Up Against The Void is an existential punch-up, while the speeding joyride of Turboner screeches away with a tankful of gas, a lack of brake fluid and scant regard for personal safety. Best of all is the title track, which displays some intriguing guitar dexterity from Mike Pygmie.…

Psychotic Waltz The God-Shaped Void INSIDEOUT Prog-metallers make a convincing recorded return after an extended hiatus. Dogged by a combination of bad luck and not quite catching the wave enjoyed by other practitioners of the second wave of progressive metal, California’s Psychotic Waltz seemed forever destined to be the bridesmaid instead of the bride. But, following a gap of 24 years since their last album and 10 since their re-formation, The God-Shaped Void should do much to re-establish their reputation. Anchored by solid drumming and dependably crunchy guitars, and topped off with squealing leads and occasional pinched harmonics, it’s an album that, taken as a whole, can be a little wearisome, but with some judicious cherry picking the individual tracks reveal their charms. Devils And Angels and While The Spiders…

Deap Lips Blam COOKING VINY Flaming Lips and Deap Vally collaboration comes in remarkably short on wham. Collaborating with the Flaming Lips is becoming a form of alt. rock jury service – everyone gets the call eventually. After working with artists including Nick Cave, Ke$ha, Tame Impala, Erykah Badu and even Miley Cyrus, it’s LA’s hard-riffing duo Deap Vally’s turn. Their gutter gristle and gothic western bent blend well with Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd’s deep-space echoes and opium-vision vibes. Take Home Thru Hell, on which the Deap duo construct gnarled scifi R&B alongside what sounds like an autotune that’s become sentient, or Hope Hell High, a cool country twang that finds Deap disintegrating like they’ve been hit by an alien atomiser in verse two. Inventiveness abounds – seven-minute centrepiece…

My Dying Bride The Ghost Of Orion NUCLEAR BLAST None more black. As dark and foreboding as a jagged peak in the Dales during a rain storm, My Dying Bride are as rugged as the Yorkshire landscape they barrelled out of some 30 years ago; black as pitch and a band Rolling Stone felt moved to describe as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the ears”. While the latest BBC incarnation of that foul beast isn’t afraid to play it for laughs, My Dying Bride remain steadfastly rooted in gloom. It’s a nuanced gloom, though; elegiac prog, if you will, fluttering doom filled with foreboding and occasional flashes of light, like sunlight piercing grey clouds, and especially good on the languid Tired Of Tears or the broken roar of The Long Black…

Russ Ballard It’s Good To Be Here ABSOLUTE Looks familiar. Those who’ve been paying attention may be thinking this is a reissue. And while Ballard did release an identically titled album five years ago, this isn’t it. Not exactly. While six of its tracks were featured on 2015’s digital release of It’s Good To Be Here, they’ve all since been ‘reworked’. Meanwhile, seven songs have been added (and three excised, but we won’t talk about them). Cynics might accuse Argent’s ex-vocalist of reheating leftovers, bunging a fistful of parsley on top and hoping no one will notice, but as he’s an undervalued pioneer of ‘proper’ rock singing, and wrote Since You Been Gone, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. While rock to its core, It’s Good finds Ballard…

Steve Harley Uncovered ABSOLUTE Acoustic covers album from the original cockney rebel. His biggest hit might currently be used in an advertising campaign for Viagra, but as anyone who has seen Steve Harley live recently could tell you, the man himself remains, at 68, as potent as ever. He was once described by no less an authority than Rod Stewart as “one of the finest lyricists Britain has produced”. On this acoustic set he interprets an eclectic collection of his personal favourites. Highlights include a rootsy rendition of the Stones’ Out Of Time and a poignant version of Bowie’s Absolute Beginners, but Harley’s obvious love of the source material shines throughout, whether it be delivering a soulful rendition of Lost Myself, by 90s indie obscurities the Long Pigs, or an…

Anubis Homeless ANUBIS MUSIC Aussie neo-proggers’ topically themed sixth album. While Australia’s more psychedelically inclined acts have been much celebrated in recent years, they’re not short on more cerebral rock acts down under, either, and proggy six-piece Anubis have been quietly knocking out expertly crafted melodic prog rock for a decade and a half now. As ever, they don’t knock you backwards with power riffs or charm you with singalong soundbites, and you’re not going to pick any of them out of a police line-up of unassuming black-clad prog musicians any time soon. But after a few listens Homeless really seeps into your subconscious, as the Yes-style harmonies of the title track begin to edge ever higher from the mix, and echoes of Hogarth-era Marillion’s deep-pile melodic elegance and lyrical…

BEST OF THE REST Other new releases out this month. Peter And The Test Tube Babies Fuctifano ARISING EMPIRE Nothing major ever changes in Peter Bywaters ATTB’s ever-reliable enclave of Oi-infused punk thrashing with a significant side order of Pathetique. Good news for some, irrelevant news for most. 6/10 Chantel McGregor Bury’d Alive TIS ROCK MUSIC As adept with short, sharp blues-rock shocks (Killing Time) as extensive progressive extemporisations (April), Yorkshire’s Chantel McGregor steers clear of showboat covers and still continues to impress. 7/10 Creem Circus The Glitterest, Sladest, Rockin’est, Laidest, Overtime-Paidest, Boogiest Band In Town CHEEP The title’s its own review, really. If you grew up with T.Rex (and who among us didn’t?), you’ll find an awful lot to love here. CC’s tongues are in their cheeks, but there…

Status Quo Deluxe Editions UMG Quo’s 89-94 albums revisited, now with extras. If ever there was a band for whom the maxim ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applies, it is surely Status Quo. But for much of the 1980s and 90s, it seemed as if Quo were tinkering with a timeless formula. Perfect Remedy (1989, 5/10) suffers the curse of its decade – dated production. Pip Williams’s slightly anaemic, rockphobic sound was even more thinned out on bonustrack B-sides such as the flimsy Gone Thru The Slips. Way better, as ever, are the live tracks, although the lack of newly released material might limit interest even for completists. In contrast, Rock ‘Til You Drop (’91, 8/10) pushes the syrupy synths back in the mix, turns up the guitars…

Discharge Protest & Survive: The Anthology BMG They were loud, they were fast and they were so very angry. Once the pioneers reached the charts and new wave began to blossom, punk lost its hardcore edge. Fresh out of Stoke-on-Trent and featuring an endlessly rotating cast of characters, Discharge began as Sex Pistols clones, but by 1980 and their first release, Realities Of War, they had refined their sound into something altogether less compromising: buzz-saw guitars, Kelvin ‘Cal’ Morris’s hollered vocals, super-fast songs, and lyrics that raged against the system on State Violence/State Control and Accessories By Molotov or, on Never Again, the nuclear apocalypse: ‘Choking lust, crazy with thirst, drinking from poisoned pools and streams…’ The first of this 53-track compilation’s two discs agrees to forget the misplaced metal phase…

Tangerine Dream Recurring Dreams KSCOPE Let’s try that one again…. If you’re going to do a covers album, then why not covers of your own tunes, reworked significantly different from the originals? Which is what the German synth pioneers have done here with a selection of their classics. Listening to the original tracks now, which were groundbreaking at the time, when synthesisers still seemed like futuristic sci-fi and were only just starting to open up new sonic worlds, they still sound good, but really show their age against these new versions, which replace 70s analogue with polished, 21st-century digital sophistication, via sonically brighter sounds and more dynamic instrumentation. Tracks including Phaedra, Tangram and Yellowstone Park retain enough of their musical core to still be easily recognisable, but rearranged are now…

The Replacements Reissues RHINO They should have been ubiquitous. Don’t Tell A Soul (1989, 7/10) might well be held to be The Replacements’ second-worst album (thank you, Rolling Stone), but it still sounds mighty fine in 2020. Crackling and bursting with “kamikaze rock’n’roll fire” (Rolling Stone again), it proved to be the Minneapolis band’s best-selling album. Paul Westerberg’s insouciant rock attitude and way around a hook was a major influence on Cobain (it predated Nevermind by two years). Sharp-tongued, derisive, divisive, packed full of smart melodies… it was quite the way for The Replacements to (once more) narrowly miss out on fame. On Pleased To Meet Me (1987, 8/10) there’s a great tribute to former Big Star/Box Tops singer Alex Chilton (the raw throated Alex Chilton) that predates everyone except…

BEST OF THE REST Other new releases out this month. Cat Stevens Matthew And Son UMC Between Steven Georgiou and Yusuf Islam there was Cat, and Cat was a guitar-toting singer-songwriter who sold twee records in unfeasible quantities. M&S, his first from ‘67 (remastered, vinyl) remains one of his most charming. 7/10 MC5 Kick Out The Jams RHINO A red, white and blue splatter vinyl version of an essential document. Sonic revolution crackles through the ozone as the Motor City 5, with souls ablaze, rewrite rock’s future. Astonishing still. 9/10 Ramones It’s Alive RHINO Perfectly drilled, stripped of fat, four leather jackets, a white Mosrite and a couple of dozen “1-2-3-4”s. The Rainbow, New Years Eve 1977. Now on double red-and-blue vinyl, the best hour you’ll ever spend. 9/10 Stevie…

Days Of Rage: The Rolling Stones’ Road To Altamont SPIRITLEVE Intrepid stab does the job. Against these clean-cut times of mainstream blandness, the Altamont festival more than 50 years ago seems more like a surreal horror movie as the world’s greatest rock‘n’roll band face psychopathic Hells Angels hired as security. All that’s in Gimme Shelter. Director Tom O’Dell’s mission here is contextualising Altamont with America’s political assassinations, Vietnam, riots, Woodstock and Manson murders, providing a grisly climax to the Stones’ rise covered earlier. Mixing familiar clips and talking heads, the film’s bolstered by Stones ‘69 MC Sam Cutler, tour manager Ronnie Schneider and author Joel Selvin, whose Altamont is the definitive work about the festival. Rivetingly insightful, he recalls the Stones desperately playing on for an hour after Meredith Hunter’s…

10cc – The Worst Band In The World Liam Newton ROCKET 88 Definitive biography of chart-topping Mancunian brainiacs. In many ways, 10cc were the British Steely Dan – 70s studio boffins who blended humour, flashy muso chops and left-field subject matter on a string of brilliant pop hits. Yet unlike the Dan, they’ve long been dismissed by critics as being too clever for their own good. That’s a situation that Newton’s revised 528-page tome (newly extended to a whopping 30 chapters) does its best to rectify. Interviews with founding members Kevin Godley, Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart provide heft, while fans will relish the small detail – apparently Paul McCartney was so moved by the brilliance of their 1973 debut that he sent a postcard to their headquarters at Strawberry…

Superior Reputation cementing Arthur PYE, 1969 Written to soundtrack a TV film that was never made, beaten to the punch by Tommy as the first rock opera, and continuing a period of commercial freefall for The Kinks, Arthur - subtitled The Decline and Fall Of The British Empire - filters themes of imperial decay through the Davies family’s bitter post-war disappointments. Its chief glory is Shangri-La, an epic single which chucks in the kitchen sink, firing brass and guitar barrages as it demolishes the suburban dream. Some Mother’s Son mourns a young man’s brains being blown out on the Western Front, and Australia channels the Beach Boys, on The Kinks’ most angry, epic record. Something Else By The Kinks PYE, 1967 The Kinks’ most perfect recording, Waterloo Sunset, is of…