Quite honestly, this is not quite what one might expect from a ‘few of our favourite songs’ recording by anyone, let alone the 83-year-old, silken-voice half of Simon and Garfunkel and his son Art Jr, known in Europe for his folk recordings in German.Yet it’s a triumph, as modern as they come, certainly not in middle-of-the-road manner but ma…
Fantastic Negrito doesn’t pull any punches. The triple Grammy winner’s visceral, hard-hitting new album is intensely autobiographical with songs focusing on his troubled past as he searches for redemption, understanding, and closure. One of 14 kids born into a poor family, Negrito ran away from home after clashing with his overbearing father, b…
For those of us who grew up listening to The Beatles albums as the band intended, the band’s US catalogue is a bizarro world, filled with disorientating left turns and did-I-hear-that-right mixes. The 1964 US Albums In Mono collects the six albums released in their breakthrough year in the States plus the March ’67 comp The Early Beatles across…
Fans attending Elvis Costello’s 1984 UK solo tour would have witnessed the live debut of The Coward Brothers, two men who looked suspiciously like opening act T Bone Burnett and the headliner, playing a brief set that included Beatles and George Jones covers. At the time, the Merseybeat-Nashville hybrid spawned just one single, and only now can t…
Kelly’s 27th album in a career stretching back more than 40 years is a reassuringly familiar affair with more than a few flourishes beyond the reductive “Aussie Springsteen” tag that frequently does him a disservice. There’s a quirkier mind at work on the brass-led vaudevillian pop of Hello Melancholy, a Crowded House cuteness to Let’s Wo…
Some think this 1972 double concept album from a Greek prog outfit, wherein the Bible morphs into the apocalypse (or something; it’s unclear), is bonkers. And that the brainchild of Vangelis and film director Costas Ferris, which even participants like Demis Roussos and (amazing) drummer Loukas Sideras baulked at because they were happy with the …
More than 50 years after fans first heard Living In The Material World its broader themes of peace, love and understanding are as universally relevant as ever. Listening to the music again, however, tenderly and respectfully tweaked for 21st-century ears, there is a greater sense that, for much of the album, George Harrison is singing to himself.Th…
As fans sporting “shoegazer” T-shirts may agree, shoegaze developed to become a more multifaceted thing than those “scene that celebrates itself” jibes implied. Likewise, former NME sub-editor Nathaniel Cramp spawned Sonic Cathedral as a shoegaze club night and then as a label, intuitively nurturing an expansive vision of shoegaze’s off-s…
The titular year of this five-disc set began with Lizzy in the last chance saloon with Vertigo Records, until Jailbreak and all-conquering single The Boys Are Back In Town exploded on both sides of the Atlantic that March. Subsequently hospitalised with tour-derailing hepatitis, Phil Lynott wrote the lion’s share of Johnny The Fox, out by October…
Key members having jumped ship to form Fun Boy Three, The Specials struggled to regroup and carry on. Linchpin Jerry Dammers took two years to assemble the contents of In The Studio (in four studios), yet its disparate elements hang together well and still sound fresh 40 years on. Stan Campbell (the man who would be Terry Hall) hits the right testi…
