by Ed Biggs Leeds’ pysch-rock / post-punk resurgence has really begun to yield impressive albums over the last couple of years. The scene’s biggest names Eagulls and Hookworms have both produced quality records celebrated in these pages since 2013, and now a second wave of intense, guitar-toting young men has followed in their wake, including Forever Cult and AUTOBAHN. That Kraftwerk-aping name is a bit of a red herring – you
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by Ed Biggs It seems difficult to believe it forty glorious years later, but in 1975 Bruce Springsteen’s career hung in the balance. His first two albums – Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, both from 1973 – had earned him critical respect but had not made him a star, falling far below Columbia’s expectations in the charts. So, under record label
by Matthew Langham Now onto his sixth studio album, the ever-consistent Frank Turner returns with more of his politically-infused punk/folk/rock crossover which has seen him amass a devoted fan base over eight years. His Glastonbury midday performance this year was prime example of his broad appeal and one which I will admit helped to banish a heavy hangover. His passion for music is patently obvious and his arena shows are now
by Ed Biggs Proving that critics have absolutely no impact on record sales, Bedford’s slick alternative rock outfit Don Broco’s critically slaughtered Priorities performed well in the charts back in 2012, reaching an eventual high of Number 25. Their inoffensive ‘Busted meets Biffy’ melding of chart-bound tunes to loud, vaguely metal aesthetics has been done to death over the last twenty years, but clearly it’s a formula that still has a
by Ed Biggs When his former colleague Ice Cube dropped the news at the end of July that Dr. Dre was imminently going to release a new album, the internet promptly lost its shit. Having done so much to sculpt the sound of hip-hop as we know it today – through N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton in 1989, which provided the genre’s Sex Pistols moment, his solo debut The Chronic in 1992,
by Ed Biggs Canadian-born indie troubadour Mac DeMarco became the toast of the indie underground in 2014 with Salad Days, a breezy album of bedroom song sketches that benefitted from sounding spontaneous and demo-like. He’s following it up with a brace of mini-albums in the form of Some Other Ones (consisting entirely of instrumentals) and Another One. It’s not explicitly personal in the same way as Salad Days – by all
by Ed Biggs Los Angeles’ electronic noise-pop outfit Health have experienced commercial success that they almost certainly couldn’t have anticipated over the last few years. Though they haven’t released a proper studio album since 2009’s Get Color, their 2012 soundtrack for Rockstar Games’ blockbuster shooter Max Payne 3 has sold in excess of four million copies.
by Ed Biggs Always one of the most underrated and overlooked groups of the ‘90s, Garbage were prime movers of the alternative rock trend that exploded in America that decade, at around the same time that Britpop was doing likewise across the Atlantic. Formed of three American producers and musicians – including Nirvana producer Butch Vig – plus their fiery Edinburgh-born Shirley Manson with her shock of red hair and streak
by Ed Biggs Utah seven-piece band The National Parks found modest success with their 2013 debut album Young, with a certain compositional simplicity in tracks like ‘Helsinki’ and ‘Wind & Anchor’ that showed a natural knack for the intricacies of folk music. For their sophomore effort Until I Live, lead singer Brady Parks has said they’ve attempted to lean in a more populist direction without entirely abandoning the sound of their
by Ed Biggs Bossanova enjoys an unfairly deserved reputation in Pixies’ back catalogue as the point where it started to go wrong for them. Surfer Rosa and Doolittle were hugely well received by the American and European indie underground, and did so much to help form the musical template that would become known as ‘alternative rock’ in the ‘90s by influencing, among others, Nirvana. But one tends to hear much less
