by Ed Biggs With important albums turning 50 years old in the next 12 months, it’s perfectly arguable that Bob Dylan is the greatest artist of the 1960s, whose willingness to experiment with what pop music could sound like, and what topics it could address, predates even that of The Beatles. Fans often cite the three albums he made in 1965 and 1966 as his golden age, which saw him make
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by Ed Biggs Nottingham three-piece Kagoule are the latest serious contenders to emerge from a burgeoning scene in that city. While Jake Bugg rocketed to superstardom seemingly overnight, Sleaford Mods have quietly grown a fanbase over the course of eight years. Vocalist and guitarist Cai Burns, bassist Lucy Hatter and drummer Lawrence English are doing things with a middle approach of those two success stories, spending two years building an impeccable
by Ed Biggs We’ve been keeping an eye on the brothers Radke for a couple of years now. Going under the sort-of-family-band name of Radkey, their 2013 EPs Cat & Mouse and Devil Fruit were short, sharp blasts of retro garage punk, and their ferocious yet disciplined live act has been seen on the likes of ‘Later… with Jools Holland’. Following extensive touring throughout 2014, the trio began work on their
by Ed Biggs Tim Presley has been one of the busiest names in indie over the last decade or so. A member of cartoon punks The Nerve Agents and then his own project Darker My Love, he’s also been a short-term member of The Fall (on Reformation! Post-TLC) and released six albums in five years under the name White Fence. Drinks is a collaborative effort with curious Welsh siren Cate Le
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
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 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
