Album Review: They Might Be Giants – I Like Fun
With their Dial-A-Song service returning, and a European Tour lined up towards the end of the year, it looks like 2018 is going to be a busy one for They Might Be Giants. Highlight of the year for many will no doubt be their new album, I Like Fun, a long player which on the …
Not Forgotten: Lowell George – Thanks I’ll Eat it Here
One of the things that is most often remembered about Thanks I’ll Eat it Here is the fact that it was released just ten days before the Little Feat frontman’s early death. What is remembered less frequently is that Lowell George’s only solo album is very good indeed. Given that George had slowly been losing …
Not Forgotten: The Darkness – Permission to Land
I initially took them as a joke. Actually, it seems that most people took them for a joke the first time they saw them. After all, stadium rock played by skinny blokes with big hair in tight catsuits, leaping around could only be a parody of the 80s hair-metal acts. Hell, they even looked a …
Not Forgotten: The Replacements – Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash
The Replacements, scruffy quartet that they were, may very well be the definitive American rock and roll band. From the garages of the suburbs of Minneapolis, possessing a youthful energy rather than any technical proficiency, and a collective ambition which seemingly stretched no further than avoiding the dead-end jobs that the majority of their classmates …
Not Forgotten: The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – Framed
As 1972 drew to a close, things had seemingly settled down a little bit in the landscape of British rock music. The singles charts were full of good time glitter stompers, and the album charts full of amplified heavy rock and ambitious prog rockers. There were a few acts that bridged the chasm between singles …
Album Review: Typhoon – Offerings
There are times an act naturally moves away from the sound that had originally beguiled their fanbase. Sometimes it’s all part of following the muse, sometimes it’s just down to line up changes, and sometimes it’s simply down to the fact that the sound that had made them successful is no longer doing so well …
Not Forgotten: Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding
Music changed forever in 1967, primarily because in the wake of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it was firmly established that the long player had finally wrestled the mantle of definitive medium for rock and roll statements from the single format. Sure, it was already in the pipeline anyway, as acts like Pink Floyd …
Classic Compilation: Frank Zappa – Strictly Commercial
For those of us with somewhat mainstream rock tastes, Frank Zappa can be a fascinating, yet utterly confusing artist. He was so prolific, and his albums were so varied, both in musical style and quality, that his body of work is at best a stylistic labyrinth you can spend decades getting lost in, and at …
Album Review: The Magnetic Fields – 50 Song Memoir
How the hell do you even review an album like 50 Song Memoir? At 5 CDs, it’s a huge undertaking just to listen to the whole thing. Or at least it seems that way until you realise that the whole thing could have sat snugly on two CDs, then it just seems like it’s a …
Classic Compilation: Neil Young – Decade
Even by the standards of the late 60s and early 70s, an era where acts would generally be expected to deliver a new studio album at least as regularly as one every twelve months, Neil Young was terrifyingly prolific. Between 1966 and 1976 he released seven solo studio albums, a sound track, a collaboration with …