Albums

Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band less like that grunting Manc convocation, except in the fact that BCNR are just about the biggest band in the country right now, as the Gallagher bros were all those years ago. Vocalist (of a sort) Isaac Wood has left and with him has gone the occasional temptations to stray into stadium bombast, à la Arcade Fire. Instead, with three females sharing vocals, we have evanescent chamber pop, occasionally buttressed by a certain glam swagger, almost always underpinned by plucked acoustic guitar and May Kershaw’s superb and imaginative piano. It

Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about a dancing teapot. But when he was rejected for military service in the first world war (he was 39 and 5ft) he practically forced his way to the front line as a lorry driver – sheltering for days in a forest near Verdun after his truck was disabled by shrapnel. Apparently, when he visited Vaughan Williams in London he went straight to the Victoria Station grill and ordered steak and kidney pudding. Just when you thought you couldn’t admire the man any more.  It’s the toughness that impresses in this

Grade: B+ Satan’s devoted groupies Cradle of Filth are back with their shrieking, howling, portentous, Exorcist-style incantations, 30 years after effectively inventing the loser-boy goth-metal offshoot, black metal. They’ve got quite good at it. Rapid-paced minor-chord hard rawk, much as AC/DC might have churned out if someone had shown them some Edgar Allan Poe and told them who Wagner was. Except I’m not sure that AC/DC could manage heavy metal so relentlessly intricate, so utterly precise. As all the catchy, simple, heavy-metal riffs had been used up by about 1979, Cradle of Filth are forced into considerable complexity, which at times – ironically, in a genre that is largely despised

Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that beloved old fairytale, the Sex Pistols’s Slaying of the Dinosaurs, it’s worth remembering that nothing of the sort occurred. The big beasts of the 1970s – Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes – thrived into the 1980s and beyond, albeit in somewhat sleeker form. In turn they begat the likes of Marillion, Ozric Tentacles, Dream Theater, Talk Talk, Muse, Radiohead and Lankum, all of whom had or have familial ties to prog. Porcupine Tree, the project founded by Steven Wilson in the late 1980s, is a case in point. Doggedly unfashionable, Porcupine

My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters and outline of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the early 1930s; she commissions him to write a piece and invites him to compose it at

Grade: B When a music-lover is tired of Haydn’s London symphonies, they’re tired of life. It’s not just the sheer creative verve of these 12 symphonies by a composer in his sixties. It’s the generosity of spirit. Beethoven demands a battle of wills; Mozart a near-impossible grace. But a conductor can run straight at a London symphony and Haydn will show us, with a smile, exactly who they are. Beecham is urbane, Bernstein camps it up; Abbado is trim and impeccably turned out. Eugen Jochum (a belated discovery) is just very, very German. Haydn’s still bigger than all of them. Paavo Jarvi has reached the second volume of his London

For artists lacking any obvious feel for the style, ‘going country’, similar to mainstream white artists dabbling in reggae in the 1970s following the breakthrough of Bob Marley, tends to elicit the sour whiff of a morning after the last chance saloon. Particularly at a time when a slick multi-hyphenate brand of country music is the pop trend du jour, carpetbagging and bandwagonism abounds. The lyrics on Look Up are elementary to the point of banality, which is as it should be Ringo Starr needn’t worry. Starr is the cowboy Beatle. He has loved this music from a young age, which is a long time. The Beatles wisely facilitated his

Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North Carolina has been described by the press as Americana, slacker rock, indie and alt-country. But we at The Spectator will call it how it is: this is country rock, pure and simple. And if country rock isn’t slacker, indie and a little bit alt, then it’s the Eagles – and nobody wants to start going down that road. Of the four albums generally thought to have been the best of last year across a vast number of publications, I’ve reviewed three of them for you – Beyoncé, Fontaines D.C. and

Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and a torrent of dissonances’, as Charles Rosen put it. Only the most freakishly gifted virtuosos could tackle it. The first recording was by Artur Schnabel, whose heroic assault on the finale sent wrong notes scattering in all directions. Today, technique has improved so dramatically that most students can steer Beethoven’s juggernaut without obvious mishaps. Even so, some great masters wait decades before taking the plunge. In this sonata above all, getting the notes in the right order is no guarantee that you have anything to say. Marc-André Hamelin is now

Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and their shrieking blues metal ur-punk was afforded unnecessary respect because of their agitprop politics. Sucking up to the Black Panthers and running a bit foul of the law can do wonders for a slightly below-average blues band whose songs had energy and attitude – but nothing else. Here they are, back with their first studio album in 53 years: thanks for the merciful interregnum, if nothing else. When I say ‘they’, I mean the half-decent guitarist Wayne Kramer and, on one or two tracks, their original drummer, Dennis Thompson. Both

A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not crediting his band the Bad Seeds in an album review. She was quite right. As Cave says, with a hint of paternal pride, during this powerhouse Glasgow show: ‘This band can do anything.’ It’s not just that the Bad Seeds’s task ranges from delicately enhancing the most nakedly exposed ballads to unleashing a raging firestorm of noise. It’s that supporting a performer as mercurial as Cave takes oodles of nous and empathy. He’s a wild thing, but they never once lose him. Cave brings to mind that volatile drunk left

The fate of the pop musician – at least the pop musician below the top tier of stardom – has historically been to fall from fashion. At some point in their rise they will be of the moment, the spirit of the age, and then they won’t be. At best, they’ll have a slow but perfectly lucrative fade, as their fanbase dwindles to the zealots. At worst they’ll become a punch line, a raised eyebrow: ‘What were we thinking?’ Every hit, every sold-out show, is just another step closer to irrelevance. ‘There’d be 800 teenagers in a club in Minneapolis, which felt absurd: we’re old enough to be their parents’

Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are down, kid – shove a fiddle in the next one. And a pedal steel. And git some of those country dudes to collaborate. Especially Dolly. But also Hank Williams Jnr, if you can. Makes them look hip, makes you look real down home. So it is with the agreeably slobbering rapper Post Malone, born in NYC, raised in LA but here sounding like he jes swung in from some roadhouse barstool outta Shreveport, with bourbon and country blood trickling down over his stupid tattoos. His career has hit a hiatus

The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being paid either too much or too little attention. The stealth arrival of Jack White’s new solo album falls firmly into the second category. Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a certain level of intrigue I didn’t love White’s old band, the White Stripes, back when they were a garage-rock/blues revival phenomenon in the early 2000s. Since their demise in 2011, the world seems to be coming around to this way of thinking. Their most successful albums, Elephant and White Blood Cells, hold little cultural currency

Grade: D+ Happenings were interesting, or irritating, events staged from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s by performers who eschewed the corporate and bourgeois restraints placed on artists and veered into surrealism, parody, violence and, of course, situationism. Think Allan Kaprow and John Cage. In rock music, meanwhile, think the Fugs and the Pink Fairies. Happenings by our country’s most profitable faux-rawk outfit, Leicester’s Kasabian, is by contrast a celebration of everything happenings were most opposed to. It is boring, corporate, imitative, inane and gutless. I would almost rather listen to an album by Dua Lipa. It is 20 years since Kasabian’s first album and they have got

It is always interesting to observe the ways in which pop stars try to negotiate first growing up, and then growing old. From teen scream to respected mainstay to elder states(wo)man is not an easy path to walk without a few stumbles. At certain times, it requires making some blatantly strategic moves. Cabello wants so badly to grow up that she evolves from a past incarnation practically into thin air Few readers will remember that the first solo single George Michael released after dissolving Wham! was called ‘I Want Your Sex’, a forgettable bump-and-grind with a steamy video designed purely to shift audience expectations away from all things teenybopper and