Album Review: Tenacious D – Rize of the Fenix
Kyle Gass, half of the core duo behind Tenacious D, has gone on record to argue Rize of the Fenix, third longer player from this most awesome of rock acts is “much like Nirvana’s first album Bleach or the Beatles first album Help. Rough and yet a masterpiece.” And how could a humble music reviewer possibly argue the soggy toss in the face of such majestic, powerful, awesome rock & roll? The rock… the roll… it’s like a left-right... Read More
ALBUM: Bruce Springsteen – The Promise
To start with a cliché, when I was young Bruce Springsteen was so ubiquitous, so well-established that the only thing I could do, as an angst-y sixteen-year-old, was to disregard him. To me he was nothing more than a crusty, jingoistic, cheese-peddler who clashed badly with my nascent nihilism. But time changes everything, and ten years on my feelings are far more ambivalent. I’m still convinced that “The Boss” (how unbelievably inappropriate... Read More
SINGLE: Manic Street Preachers – (It’s Not War) Just the End of Love
It’s hard to imagine now, but at the turn of the millennium The Manics were firmly out of favour. I remember seeing a picture in the NME of an overweight, dishevelled looking James Dean Bradfield with a caption saying something like, “Who ate all the pies”? Trust the NME to not see beyond the image. This Is My Truth… may have abandoned the angry, overtly-political, self-abusing sound of an earlier manifestation, and replaced it with something... Read More
ALBUM: Broken Bells – Broken Bells
Too many collaborations sound like a match made in heaven, but end up in purgatory. They disappoint because the individual musician owes more to his band than he or she (or we) might think, and they have to compromise their own artistic vision to fit in with someone else’s leading to a product that is half as good as it should be. Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle, to name but a few,... Read More
