Rock
A criminally underrated songwriter: Matthew Sweet’s Catspaw reviewed
Grade: A– The early 1990s were a lovely time for rock music: Beck, Sparklehorse, Sugar, Green on Red and Royal…
As pretty as anything he’s written in four decades: McCartney III reviewed
Grade: A- The greatest songwriter of the 20th century, or just one of the top two or three? Who…
Virtuosic but slight – always prog’s problem: The Pineapple Thief's latest reviewed
Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has…
There's scarcely a dull track: Deep Purple's Whoosh! reviewed
Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished…
The people who were idiots at gigs in early March are still idiots
Is the world ready for the return of live rock music? On the evidence of the first gig in London…
Ranges from the slight to the first-rate: Neil Young’s Homegrown reviewed
Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly…
Dysfunctional music for dysfunctional people: The Public Image is Rotten reviewed
A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and…
The festivalisation of TV
Televising Glastonbury has changed the festival, and in turn transformed television, says Graeme Thomson
Contains the loveliest new song I've heard in decades: Bob Dylan's new album reviewed
Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which…
In defence of Prince’s late style
In 1992 Prince released a single called ‘My Name Is Prince’. On first hearing it seemed appropriately regal. Cocky, even.…
Skates on the edge of parody: The 1975's Notes on a Conditional Form reviewed
Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg.…
Beautiful voice, pretentious album: Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters reviewed
Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song…
The musical benefits of not playing live
Many performers hated playing live. But freed from the stage they often made their best and wildest work, argues Graeme Thomson
Taylor Swift is fascinating – but you really wouldn't want to be her
There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the…
Grimly compelling: The Whitney Houston Hologram Tour reviewed
‘No matter what they take from me,’ sang Whitney Houston towards the end of a peculiar evening in Hammersmith, ‘they…
Woke slogans welded to incompetent grunge: Neil Young’s Colorado reviewed
Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band…
At their best the Psychedelic Furs are fantastic
It’s amazing what the movies can do. In 1986, the John Hughes teen flick Pretty in Pink — the one…
Imagine ZZ Top stuck in a lift with Gary Numan: Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury reviewed
Grade: A– The outlaw country genre has shifted a little over the decades since Waylon and Willie, with each proponent…
Sweet but formulaic: Blinded by Light reviewed
Once upon a time two men sat in a New York bar lamenting the state of Broadway. So they decided…
Reliably odd but the deranged proggery grates: King’s Mouth by The Flaming Lips reviewed
Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and…
Hideously tasteful elegies to useless country singers: Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars reviewed
Grade: B– The first Springsteen song I ever heard was ‘Born To Run’, back when I was 14. I clocked…
Why I’m done with Fleetwood Mac
There is something inexplicably exciting about pop’s notion of a ‘scene’: young musicians of similar outlooks drawn together by a…
David Coverdale, lead singer of Whitesnake, talks hair, love handles and ‘sexism’
‘Invest in your hair,’ advises David Coverdale, a man with a shag of the stuff glossier than a supermodel’s and…
Enveloping and gorgeous: Cate Le Bon reviewed
The last time Bikini Kill played in London was in a room that now serves as the restaurant of a…
A Saturday-night variety show: Take That at the O2 reviewed
Being old is big business in live music nowadays, in a way it wasn’t even 25 years ago. When Take…
