Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: rock

Showing posts with label rock. Show all posts

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Bumblefoot - ...Returns! (2025)

It's almost impossible to categorise this ninth album from Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal beyond calling it guitar music and, given that he's a guitarist, that's kind of a given. Whether you know his work from Guns n' Roses, Sons of Apollo or from solo releases, there will be something here that you'll never have heard before, because he very deliberately trawls in whatever style of music he feels will work for a particular piece.

The opener, Simon in Space, is probably the closest to what you might expect. There are plenty of heavy note bending sections wrapped around more laid back solos and even those laid back solos are intricate and virtuosic. It's the sort of track that tends to sit on albums like this whether they carry the name of Bumblefoot or another guitar wizard like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani rather than a shredder whose tracks are faster and more deliberately awe-inspiring. He's going for mood and feel not technical genius, but there's plenty of technical genius used to get there. Eight minutes of that leads into five more of Planetary Lockdown, which is a little lighter and sassier but in the same ballpark.

And then things go off the rails, as it were. Moonshine Hootenanny is the lively bluegrass knees up that its name suggests, Bumblefoot's guitar variously playing roles that might otherwise go to banjos or lap steels. Sure, there's some of that heavy notebending a couple of minutes in and it leads into a more traditional rock guitar solo, but the bluegrass returns quickly enough. That's followed by Chopin Waltz Op64 No2, which is a well known classical piece. There's another one of these later on in Funeral March, also written by by Frederic Chopin, but while the former is just a transcription to electric guitar, starting with the frantic bit, the latter is a guitar and violin duet with an ominous backdrop.

That highlights that he doesn't do everything here himself, though I'd guess that he does come close. Ben Karas, best known for Thank You Scientist, is the guest violinist who combines so well with him on Funeral March, but household names like Steve Vai and Brian May also show up for guitar duets. Vai's on Monstruoso and May's on Once in Forever. Guthrie Govan may not be quite as famous as them, but he's played with Asia, ironically after asking May, Steven Wilson and Hans Zimmer, with whose band he's been playing live for almost a decade now. He's on Anveshana.

Of those, it's Anveshana that I like the most. Monstruoso is an experience, with heavy and fuzzy electronica almost dominating, enough that it gets a brief reprise in Monstruoso II (Departure). Once in Forever has a country tone without necessarily becoming a country song in the way that Moonshine Hootenanny absolutely becomes a bluegrass song. Anveshana benefits immediately from a tasty groove and the guitar melody feels like it's singing rather than soloing. That combo makes it a highly accessible piece but it stands up to a deeper dive too.

However, it's far from my favourite piece on the album. Funeral March tops that list for me, even if it's the one song that most prominently features an instrument other than the guitar. Cintaku comes pretty close to it though, with its organic beat and melodic guitar line. Like Anveshana, it seems like the guitar is transcribing lyrics. I could believe that this is a Journey song with lyrics in a parallel universe and Bumblefoot's tapped into that for an instrumental version in ours. Oddly, the solo in the middle feels more spacy without apparently trying than on earlier songs where it was absolutely trying to live up to that delightfully weird cover art.

And, with a brief mention for the delightful Andalusia, on which Bumblefoot appears to only play one note but continues to bend it in different directions forever—at least for forty-nine seconds, because that's how long the piece lasts—then there's The Thread, which seems like it's the epic of the album, even though it's three minutes shorter than the opener.

It's an old school instrumental of the sort we might expect to hear on a Jeff Beck album and, as it evolved, building smoothly to explosive moments, I realised that it's echoing what Roy Buchanan did with The Messiah Will Come Again, sans vocals. Once I caught that, I realised just how much phrasing feels very similar. It surely can't hurt to bear comparison to one of the greatest guitar pieces ever played, even if it inevitably comes off as lesser. It's still very tasty indeed.

And so there's surely something here for every guitar fan, even major use of the most seventies technical gadget, the talkbox, on Griggstown Crossing, but, like so many guitar albums, it's all so varied that it's mostly going to impress actual guitarists.

Thursday, 16 January 2025

Red Lloyd - Duke (2025)

Country: Germany
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Here's something interesting. It's enjoyable too, but it's more interesting than enjoyable, which is unfortunate. Apparently Red Lloyd is Frank Altpeter, who sings and plays keyboards in Moore and More, a German tribute band to Gary Moore. I haven't heard them but they won't sound anything like this. This is a prog rock album, a tribute in a sense to the Genesis of 1980, because Altpeter saw them release Duke and envisaged a concept album about a mediaeval nobleman that, needless to say, was not what Duke was.

So, forty years later during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote what he thought it would have been back in 1980 before he actually bought a copy and heard something else. He then recorded it in as authentic a manner as he could, researching the instruments that Genesis used and then locating working examples of the same to play. This is a glorious starting point for a concept album, at once inspired by and yet still not at all based on an existing work by someone else. That provides plenty of leeway too, so this both sounds like Genesis in 1980 and doesn't. Certainly, Altpeter's voice is far deeper than Phil Collins's and sounds especially dissimilar when he gets emphatic on songs such as Ponderings and Duke's Rise. Throughout, the instrumentation is a lot closer.

The concept is relatively clear, of a good and honest duke who's betrayed by his men and vanishes into the desert. While he gets all introspective there over a long period of time, his legend builds back home and a rumour grows that he'll return. However, rather bizarrely, the copy I'm listening to has the tracks presented in a completely different order to what's listed on Bandcamp, one that oddly seems to flow better. It made me happier to see that mine is the stated order on Red Lloyd's official website.

Now, why Bandcamp shuffles these tracks, I have no idea. It would seem to make sense to put Duke Intro at the beginning, for instance, given that it features narration and sound effects to get this album underway, and Duke's Return at the end, as he may or may not show up to make the faithful happy. That's what my order/Red Lloyd's website order does. Bandcamp's doesn't. Either way, the concept flows loosely, so maybe we can shuffle these tracks around without ever losing sight of the general idea.

It's probably fair to point out here that Duke isn't my favourite Genesis album and this isn't up to its standards. However, there's still value here, Altpeter generating some pleasant grooves to fall into, some capable story songs that succeed in keeping our attention and, above all, instrumental sections to get lost in. There's nothing wrong with his voice but I preferred the instrumentation, a majority of it courtesy of Altpeter but with additional guitarwork from an old collaborator, Daniel J. S. Lewis, and Günter Schlünkes, who plays guitar and bass for German prog rockers Riven Earth.

Of course I have no idea whose guitar is whose. I can just call out how lovely it is on Crosses, City of Broken Toys and Ponderings, to give just three prominent examples. The latter two are highlights for me and Tonight is worth calling out too for other reasons. It's the one that gets catchy. There's nothing here on the level of Misunderstanding, let alone Turn It On Again, but occasionally there is a serious attempt to mimic that sort of hook. It's most obvious vocally on Tonight and otherwise on City of Broken Toys and Duke's Rise.

Interestingly, City of Broken Toys starts out with a guitar reminiscent of the Alan Parsons Project, but just before the two minute mark, it shifts to being about as close as this album gets to Genesis in 1980. Duke's Rise reprises that but the other way around, starting out close but veering away as the song runs on, Altpeter delivering his story in a more vehement voice than Collins ever had. My Time Will Come does it too, driven by an excellent beat and authentic keyboards.

And so this is as it was perhaps always doomed to be, a full length concept album born of a musing that trawls in some wonderful stories and not a lot more. After all, I have written a lot more about what this album aims to do than I have about what it actually does. However, that's telling in itself and it's why I started out by saying that it's enjoyable but more interesting.

I could talk about how the concept is never fully wrapped up, left for us to continue in our heads as we wonder if the duke does return or not. I could highlight that some of the tracks are just there, most notably for me Duke Intro, which is a tame intro for the album (or for The Duke's Lament, depending on the version). It doesn't matter. What I've said here covers what it needs to.

Thursday, 9 January 2025

Ian Hunter - Defiance Part 2: Fiction (2024)

You'd never know from this album that Ian Hunter is eighty-five frickin' years old, especially with a song as absolutely killer as People to open up. Damn, that's a catchy "na na" chant to kick off a new album, as if we're back in 1974 and Mott the Hoople is still in business. Hunter certainly is, spitting out cynical lyrics with glorious intonation that land tellingly. I found myself singing along with this song on my very first time through and all the more on further listens. It's about everyone being a consumer of marketing. "We know what people want," claim the marketroids. "No you don't!" we chant in response. This is a fantastic song to start but it's also easily the standout track.

Much of the rest of the album follows the precedent of the title track, which is a singer-songwriter song in the old style. It feels notably weaker than People initially, but it grows as it goes, getting under the skin before it's done. Arguably the quality of the songs will depend on this factor. Those that get under our skin are the strong ones that will grow with repeats until we wonder why we'd doubted them to begin with. Those that don't will feel weaker and lessen the album overall. What seems particularly important is that that's going to be a personal thing. I can absolutely imagine that the songs that don't get under my skin may well get under yours.

Hunter's voice is as recognisable as ever and, while his voice may be a little rougher now than the rough it's always been, it's still glorious and his delivery is just as fantastic as it's ever been. He's feeling these lyrics and passing that feeling on to us without any trouble at all. What's more, few songs are worthy of comparisons because they generally feel like Ian Hunter songs. He sounds like Bob Dylan on a lot of What Would I Do without You, a song on which Lucinda Williams joins in and her voice has changed considerably since I last heard it. Otherwise, the delivery on This Ain't Rock and Roll sounds like a Steve Earle story song, but that's about it. Everything else is Hunter.

I can't get much further in this review without pointing out that this is the sequel to Defiance Part 1, which came out in 2023 and which I haven't heard. Like that album, this one features a core set of musicians but also a heck of a lot of guests. I wasn't remotely surprised to find that Joe Elliott is there on backing vocals, as he's worshipped Hunter for decades, but he's not particularly obvious. He's on People, along with both Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. Brian May heavies up Precious, Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp both contribute guitars to The 3rd Rail and the late Taylor Hawkins plays drums on four tracks, including Hope, with Williams and Billy Bob Thornton helping out with the vocals.

I appreciated many of these contributions, but none are blatant, Williams's voice on What Would I Do without You being easily the most obvious. Whatever these luminaries contribute, Hunter's voice and lyrics remain in the spotlight. Of course we're supposed to listen to the lyrics on singer-songwriter songs but that doesn't mean that we always do. We do here, even if we don't know what Hunter's singing about. The 3rd Rail, for instance, is a notably sad song that I have to assume refers to a news story back home that I must have missed, having hopped the pond a couple of decades ago.

The most obviously Ian Hunter songs are People, with its Mott the Hoople glam rock drive, along with This Ain't Rock and Roll and Everybody's Crazy But Me, with its simple but very effective riff in the time honoured Keith Richards style. The former seems pretty straight forward, dissing on modern music, but I wonder if it actually is. After all, disses on modern music aren't remotely new and I wonder if Hunter is cleverly nodding to the fact that, a century ago, someone was probably complaining about how the work songs mentioned in the first verse simply aren't like they were back in the old country. The latter is neatly sardonic, as we expect from Hunter.

Amidst all the singer-songwriter material, Precious and Kettle of Fish are heavier songs, courtesy of Brian May on the former and Rick Nielson returning on the latter. I like the variety of intensity and it feels like Hunter does too. He relishes telling stories in songs like The 3rd Rail and Hope but he really gets his teeth into hooks on songs like People and Precious. When he starts Everybody's Crazy But Me with a characterful "'allo, 'allo, 'allo", we struggle to believe it's over half a century since Mott the Hoople split. Talking of openings, People begins with "It's the gospel according to whichever channel you're listening to", which is almost as great a beginning as the "na na" chant before it.

What that means is that some of this is immediate, most obviously People, but none of it is tough to get through. With repeat listens, everything grows and some of it considerably. There's a lot in play here and it's well worth trying to figure out what Hunter's singing about, even on songs that outwardly seem straightforward like This Ain't Rock and Roll. And that in turn means that I really need to take a listen to Defiance Part 1. I grabbed a copy in 2013 but never got to it. Obviously that was a mistake.

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Wild God (2024)

Country: Australia
Style: Alternative Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

My first experience of Nick Cave was oddly not musical, because I first encountered him as an actor giving an uncompromising performance in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, an obscure Australian prison feature that he also co-wrote. Once I realised he was a musician, I had to check out his music and I was quickly hooked. Murder Ballads is probably my favourite album of his with the Bad Seeds, but on another day I might plump for Let Love In or Your Funeral... My Trial instead. I was firmly paying attention when he put out the very different The Boatman's Call, but I seem to have drifted away since then. I've heard some of his later albums but nothing's grabbed me the way his old stuff did.

So let's check out his new one, Wild God, which is his first album since 2019's Ghosteen, and which apparently features much more input from the Bad Seeds. Cave has continually reinvented what he does throughout his career, so I'm not shocked to find this different to anything that I've heard from him before. However, it's easy to see the evolution. There are plenty of moments here that owe a debt to The Boatman's Call, but the sparseness is gone, if not all the personal ache. What replaces it is a buoyancy that's always there but sometimes makes itself incredibly obvious.

It's there from the outset on Song of the Lake, the busiest song I've heard from Cave in decades. While Wild God is a more personal song, it erupts halfway through and suddenly it's every bit as buoyant as Song of the Lake. Frogs builds into buoyancy. Joy builds into buoyancy. Conversion may build into buoyancy more than anything else here, touching early but exploding into something of such import that it's impossible to not be affected by it. Eventually we realise that the swell is on every song, even when we think it's all calmed down to something more personal. It's like there's an angelic throng hovering above the album accompanying everything with joy.

The key line may be one from Joy, when Cave sings, "We've had too much sorrow. Now is the time for joy." He's always been a tortured poet, tearing apart his soul for the right word on album after album, and this album is no exception. However, every moment of pain is tempered by the vibrant joy in the chorus around him. This is gospel music really, even if it's not worshipping any particular god. It's finding revelation in the act of worship through music. It's weird to realise that this isn't an album of words, not really, even if a few stand out here and there. Cave may be a poet with his own singular voice, but this album is all about mood.

Above everything else, it lives or dies on mood. How did you feel coming into this album? How did you feel leaving it? Crucially, what's the difference between those two states and why? Are there any particular moments that prompted that or was it just the combined effect of three quarters of an hour of grand affirmation? There are moments here of traditional Bad Seeds groove, like in the second half of Cinnamon Horses, but mostly it's just pure emotion transformed into a musical form.

I'm not sure I can even call out highlights because I think I'll need to get to know this album over a much longer period than a day to decide on that. Wild God certainly grabbed me, and Conversion and Joy too, but I wonder if Final Rescue Attempt will end up being the song that actually speaks to me the way Cave songs traditionally tend to do. I have a feeling it might be but I don't know yet. I do know that the song that most people have raved about, O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) didn't wow me. Maybe it'll manifest its power to me after more listens, but I don't think so. It's an interesting song musically with unusual percussive effects, whistles and a tasty backing vocal, but it's not one that has connected with me yet, especially with the narrative section.

It isn't alone. I like every song here but I don't love every song the way that many people seem to do. I've seen it in a lot of top ten lists for 2024 and it's topped at least one. Even as a Cave fan, I'm just not hearing that level of accomplishment here. It's a good album, certainly, and maybe it's a great one. It does things that I'm not used to hearing from Cave, like focusing on mood over lyrics, and that's interesting. I felt the buoyancy too, which I think is the point, but I'm not going to find a struggle to move on to another album, which is something I've done before with Cave albums. Let me see how it settles.

Monday, 6 January 2025

Little Feat - Sam's Place (2024)

The latest in a long string of bands who I had no idea were still together and releasing new music are Little Feat, who were founded back in 1969 in Los Angeles by alumni of Frank Zappa's band like Lowell George. They were talked up often by people whose voices I trusted, like Tommy Vance and Ian Gillan, both of whom played tracks by them on the Friday Rock Show, like Skin It Back and Dixie Chicken, but I could have sworn that they'd gone away before I found rock music in 1984 and they'd done that, splitting up in 1979, shortly before George died. What I missed was that the surviving members reformed in 1987 and they've been together ever since.

Back then, that meant five musicians, but time has whittled them down to three and Sam Clayton takes the mike throughout this album for the first time. The other two are Kenny Gradney on bass and Bill Payne on keyboards. Fred Tackett joined the band at the point of reformation in 1987 and guitarist Scott Sharrard and drummer Tony Leone are recent arrivals. The other reason that I have been blissfully unaware that Little Feat kept on rolling is that they haven't put out a studio album since 2012's Rooster Rag. As that featured songs by Mississippi John Hurt and Willie Dixon, maybe it pointed the way to this being fundamentally a blues album, albeit one that rocks.

Milkman is pure blues with a lovely groove. Clayton's vocals are delightfully characterful and the guitar solo is absolutely gorgeous. However, that's immediately outshone by my favourite track on the album, You'll Be Mine, which simply barrels along with punctuating horns, a lovely slide guitar and another quality guitar solo at the end. Third up is a stalker of a song, Long Distance Call, with a guest vocal appearance by Bonnie Raitt, a sleepy harmonica-driven vibe and old school country guitarwork. That's three different blues styles in three songs and they're all excellent. Little Feat have my attention.

They play with the tempo for a while, up for You'll Be Mine, down for Long Distance Call, up again for the rocking blues Don't Go No Further, down once more for Can't Be Satisfied and down again for Last Night. However, everything that follows goes back to Can't Be Satisfied to work in a more consistent style. There's a real bounce to Can't Be Satisfied that guarantees to make us move. The vocals are sassy, the harmonica follows suit and so does the rest of the album, in Why People Like That and especially Mellow Down Easy, which features two fantastic solos, one on harmonica and the other on guitar.

Nothing tops You'll Be Mine in my book, but Why People Like That comes close. It's a message song with a spectacularly simple message, pointing out that people do bad things and wondering why. The title is a question, even if it's shorn of punctuation, and we can't answer that question by the end of the song any more than Clayton can. Both are lively songs and, while this is studio work all the way through to the bonus track, a live rendition of the Muddy Waters standard Got My Mojo Working, it always has that live feel to it as if the band are just jamming in the studio. That's most obvious on the bouncy songs, of course, but there are two other reasons.

One is that Clayton's voice is gorgeous but deliberately unpolished. He's trying to sound dirty not clean and he manages it. We imagine that he's even older than his seventy-eight years, singing to us from a rocking chair on his porch. It's perfect for this material. The other is the solos, which just keep on coming. None of these songs are long, Last Night a breath shy of five minutes and the rest shorter, down to the sub-three minutes of Don't Go No Further, but they all have solos, often more than one. Everyone seems to get in on that action too, so it's not just the guitars; the harmonica gets a few and so do do the keyboards, Bill Payne especially rocking out on Last Night.

This is a joyous album. It may be that, over time, a slow song like Last Night might seem a little in the way amongst all the lively material, but I'm still loving every single track three times through and I'll be diving straight into a fourth. Now I need to check back to see what else Little Feat have been up to since their 1987 reformation. I see a huge amount of albums, but most of them are live. I'll have to figure out which are studio and see how they changed their sound across that span. But not yet. I'm listening to this again.

By the way, the album's called Sam's Place because it was recorded at Sam Phillips Recording, one of the most legendary studios in Memphis. The songs are mostly standards, even if a few were new to me, with Milkman the only original. You'll Be Mine and Mellow Down Easy are two of three that were written by Willie Dixon, so I should clearly dig deeper into his catalogue than I have thus far. Why People Like That is a Bobby Charles song, a white musician who pioneered swamp pop. I don't know his work well, though I have heard some of his more famous compositions, like See You Later, Alligator and (I Don't Know Why) But I Do.

Thursday, 2 January 2025

David Gilmour - Luck and Strange (2024)

The second half of 2024 was a nightmare for me trying to get anything done, so I missed out on the fifth studio album from Pink Floyd main man Dave Gilmour in September, his first in the nine years since Rattle That Lock in 2015. However, I did hear a couple of tracks from it. Between Two Points, a song featuring his daughter Romany on harp and lead vocals, got good press and I listened online, then Alice Cooper played it and another track I don't recall on his radio show. I remember thinking that it sounded interesting but lost a lot of its impact through a car radio, so wanted to seek it out at home and never got the chance until now.

I've heard a lot of praise for this album but I find it a little inconsistent. The good side is wonderful but some of the other songs are predictable or, worse, just there. I've only listened through three times so maybe some of it will grow on me with future listens, but I've found that threshold to be a pretty safe one on the whole.

Black Cat is just there, opening up the album, but it's only a brief reminder of the Gilmour guitar tone to set things in motion. Luck and Strange is much better but it sounds exactly like the sort of song we'd expect on a David Gilmour solo album. He plays that fluid guitar with all the sparsity he is renowned for, delivering only the few notes that he feels the track needs but every one of them perfect in every way. He also sings in a voice that's almost as recognisable nowadays as his guitar tone. Given that the piano and organ come courtesy of Pink Floyd's Richard Wright, who recorded his parts in 2007, a year before his death, it's not unfair to think of it as a latter day Floyd song.

The Piper's Call is where things start to change and that's a good thing. It's an introspective piece from the outset, but it gets interesting musically around the minute mark and continues to build for another four. It starts getting heavy three and a half minutes in, Gilmour getting delightfully jagged and bluesy. Steve Gadd's drums grow too and there's a real emphasis by the time its done. This last minute and a half may be my favourite part of the whole album, matched only by another rock out in the second half of Dark and Velvet Nights. The longer The Piper's Call runs, the more I like it.

Gilmour turns down the emphasis on A Single Spark but the drums, this time by Adam Betts, make it feel commanding. It's never particularly fast or heavy but it demands our attention, especially when some percussion that sounds rather like corporal punishment arrives a couple of minutes in. Dark and Velvet Nights carries that command forward before it rocks out, but it's also jaunty in a way I didn't expect from Gilmour. It's almost reggae in structure, if not tone, and moves back into more traditional blues rock jam territory as it goes.

In between those two songs is Vita Brevis, a palate cleansing sub sixty second interlude to set the stage for the highlight song, which is Between Two Points. This is an unusual song for two reasons. For one, it's not a Dave Gilmour original, because it's a cover of a Montgolfier Brother song. I had no idea who they were and imagined them to be a deep cut psych band from the late sixties. They turn out instead to be a British dream pop duo and this track was on their 1999 debut album. Also, Gilmour doesn't sing it, handing the mike over to his daughter Romany, who was only twenty-two at the time. She makes it haunting, the sort of song that can pass right by us but also never leave us alone.

She does a fantastic job, her lead vocal as much a highlight as her dad's guitar solo. It may be easy to look past her contribution on harp but it becomes more obvious with each listen, adding a Kate Bush touch that isn't there in the vocals. She takes a straightforward approach there, refusing to do anything flash and making all the more impact because of that decision. I can't be the only one listening who wishes that they collaborate more often. She sings backup on a few other songs but I couldn't isolate where. She also sings on Yes, I Have Ghosts, a bonus track on some editions, but in duet with her father's warm voice.

It's almost surprising after these more interesting songs for the album to drift into conventional territory as it wraps up. Sings and Scattered aren't bad at all, but they feel unimaginative in this company. They're both soft songs that intend to showcase Gilmour's voice against keyboard swells and growing backgrounds. There are interesting moments, like when Scattered suddenly finds an experimental urge around the three minute mark, but mostly they're just there and that's an odd way to wrap up an album that took Gilmour onto new and generally successful musical ground.

They mean that, while I was leaning towards an 8/10 for Luck and Strange, I think I have to lower it to a 7/10. Had it ended after Dark and Velvet Nights, it would have felt a bit short at a breath over half an hour but it would have been stronger and I'd have been happy to stay with that 8/10. Add in the folky Yes, I Have Ghosts as a closer, with its violins and hints at Leonard Cohen, and that would be a surety.

Tuesday, 24 September 2024

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers - I Love You Too (2024)

Country: Australia
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I'm always on the lookout for what's coming out from down under and here's a gloriously named band who I'm listing as alternative but play a cross of pop and rock with a garage rock mindset and sometimes a punk urgency too. Their first album, released last year, was called I Love You, so this is naturally I Love You Too. I don't think I'm quite ready to declare unconditional love for them yet but this is bright and engaging and agreeably varied. It's very easy to listen to and its energy has an agreeably positive effect on the day.

That begins with I Used to Be Fun, which opens up the album with a perky form of energy, but it's Treat Me Better which really elevates the album. In fact, while I could (and will) pick out a host of favourite tracks, this one sits above them all. It starts out calmer but builds with serious effect in immaculate fashion. I love how this one bulks up and shrinks down again. It's a more imaginative song than the opener and it plays with some neat contrasts. The guitar tone as it bulks up is very tasty too, courtesy of Scarlett McKahey.

The bad news is that nothing else here matches Treat Me Better. The good news is that nothing is particularly interested in trying because the other songs have other things to do. The heaviest is a forty second track called Cayenne Pepper which rather hilariously, is artificially bulked up. Twenty seconds of it constitutes a slice of studio reality. The second half is a blitzkrieg of a punk song. The lightest is Your House My House, which is entirely unplugged, mixing vocals and acoustic guitar. If that gives a particular impression, I should add that the vocals sound like everybody in the band is harmonising together and the guitar is almost hiding in the background.

As you might imagine, songs like that rely on their melodies and hooks and, quite frankly, so does everything here. That holds for a pop rock song like I Love You, which is infuriatingly catchy with a kick to it. It holds for the songs that find and milk their grooves, like Backseat Driver, I Don't Want It and Kissy Kissy. The latter especially reaches a big singalong at the end, which somehow works even though some of those singing appear to be cracking up at the same time. And it holds for the odd tracks, like Never Saw It Coming, which is soft enough to feature strings, acoustic guitar and yet more harmonising. The lyrics are more visceral and the contrast is impressive.

The lead vocalist is Anna Ryan, whose Aussie accent shines through even when she's singing. It's a flavour for these songs that's unmistakable on a bunch of them, especially Backseat Driver and I Don't Want It. She also handles rhythm guitar, but McKahey handles lead. She's the primary way that these songs get different tones, hulking up for the powerful songs, coating everything in grit and grunge or finding a melodious chiming tone that almost reminds of surf music on mid-power songs and either dropping into acoustic mode or vanishing entirely on the softer poppier tracks.

That leaves Jaida Stephenson on bass and Neve van Boxsel on drums. As the rhythm section, they aren't there to do anything flash but the former manages it anyway on a few tracks. There's some wonderful prominent basswork on Backseat Driver and I Don't Want It. Everyone joins in on songs that need communal vocals and I believe van Boxsel occasionally sings lead as well. It always feels redundant to call out how a band works together because, of course, everyone in the line-up plays a part. However, there are bands dominated by vocals and others dominated by guitars. Here, it's very much a team effort; nobody dominates because everybody shares the spotlight throughout.

With acknowledgement to a couple of guest groups, Softcult and the Linda Lindas, who guest on a track each, I'll cheesily riff on the title of the final song, We Thought It Would Be a Good Time But It Was a Bad Time. It might have been for the singer or the character she's portraying in that song but it isn't for us. This is a good time album. Even at its grungiest, it's a happy album and would be even if there weren't so many glimpses of how much fun the band were having when they recorded it. It's not just the first half of Cayenne Pepper or the laughter in Kissy Kissy, it's all over the place, starting with the end of the opener. These are riot grrls with more than one meaning to riot. And this is a good time.

Monday, 9 September 2024

Los Lonely Boys - Resurrection (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 2 Aug 2024
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Los Lonely Boys is made up of three brothers, the Garzas, and this is called Resurrection because it's a reunion. When Jojo Garza left in 2019, they went on hiatus, but he came back in 2022 and so they're back in business again. As they hadn't released an album for a few years before that split, this ninth album comes a decade after its predecessor. It's not only a good one, it's an agreeably versatile one, as fans might expect, because they're well known for combining rock 'n' roll, blues, country, soul and Tex-Mex into a commercial sound all their own.

The surprising song for me was the opener, Wish You Would, because the obvious influence here is the Beatles, who didn't venture much into the genres listed above. It's a rock song more than pop, but it's written exactly like Lennon and McCartney would write it and there are whole sections of music simply drenched in the Merseyside sound.

As if to counter that, it's followed by I Let You Think That You Do, which is far more ZZ Top, not just rock over pop with a powerful guitar solo, but firmly rooted in the blues and obviously flavoured with the Lone Star state. This is a song that you simply can't imagine originating from any other location, launched with harmonica and unfolding with pure Texas dirt. It wouldn't shock me if they recorded this outside in the desert with nothing in sight except for tumbleweeds and armadillos stomping their toes, except that I think they really moved all those into a roadhouse and recorded it there instead.

Much of what follows sits in between those two sounds, at least until we get to the majestic closer, Bloodwater, which returns us firmly to the blues.

Initially, it's lively in a party sense, a string of songs that are easy to dance to and often shift into a Spanish verse or two. Dance with Me is sassy and soulful, a quintessential Latin song, right down to strong brass and a Cuban beat. It takes a lot to not move to this one and, with different filters, it could be a Latin pop single. Send More Love is a textbook example of laid back country rock, with a timely hook in "This world is going crazy! Can you send more love?" Natural Thing is an engaging ballad, with a strong guitar.

As we move into the second half, things remain lively but shift more into rock 'n' roll, starting with Can't Get No Love, which is such straightforward piano and guitar driven rock 'n' roll that Elvis has to have sung it at some point. Painted Memories adds a strong dose of Latin flavour and country too, but remains just as fundamentally rooted in rock 'n' roll. Hooked on You is as different again as it can be without ever leaving that genre, sassing it up into a punchy pop rock song.

In between those three is See Your Face, which is a smoocher of a song even though it's not overt ballad material. The ladies have been dancing all the way through, but they will drag in their men for this one. But hey, let's leap past that and relish in the closer.

Bloodwater is a soft blues song with a very tasty intro indeed, shifting from dirty into smooth with effortless charm. It's somewhere in between Jeff Healey and the Neville Brothers, I think, with an excellent and patient organ providing the perfect backdrop. There are a number of strong guitar solos on this album, including on I Let You Think That You Do and Natural Thing, but this leaves all of them in the dust. This isn't just a Henry Garza solo, it's a magnetic gem, somehow laid back but still soaring, more B. B. King than Stevie Ray Vaughan. It's the jewel in an already glorious song, easily my favourite song, ahead of the very different pairing of I Let You Think That You Do and Dance with Me.

It's also a patient closer. Everything on this album is three minutes and change except for the final two tracks, because Hooked on You wraps up just a little early and this one stretches out into five langurous minutes. Of course, it has to be the final song, because nothing can follow it, except for a decision to listen to the whole album over again. Which I'm about to do once more. This is a good album by any criteria but it's an especially good return for a band who have been out of the studio for ten years and on hiatus for a few of those. Welcome back!

Friday, 10 May 2024

Lee Aaron - Tattoo Me (2024)

I'm always fascinated by the latest Lee Aaron release, because she has no intention of staying in a single musical genre. Back in the mid eighties when I first heard her, she was singing heavy metal, but softened up into hard rock later in the decade. She's moved through pop, blues, jazz and even swing, shifting back to rock with 2016's Fire and Gasoline. I noticed in 2021, giving Radio On! a 7/10 and its follow up, Elevate, a highly recommended 8/10. I believe this is her sixteenth album and it's happy to do something very different again, comprising a set of eleven highly varied covers.

Covers albums are often inconsistent and highly varied ones all the more so and I have to say right out of the gate that this is definitely one of those. However, the best material is excellent and the opening track plays much better to me than the original. Now, it's one of two tracks I didn't know coming in and the one where I didn't even know the band who recorded it, so Aaron's version was the first one I heard, but I did follow up with the original on YouTube. It's the title track, Tattoo, a song originally recorded by the 77s much later than their name suggests. It's a solid opener that I could happily have believed was an original.

It's not the best song here, that being her take on The Pusher, but it's not far behind it and much of the reason is that it feels like she's taken a song she loves and she's rocking it up with her band who clearly appreciate it too. Another that fits the same bill is Even It Up, the song by Heart, from their Bebe le Strange album in 1980. It's an obvious pick for Aaron and she does it justice, with the help of a band who clearly mean it too. The best and worst thing about this album is that she isn't interested in just recording these obvious picks.

It's the best thing because there are songs here that I wouldn't have imagined would fit Aaron but she tackles them anyway and makes them work. Many of these show up at the end of the album in a quartet by Hole, Elton John, Elastica and the Undertones, but I'd throw in the Alice Cooper cover too. The best of them is Connection, the only Elastica song I know, which is a fundamentally bouncy alt pop song. Especially given all the negative notes I'd jotted down on the way to that one, I would have thought it would be a notable failure, but it isn't. In fact, it's one of the biggest successes of the album, even if it doesn't try to add anything to the original.

It's the worst thing because the less obvious choices don't always work, in part because Aaron has little wish, it seems, to stamp her own authority on them. The best covers in my mind are the ones that grow into something new in a fresh version. Johnny Cash's famous take on Hurt is surely the best example nowadays. It's not that he does it better than Nine Inch Nails, it's that he does it in a very different way and sells it so well that even Trent Reznor says that it's Cash's song now. Aaron has so much variety in her musical background that she could have reinvented these songs in wild ways, if she only chose to do so. For the most part, she chose not to.

The first example is Are You Gonna Be My Girl, the famous Jet single, and Aaron doesn't do a bad job by any metric I can conjure up but it somehow feels wrong anyway. It feels like a karaoke song, as if she's singing live to a recorded backdrop that doesn't seem any different from the original. I would be blown away if she did this at my local karaoke spot, but I'm disappointed by its inclusion here. The same goes for Go Your Own Way, the Fleetwood Mac classic, and Teenage Kicks, the old Undertones gem, famously John Peel's favourite song. She does her job, but there's no reason for these covers to exist. She doesn't add anything.

The songs in between the best and worst are ones like What Is and What Should Never Be, Is It My Body and Malibu. The latter was a real surprise, because it's a Hole song and I'd have thought that Aaron's approach to music was inherently differently to theirs. I'm not a particular fan of the song but this is a strong version of it. The other two have moments, especially early on, where they fall into that karaoke mindset, Aaron's delivery just not right. She brings a sultry approach to Robert Plant and attempts Alice Cooper's sneer, but both fail. However, when those songs ramp up, she's able to gel with the band and suddenly it all works. The longer these run, the better they get.

With a quick mention of Elton John's Someone Saved My Life Tonight as the worst track here, not because Aaron does anything wrong but because I can't stand the original to begin with and she doesn't change my mind on that with her version, I'll get to The Pusher, which is wonderful. What has to be said first is that she seems to be covering the Nina Simone version, even though it was a Hoyt Axton song made famous by Steppenwolf, and that's a good thing because this approach is a real gift for Aaron's vocal talents and she feels more natural tackling this than anything else.

So it's a mixed bag, almost inevitably so. I appreciate Aaron stepping out of her comfort zone with a few of these choices, not that she has a particularly restrictive comfort zome. She surprised me with the Hole and especially the Elastica songs. However, the best songs are primarily the easier choices, Tattoo and Even It Up and especially The Pusher. I just wish she'd have tried to make these songs her own, rather than merely demonstrating that she can sing them. Of course she can! She's Lee Aaron. But I'm going to leave these wondering how What Is and What Should Never Be would sound like as a swing song, even though that's not what she and her band deliver here.

Thursday, 9 May 2024

Rydholm/Säfsund - Kaleidoscope (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | YouTube

For all the wild guitar that opens up Now and Forever and thus the album itself, presumably from Kristian Larsen, who's credited here for guitar solos, this is not heavy music. In fact, this may well be the poppiest album I've reviewed thus far at Apocalypse Later. I've gone with melodic rock as a label, which is fair and is where Rydholm and Säfsund tend to play in bands like Grand Illusion and Work of Art respectively, hence the name of their previous collaboration, Art of Illusion. However, this is a little different from that, I believe, hence the new band name.

I haven't heard Art of Illusion so I can't really speak to why this is different but I believe it's due to it being very firmly at the softer end of melodic rock, veering occasionally into prog rock and jazz but with just as much pop music here as there is rock, much of it funky in nature. Many songs, like the two openers, Now and Forever and Hey You, are often reminiscent of soft rock bands like Toto and the commercial extreme of prog rock like the Alan Parsons Project. I caught moments where commercial era Yes came to mind too, especially in the changes, but Hey You honestly owes just as much to Michael Jackson as any of the names you were more likely expecting to hear.

What that means is that I get to bring up Into the Music for the first time. I've talked in occasional reviews about the Friday Rock Show, a BBC radio radio show which was mandatory listening for any UK fans of rock and metal during the eighties. Well, Tommy Vance, the presenter of that show, did a year of presenting a second show, Into the Music, that focused on the lighter end of rock music. If that was running now, I'd be utterly sure that producer Tony Wilson would dialling Stockholm to see if Rydholm/Säfsund would be in London at any point and, if so, if they'd want to pop over to the Maida Vale studios to record a session.

That's because their core sound is in between those two openers, as highlighted by the next bunch of tracks, if not all of them over the fifty minutes taken up by the remaining ten songs.

What's Not to Love and Seven Signs of Love are bouncy and rooted in melodic rock, but they drift into pop frequently. There are guitar solos here, courtesy of Kristian Larsen on this pair, but with others guesting here and there on later tracks. Some are very tasty and I'm particularly fond of the ones on Seven Signs of Love and 4th of July, the latter performed by Tim Pierce, but crucially they never seem out of place, even with what I'm going to add in the next paragraph.

And that's the horn sections, which are even more obvious on Don't Make Me Do It and 4th of July. There are two here, one introducing this aspect to the band's sound on Now and Forever while the other takes over for the rest of the album. That means that Tom Walsh is a huge part of Rydholm/Säfsund's sound, maybe not as much as Rydholm or Säfsund but easily up there with Larsen. What matters is that he isn't soloing on an electric guitar but delivering lead trumpet and fluegelhorn. I've heard saxophones on extreme metal albums lately, so I won't suggest that the mere presence of fluegelhorn makes this pop music but it kinda helps.

Certainly, songs like The Bet, that sounds like a cross between Toto and Queen, and Sara's Dream and Bucket List, which are more like the former without the latter, would sound even more so, if there was less trumpet and more guitar. At points on the latter two, I started to imagine that this was a Toto covers album performed by Postmodern Jukebox, merely with only one singer in Lars Säfsund rather than a string of different guests. Just to highlight how these halves of the sound work together, Bucket List features both an excellent saxophone solo from Wojtek Goral and an excellent guitar solo from Larsen.

What this all ends up as is something very easy to listen to. It's often the sound of summer, which isn't necessarily a good thing because it makes me want to go outside and I live in Phoenix rather than Stockholm, where the sun is a fiery ball of death in the sky that wants to kill me. I'll settle for sitting in my office feeling happier because of the sheer perkiness of this material. My favourite track is surely Now and Forever, which is also probably the most rock song here, but I'm very fond of The Plains of Marathon, another Toto-esque song in the grand sweep after the openers. All of these do the perky thing, though, and it's a generous album at almost an hour, enough to make anyone happy.

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

Pearl Jam - Dark Matter (2024)

I was born in 1971, so my formative musical years were the eighties, from the early post-punk days when my favourite artist was Adam Ant to my thrash years in the second half of the decade, where Nuclear Assault had taken over that mantle, via an incredibly varied ride through NWOBHM, hair metal and the various nascent forms of what became extreme metal. I'm also English, so my idea of alternative rock is the journey the eighties took from Bauhaus through the Wedding Present to the Stone Roses rather than what the US produced a decade later. In other words, I'm not really a part of the target audience for Pearl Jam.

However, all that said, I rather enjoyed this. I can listen to the big hits well enough, but they don't wow me. My favourite experience with Pearl Jam was the blistering stripped down version of Bob Dylan's Masters of War that Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready performed at Dylan's 30th anniversary concert. I'm not sure what I expected from a quintessential nineties band in 2024, but there's a lot here and very little of it fits with what I thought I might hear. That's a good thing in my book, just in case you're new here.

Scared of Fear bursts out of the gate like a hard rock song, with a real urgency to it. It may well be my new favourite of their original songs. That continues into React, Respond, which has an almost punky edge that's clearly alternative but kicks it like hard rock too. The bass of Jeff Ament is very prominent here, so much so that it leads the way for serious chunks of the song. The chorus is just as vibrant and bouncy as I tend to think Pearl Jam aren't. And, while Wreckage is softer, more laid back, that bounce never quite leaves the album. This is a much happier album than I ever expected it to be.

Upper Hand may be the epitome of just how upbeat it gets. It's not happy, not precisely, but it's a heck of a lot closer than the opposite. And, with that note that underpins this entire release, I can start throwing out names, because I heard a lot of other people here that I didn't expect from the band with a professionally downbeat singer like Vedder at the mike. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for his vocal talents and have no problem with depressing delivery. Leonard Cohen's first two albums are among my favourites, as are Joy Division's. However, I don't think of him as a singer who can be happy. It's simply not an emotion he channels. This proved me wrong.

It's also worth mentioning that he has such an iconic voice that he stamps his authority over every song he sings, whether it's Pearl Jam's or not. However, he drifts into territory already owned and I could easily hear these songs sung with different, just as established voices. Won't Tell is alt rock in the sense that U2 are alt rock. Can any of you remember that far back into the annals of musical history? Something Special has a pop mentality to it that prompts me to imagine Amy Winehouse singing it. Got to Give reminds me of Bruce Springsteen and the closer, Setting Sun, feels like it's a laid back seventies pop song with a country tinge, maybe something that Neil Diamond could sing, without changing the acoustic guitar and orchestration. And then the Boss could cover that.

Some of it remains entirely alternative in the particular sense that Pearl Jam helped to define in the nineties. React, Respond starts that and Dark Matter continues it with emphasis. This one's a far more edgy song than React, Respond. It's Vedder's vocals and Matt Cameron's drums that do it for me on this one, but much of it is driven by Jeff Ament's bass, just like React, Respond. Of all the alternative songs here, though, I think Dark Matter is the one that rings truest to what I was expecting, an edgier and more modern take on what they did back in the day. However, the one I'd pick over the others is Running, which is so full of energy that it's almost punk. It's absolutely not what I expected from them, but they do it very well indeed.

So I enjoyed myself and I'm continuing to do so five or six listens in. The songs get stronger and the feelings that this is upbeat and versatile don't go away. Now, I'll always pick the eighties over the nineties and my grounding is always going to remain British, which may explain why I tend to enjoy a lot more of what I hear from European bands today than American ones, whatever the genre. It has to be said right here though that this surprised me, enough that I ought to dive into the Pearl Jam back catalogue, which is a lot more substantial than I expected. I know of their nineties stuff, even if I haven't heard it all, perhaps up to 2000's Binaural, but this is their sixth album since then for twelve overall and maybe I'm finally getting on board. I wonder when I should have started to pay attention.

Friday, 3 May 2024

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong - Day in Time (2024)

It seems strange, given such a memorable band name, that I haven't heard of Pigeons Playing Ping Pong before, but they've been around since 2009 and this is their seventh album. Clearly I've been missing out. By the way, that name was taken from the description of a scientific experiment in a textbook, but that doesn't mean this is math rock. The Pigeons play funk rock that's almost always driven by the bass of Ben Carrey. The vocals of Greg Ormont are very clean and the sound is often poppy—the earworm chorus in The Town, the obvious single which opens up the album, reminds of Bruno Mars's Uptown Funk—but they also love to jam and I fell into a lot of these guitar solos.

Let's get The Town out of the way quickly, because it's the sort of song that's so infectious that it's easy to just slap that one on repeat and forget that it's actually opening up an album. There are a further ten songs on Day in Time, plus a thirty second outro that sounds like it was ripped from an old and warped cassette. I can't say that any approach The Town on the infectious front, but a few of these songs come close to being as perky, such as the title track and Fall in Place. I had a concert to attend tonight and I had The Town and Day in Time playing in my head all the way there.

Funk rock is usually driven by the bass and Ben Carrey is a thoroughly impressive bedrock for the band to build on. He's there on The Town and Day in Time, of course, but it's impossible to ignore him on Beneath the Surface and Sorcerer, let alone when he's stealing the spotlight with bass solos on tracks like Alright Tonight and Overtime. There are moments dotted here and there on the album, often in the intros to songs, when he doesn't do anything at all and it feels acutely like something's been lost. Fortunately he soon shows up and all is right with the world again.

Once Carrey has set down a bass line, many of these songs are tasked with a pretty basic question as to whether they want to be pop or rock. The more Greg Ormont's vocals nail a melody, the more pop it becomes, whether it's the funk of The Town, the disco of Let the Boogie Out or the reggae of My Own Way. The more Ormont focuses on his guitar and Jeremy Schon joins him—I don't see a credit to divvy up lead and rhythm duties, so I presume they swap them—, the more it turns into a rock album. Just check out Skinner, which doesn't just have the best guitar solo on the album; it's seriously extended because this is a five minute instrumental.

It's how they put those two approaches together to create one sound that makes this band work so well. The clean lines, whether we're talking vocals or guitar, suggest that this is what we might hear if Lenny Kravitz handed his guitar to Eric Clapton and his microphone to Robert Cray. Late in Feelin' Fine, there's a jam that's absolutely glorious but, prior to that, the song is so clean that we'd perhaps be forgiven for assuming that they're aiming for the blandest audience possible—like people who think the sun shines out of Jimmy Buffett's margarita glass—but just can't resist rocking out anyway.

And they rock out a lot here. The Town ought to be too commercial to do that but there's a tasty guitar solo in the second half; Alright Tonight boasts another one; and Day in Time has one more that comes right after a keyboard solo. That's three in three songs and there are a bunch more to enjoy before we get to that instrumental workout on Feelin' Fine eleven tracks in. Add to that an array of extra little touches, like the keyboard flurry late in Day in Time that reminded me of early Marillion; the reggae jangle of the guitars in My Own Way and Fall in Place; or the funky horns in Let the Boogie Out that elevate the whole thing.

It all made me recall a gig review in Kerrang! way back in the late eighties that sent someone to an Allman Brothers gig who clearly had no idea who they were. They fully expected granddad rock and were prepared to sit through it, but they got a blistering jam show instead that utterly blew their mind. That's how I imagine Pigeons Playing Ping Pong gigs to be, with grandmas showing up because they just sound so nice in the background of Murder She Wrote or some such show and hearing tight rocking jams instead that make them question what they've missed over decades.

And I'll shut up now, except to make a note for my future self to figure out what that phrasing is in Overtime that I absolutely recognise but somehow can't place. I listened to a couple of tracks late one evening to see if this was something I'd be up for reviewing. Obviously I was, but what I got on an eleven track album was so much more than I heard in that pair of openers, even though anyone listening to this would have to include The Town as a highlight. I'm one of those, though Skinner is my top pick and Day in Time and Feelin' Fine aren't far behind.

So I may be a little late, but I've caught up with Pigeons Playing Ping Pong and now have six prior albums to seek out. Have you caught up with them yet? You should. Your day will feel better for it.

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

Reach - Prophecy (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Tiktok | YouTube

Reach have been around since 2012 but I'm not finding a heck of a lot of information about them. They hail from Stockholm and this is their fourth album, following The Promise of a Life in 2021. It came to me labelled as melodic hard rock and their Bandcamp page tags them alternative rock, but, only four songs in, I realised that labels and tags aren't really going to be particular helpful. They're all over the musical map and they're clearly happy about that.

Let me explain. The title track opens up the album as hard rock with a strong nineties alternative edge. It's entirely understandable why they supported H.E.A.T. on a couple of tours, but it's also a little heavy for that gig. However, as if hearing that note, Little Dreams is softer, more of a heavy pop approach that we could stretch to call melodic rock. It has a real bounce to it and the bass is a thing of joy. A Beautiful Life kicks off like a TV theme tune, only to launch into rock with the guitar pretending to be the drums for a while but then adding a grungy edge when it all bulks up.

But wait, as they say, there's more. In the second half of A Beautiful Life, there's a western vibe I might expect from an outlaw country rockabilly band that doesn't quite overwhelm the pop rock elements that could compare to a Cheap Trick. The end is almost steampunk in its look backwards into what could be taken for a harpsichord sound. Save the World kicks off with a playful guitar as if it's aiming to be a dance number and suddenly I'm thinking Stray Cats as a comparison.

It's a huge shift from those verses to the chorus that leaps right back into heavy arena pop, which isn't the end of it either, because then they go symphonic in the second half in a way that's mostly reminiscent of Queen. What does this band not do? Well, Queen could be seen as a key influence, though more for their musical chameleon act as for any particular moments, like that one, as it's a rarity. Perhaps the better general comparison would be The Darkness, acknowledging their own Queen connection, because Reach are clearly more modern than Queen and whoever handles the lead vocals likes dipping up into a falsetto just like Justin Hawkins.

Eventually I changed my tag to alternative for want of something to call this, but that's notably limited and shouldn't be seen as a be all end all to their sound. When I've reviewed the Darkness, I've gone with hard rock and that's just as fair. I could switch those and not mislead. And that's not to forget the funk in a song as hard rock as Psycho Violence, which is different to the Red Hot Chili Peppers funk that kicks off Who Knows. Just don't expect any song to sound like any other and you may really dig this. It'll certainly keep you on your toes. I haven't even got to Grand Finale yet, not the final song but another sonic leap into symphonic rock/metal. It's also another theatrical level above what's already been highly theatrical.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned any band members yet and that's because I'm not sure who is actually in the band. Bandcamp states the music is credited to Ludvig Turner, Marcus Johansson and Soufian Anane, while Turner also wrote the lyrics, so I'm guessing he's the singer. Discogs has him as guitarist and vocalist, with Johansson on drums and Soufian Ma'Aoui on bass. I presume he is the same Soufiane as Anane. Others have been involved but I couldn't tell you if they're still in the band or if they ever were, so I'll stick to these three for now. More information would be very welcome.

I like this album because it's hard not to like this album. It's entirely schizophrenic, sure, but I'm a particular fan of albums that venture all over the musical map without ever sounding like a band has betrayed their roots or gone a step too far into something that just doesn't fit. Queen's Sheer Heart Attack and Saigon Kick's Water are firmly in my list of most frequently replayed albums and this feels a little more consistent than either. Just tread carefully if you try to label it.

As to highlights, that's a how long is a piece of string question, because it's what I'm listening to at the time you ask. Mama Mama is a stormer of an opening single, so that's potentially the best of many good places to start. I do like A Beautiful Life, Psycho Violence and Grand Finale too, so they should get a special mention too. But, ask me tomorrow, and I might go with three different ones instead.

Tuesday, 2 April 2024

WONDERboom - Hard Mode (2024)

It's oddly hard to find an online discography of WONDERboom, given that they formed as far back as 1996 and have been active ever since, winning awards but releasing EPs and singles rather than full length studio albums. They celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2021 with WONDERboom 25, a set of re-recordings of favourite songs from their earlier releases, but this is a new studio album, potentially their fifth to follow on from 2017's Rising Sun, and it's a wildly versatile affair.

I saw them listed as funk rock, which is as good a description as any, I guess, but they refuse to be constrained by any one genre label, even if it's as high level as pop or rock, because they're happy to play both. There's a lot of rock here, much of it falling somewhere within alternative or arena rock, but there's lots of pop here too, from across the spectrum, trawling in ska, goth, punk, even R&B. As such, it's impossible to even attempt to identify high level influences. The band obviously listen to a broad range of music and let everything they hear filter into their own sound.

The heaviest song is probably the opener, My Name is Freedom, which is an earworm of a stomp, built as much on handclaps and audience participation as guitars and drums. It seems cheap for me to throw out John Kongos as an immediate comparison, given that he was also South African, but it's there and it's overt. However, one of the softest songs is Deadly, the pop song that has an unenviable task in following My Name is Freedom and approaches that by not doing anything at all similar. Apparently, when WONDERboom started out, so far back that they were still called the Electric Petal Groove Machine, they supported Simple Minds on a South African tour. That seems entirely appropriate listening to this song.

From one rock song and one pop song, the next four mix pop and rock in fascinating ways and that ends up being a far more common approach here. Most of my favourite songs here are both pop and rock without ever really being pop rock. Alive is a tasty mix of U2 and Nick Cave and the Cure. Overground (Subway Queen) ups the U2 proportion of that but adds a Japanese melodic theme. Avalon adds some Madness in its perky ska beat, funky piano and quietly cool attitude, though it goes elsewhere for its chorus. Similarly, Miss Demeanour is commercial punk in its verses, like an Iggy Pop song but with the incessant drive of Hawkwind, the lyrics spat in bars rather than sung, but then it all goes big and clean for its chorus.

Avalon counts as the midpoint, there being eleven songs on offer and all of them being of similar length, a radio friendly three minutes and change. I like the first half a lot, wherever it goes. I'm less fond of the second half, partly because it's more pop than rock, partly because its songs have less character to them and partly because one of them, very deliberately, sparks cringeworthy memories. However, the second half wraps up with Voodoo Doll, which is both pop and rock, has character to spare and is as catchy as anything else here, the earworm opener notwithstanding.

The cringy song is Hip, which is eighties hip, sometimes painfully so, even if the words talk about an earlier time. It's firmly pop but it goes all over the place, perhaps mostly to Michael Jackson but to plenty of others, including trends that I've tried to forget. It feels like the sonic equivalent of the sort of fashion catalogue that parents bought Christmas presents from that embarrassed everyone because the trends had moved on by the time the wrapping paper came off. There's an early white rapper feel to it and I'm not talking about Blondie's Rapture or Adam Ant's Ant Rap, but the folk who dressed in pastels and pretended to be black, the predecessors of Vanilla Ice.

The songs after it but before Voodoo Doll are mostly inconsequential compared to the rest of the material here. Prodigal Son is a logical follow-up to Hip but shifting in time from Michael Jackson to Prince. Pretty Things is quieter; it's pleasant enough and it sounds OK in isolation but its Cure-esque pop doesn't enforce itself. Rabbit Hole manages a little better, but it's another subtle pop song and I was having sinking feelings by this point in the album when Voodoo Doll shows up to be the saviour of the side, a Hallowe'en flavoured Adam Ant alt rock song that's all hook.

This is about as different as can be imagined to Toxic Carnage, but I do try to cover the spectrum here at Apocalypse Later and there are wonderful songs to be found on each of these albums. It's joyous to me to move from Thrashing Over Thirty to Alive. They're both rock songs, even if they're not alike in almost any other way, except maybe in how they nod back to the eighties. It's a great time to be alive, with so much varied music easily available to a global audience online. Enjoy it.

Thursday, 14 March 2024

Post Kaskrot - Sidi Sidi (2024)

Country: Morocco
Style: Alternative Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Feb 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's something interesting from Morocco that starts out experimental but quickly becomes a highly accessible hybrid of pop, rock and world music. That experimental opening is the intro, I am Many Things, and Many Things I am Not, which is a strange vocal melody against dissonant organ, ambient sound and what I presume are experimental keyboards. That leads into an alternate pop rock song about a dog called Douglas that's built out of friendly vocals, surf guitar chords and an array of Arabic melodies. It's part Cake, part Walk Like an Egyptian and part Frank Zappa, which is a strange but enticing mix.

What's odd is that neither of these pieces of music is particularly representative of the album. It starts to find its go forward stance with Dragonfly Dragonflew, which is a poppy song with a psych overlay that gradually takes over, reminiscent of sort of seventies singer/songwriters who liked to trawl in folk music and get a little weird with it, like the middle eastern flutes that show up during the midsection. There's theremin on this album too, I think, most obviously on Yelele, unless it's a saw. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing credits.

That psychedelic pop rock edge is never far away as the album progresses, but it's all deepened by the sort of approach that Manu Chao often took to make this not just a mere album containing a set of songs but a kind of experience. That's done through adding ambience, improvisation and a conversational approach to ephemeral material, like radio chatter, often between songs but also within them. That begins at the end of Dragonfly Dragonflew and only gets more frequent as the album runs on. By the time we get to Sun Sun Sun... at the end of the album, someone even asks a simple question: how would you describe this album in two words. The response? "God damn!"

Those were the two approaches I took away from this. It's structured like an Manu Chao album but the songs are subtler, his immediate earworm melodies replaced by more introspective material that veers between friendly pop and more abrasive alternative rock. However, there are points at which Post Kaskrot dip into a similar sort of musical territory as Chao, like the reggae sections of Seapsyche Onion and Grace, or incorporates other songs into the original material in a Chao style, like the refrain from Frère Jacques within Donner Kebab and a glimpse of the Cops theme tune in Sun Sun Sun...

It all makes for a heady mixture, as if we're not sitting at home listening to an album unfold but in the studio in Rabat where Post Kaskrot were putting it together. For a release that has so much in the way of post-production to add all those radio segments and other snippets, it feels very loose, some songs so much so that whoever's in this band may have just been jamming them, with guests occasionally added if they happen to stick their head through the door at the opportune moment. There's Amygdala on Sulfur Surfer, presumably the powerful female voice, and Genue on Grace, a French musician who looks to be just as versatile as Post Kaskrot.

There's so much here that it's hard to pick out favourites. I dig Seapsyche Onion, one of the loose songs that we can just fall into like an ocean and let it just take us away. I like the up beat garage rock meets rockabilly approach to Donner Kebab too, easily the most bouncy song here. Hejazz is an exquisite piece too, finding a wonderful ethnic groove. I can explain why I like all those tracks, but I'm lost as to why Yelele speaks to me. It's a laid back piece but it's seeping into my soul for no reason I can figure. It ought to feel a little lost in between Seapsyche Onion and Grief Tower, but I fall for it every time through. It may well be my favourite song here.

I'm loving everything I'm hearing from North Africa, but I'm not hearing a heck of a lot. I'm sure there are a lot of bands doing interesting things and I need to find a way to plug into how I can not miss them as they put out new material. Case in point: this is Post Kaskrot's debut album but they put out an EP in 2020 called Kastle. Bandcamp credits Benmoussa Amine as the primary musician and songwriter, with Baha Ghassane also contributing. I have no idea if they're still the names here or not, but I like what I hear anyway. If you have open ears to where pop and rock can go in countries outside the norm, Post Kaskrot are well worth checking out.

Monday, 11 March 2024

Nick Johnston - Child of Bliss (2024)

I hadn't heard of Nick Johnston before, but I wasn't going to pass up this gorgeous cover art. He's a Canadian guitarist on his seventh album and, for once, I can buy into everything on his Wikipedia page. He claims strong influences from a string of the usual names, like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie van Halen, Yngwie J. Malmsteen and Jeff Beck, but he also states that "I sound nothing like those guys" and he doesn't with the sole exception of Beck, whose touches I did catch once in a while. The influence that leapt out here for me was Joe Satriani, who's all over this material like a rash.

This album isn't as adventurous as Satriani's most recent effort, The Elephants of Mars, which has a lot more versatility to it, playing in all sorts of unusual genres. This, on the other hand, is clearly instrumental rock music and it's happy to be instrumental rock music, with maybe a dip into folk in the title track and a hint towards metal on Momento Vivere. However, as content as Johnston is to remain within a relatively limited scope, this is absolutely going to play best to Satch fans, who I'd think would eat this up and ask for seconds.

Now Satriani is well known for being a technical virtuoso and it's clear to me that Johnston is too, but he doesn't flaunt it as much. When he talks about this particular influence, he talks about his sense of melody as an underpinning for everything else that he does and, from this album alone, I can see that that's what drives him. I haven't gone to YouTube to see what he looks like when he's up there on stage, but I firmly imagine him standing in a spotlight he likely doesn't realise is even there because his eyes are closed as he channels the music through his body. I don't picture him at the front of the stage winking at the audience as he nails something outrageously technical that lesser mortals just couldn't do in a month of Sundays.

However, it seems likely that he could do that should he ever choose to do so. To non-musicians like me, he sounds impressive, clearly talented but no showoff, so we focus on those melodies and how he builds them into something more. Put simply, we listen to his music. Most of it seems laid back, albeit not so far as someone like Eric Clapton who gradually gets more entrenched in soft rock as the years pass, outside his occasional ventures into pure roots. However, there are still moments in tracks like Moonflower and late in Voice on the Wind that I seriously doubt are easy to play, but which he makes seem exactly that.

My least favourite track is easily the first one, Black Widow Silk, not because it doesn't sound great but because it's over almost as it's begun and he oddly doesn't play through most of it. He's clearly not a guitarist who counts his worth by the number of notes that he plays, but I don't believe he reaches twenty by the halfway mark of a piece that only just nudges past two minutes. It's an odd choice to start out the album, because it's less an intro to the entire thing as an intro into a song we never hear, because the title track works off a completely different groove.

That title track may be my favourite, even though he once more waits a long while to join the fray. While the obvious draw here is his guitarwork, with Momento Vivere and Through the Golden Forest perhaps the highlights there, I got a real kick out of the backdrops that are conjured up for him to do his thing against and this may be the best. Moonflower comes close and Black Widow Silk too, but Child of Bliss is a piece to stand out both for the backdrop that's built for almost a minute before Johnston joins in and for his guitarwork once he does. Technically speaking, he was there before the guitars, because he's also responsible for the keyboards, which includes the tasty piano here that plays with an unusual drum sound.

While I'm a little late to the table after six albums I completely failed to notice, Nick Johnston is a clear talent who doesn't just know how to play the guitar, he also knows how to create interesting pieces of music. Of course, there's plenty of back catalogue for me to seek out should I wish, but I wonder what he sounds like in a band setting. That's possible too, because he's made two albums with Archival, for which he sings as well as plays guitar and piano. He's definitely a name I'll keep an eye out for in the future.

Friday, 5 January 2024

Soen - Memorial (2023)

I found Soen on their fourth album, Lotus, and I liked them a lot. They've changed since then, with a steady move away from the Tool influence that was overt on that album to something much less progressive and much more mainstream, but still unmistakably Soen. These ten songs are simpler, especially in the bass and drums, but they're still powerful and the hooks are just as strong as ever, which is what this band does better than so many other bands: to maintain a serious level of power whatever they're doing, even at their most melodic. They don't just write hooks for their choruses, they put them in verses too and the riffs support that wonderfully throughout.

The increasing simplicity of the music, which suggests that progressive metal isn't going to cut it as a label for long, if this far, was one of the first things I noticed with this album. Another was its impressive production, which is crisp and clear and makes it feel like metal even when it's shifted down into mere rock music, which it does often, in the way that Metallica really played rock music for a while but it felt like metal anyway because of the tone and production. On occasion, the tone even seems similar. There's a ballad to wrap things up too, Vitals, and that maintains its power as well, even in its quietest moments.

I liked this immediately but not emphatically. It took a while to grow on me, partly because of the general approach that was obvious from the first track, Sincere, but also partly because the song after it, Unbreakable, was so obviously the standout. Everything else seemed to sit in its shadow for a few listens through. However, I gradually realised that, even if those songs aren't as obvious or as immediate as Unbreakable, they're all still damn good songs. And so, from liking it from the outset, this turned into a grower. I was going with a 7/10 until my fourth or fifth time through but it became clear that it's an 8/10. Maybe I'll keep going up if I listen long enough.

It's also a very accessible album. Soen fans are likely to dig it, even though they're clearly getting more commercial. It's telling that the most progressive sections are probably the guitar solos, as they sometimes remind of Dave Gilmour, especially on Hollowed, Sincere and Icon. However, Pink Floyd did the same thing that Soen are doing, gradually moving away from progressive to mainstream, so "most progressive" here isn't really particularly progressive. However, it's wide open as to the rest of the potential audience. I can see alt rock fans and nu metal fans liking this, for a start. The path to this sound seems obvious from Floyd, Opeth or Metallica, but also from Disturbed or Pearl Jam, perhaps even Creed.

Much of that is because they calm down a lot for verses. Songs will kick in hard with big metal riffs from Cody Lee Ford and often surprisingly slow drumming from Martín López, but whenever Joel Ekelöf is ready to sing, those riffs strip away or calm down so the vocal melodies stay paramount. Violence is a great example but it's far from the only one here. It makes it easy for us to dig light moments as well as heavy ones, especially as the power is always there regardless.

I say Ekelöf because he's the lead vocalist here, as he's been since the band was founded in 2010, and he's becoming the strongest aspect, if mostly because the complicated passages of songs on previous albums that kept us paying attention to bass, drums and even keyboards generally aren't here this time out. That gives Ekelöf even more focus than he already had as a stellar singer, but he shares that spotlight on Hollowed with a female voice, delivered by Elisa Toffoli, who's Italian but carries a subtle Celtic lilt at the end of phrases. It's not really a duet, because they alternate their vocals for the most part, but both shine on this one, surely the most emotional song here.

It's Hollowed that has the most overtly Pink Floyd inspired guitar solo and it's Memorial after it that has the most overtly Metallica inspired riffing, but it's not a heck of a lot of songs that send me leaping at comparisons. Does Incendiary shift into Alan Parsons Project territory? Sure, I could throw that out, but there's not a lot here that sounds like other people.

Put simply, this sounds like Soen to me, even if they're still evolving their sound with each album, and that's an especially refreshing thought because, while I thoroughly enjoyed Lotus, I heard it as a Swedish take on Tool. I heard that obvious early influence much less on 2021's Imperial, as it sounded like Soen but with Tool often coming to mind. Here I had to stretch to find Tool moments. This is the first Soen album I've heard that sounds almost entirely like themselves.

And now I need to stop listening to Memorial, because I must be on my tenth time through now. It keeps getting better and it's only the fact that Unbreakable remains unchallenged in my mind by anything else here that I'm not thinking about a 9/10. All these songs are excellent, so an 8/10 has to be fair. The question is whether that's enough or not. At this rate, the next album, perhaps due in 2025, may well be right from the outset.

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

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Thursday, 9 January 2025

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Monday, 6 January 2025

Thursday, 2 January 2025

Tuesday, 24 September 2024

Monday, 9 September 2024

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Tuesday, 9 April 2024

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