“I’m going to be honest,” singer Maynard James Keenan says before the final song of Tool’s first O2 Arena show. “I’m fucking tired. Being 58, thinking you’re 48, pretending you’re 28, it’s fucking hard work.”
The thing is, he doesn’t seem tired. And he doesn’t make it look like hard work — although even an 18-year-old would struggle to make it through the two-hour performance Tool’s just given.
“Might start writing a record & making soap,” Yannis Philippakis tweeted in March 2020, just a few days before England went into lockdown. While there’s no news on the Foals singer-guitarist’s range of bath bombs, that record is now imminent. Called Life Is Yours, it’s due next month with early reports throwing around descriptions like “euphoric”, “sunny”, and even “best of their career”.
Bloc Party: Alpha Games
Bloc Party’s Alpha Games is an album of our times. No, it’s not yet another rumination on the sociological, existential, and mental health impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not that reductive. Instead, the 12 unflinching tracks carry an underlying sense of discomfort, unease, dread; that low-level feeling surely everybody’s had over the past five years that something’s not quite right. The only relief is provided by moments of despair, outbursts of rage, and sparkles of beauty.
Trent Reznor is now a married, 57-year-old father of five who won his second Oscar for soundtracking a Pixar film. But he’s always been more than your average rock musician. And, as evidenced by Nine Inch Nails’ 2018 offering Bad Witch and the group’s still incendiary live shows, he’s also retained the conflicting brutality, insecurity, aggression, and pained beauty of his finest work: 1994’s The Downward Spiral.
Ghost’s new album, Impera, is partly about the rise of empires. It’s something they know a little about. Just over a decade ago, their debut LP didn’t even trouble the UK charts; their latest debuted at Number Two. On their last visits to London, pre-pandemic, they played at Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Arena; tonight they’re at the city’s largest indoor music venue, The O2.
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Unlimited Love
In some ways, Unlimited Love is more than just another Red Hot Chili Peppers release. It’s their first in a decade recorded with producer Rick Rubin. More importantly, it’s their first since 2006 to feature John Frusciante. His replacement, Josh Klinghoffer, is clearly a talented musician. On 2011’s I’m With You, he ably channelled the mercurial guitarist, while 2016’s more experimental The Getaway made him an integral part of producer Danger Mouse’s sonic palette.
The basement is hot. Britt Daniel and Alex Fischel have had a long day. They’re playing to around 30 people who haven’t even paid to be there. And yet the Spoon duo are giving it their all.
But that’s always been the band’s approach to live performance: crank up the intensity of their studio recordings so they sound more visceral, more direct, more emotional.
Placebo: Never Let Me Go
Everything’s a matter of perspective. Even as Placebo’s 2016 greatest hits album and accompanying two-year world tour reminded fans of their extensive back catalogue, it reminded the band they’d never been about commercial success or nostalgia.
Recording a new album after almost 30 years is, in a word, risky. Will it be good enough to match your classics? Will it be similar enough for diehard fans to like it? Will it be different enough to keep them interested? Will anyone else even notice it’s out?
Performing said album live from start to finish to a crowd who’ve never heard it before is, in a word, insane.
Tears For Fears: The Tipping Point
The road to The Tipping Point was long and (yes) winding.
There were the initial “speed dating” songwriting sessions with flavour of the month hitmakers. There was the fully completed album of wall-to-wall “bangers” all intended to top the pop charts. There was Curt Smith’s disappointment in the results, prompting him to consider leaving Tears For Fears again.
Nils van der Linden