Category: Music

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Live Reviews Music

Tremonti offer more than musical bodyslams

Alter Bridge bandmates Myles Kennedy and Mark Tremonti must be really competitive. Or maybe they just don’t like sitting around the house. Kennedy, the group’s singer and rhythm guitarist, doubles up on those roles for Slash while nurturing a burgeoning solo career. Lead guitarist Tremonti, who co-founded Creed and co-wrote hits like the Grammy-winning With Arms Wide Open, has recently teamed up with members of Frank Sinatra’s orchestra to sing Ol’ Blue Eyes standards. Oh, and for the past decade, he’s fronted Tremonti.

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Live Reviews Music

Jack White’s evolution continues

When Jack White joined his first group, Goober & The Peas, playing drums was just part of the gig. They dressed like Grand Ole Opry cowboys, so he was forced to wear the whole Hank Williams getup, from the Nudie suit to the 10-gallon hat. It wasn’t an easy fit for a kid from Detroit. But White soon realised that the band were getting noticed purely because they’d swapped out the predominant uniform of jeans and T-shirt. At that point in the early ’90s he learned that, even through something as innocuous as an outfit, he could decide what message he wanted to project.

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Live Reviews Music

Red Hot Chili Peppers still giving it away, now

Red Hot Chili Peppers have just played a swaggering Give It Away. They’ve walked off to do whatever it is they do before the encore. A few roadies move some equipment around. The cameras that have been covering the action on stage turn to the audience.

The two big screens show a sea of waving arms; close-ups of sweaty, smiling, sunburnt faces; self-conscious giggles; people who still have enough energy after 90 minutes of jumping and screaming to jump and scream some more.

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Live Reviews Music

The Flaming Lips bring peace, love, and giant inflatables

The Flaming Lips have a reputation to uphold. Legend has it they were signed after a record label rep caught a show where they almost burnt down the venue “with some questionable on-stage pyrotechnics”. They came up with the “headphone concert” more than 20 years ago, transmitting their live performance to audiences wearing headphones. They’ve released music on flash drives embedded inside gummies, a 24-hour song streamed on a non-stop loop, and one album across four discs intended to be played simultaneously.

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Live Reviews Music

Jeff Beck makes the sublime look effortless

On Jeff Beck’s first day recording Roger Waters’ album Amused To Death, the story goes, he showed up with a distortion pedal in his back pocket and an unplayed signature Fender ripped out of a cardboard box moments earlier. “You got an amp?” he asked. Didn’t need anything else. Just plugged in and played.

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Live Reviews Music

Tool are twisted but majestic

“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.

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Live Reviews Music

Foals rock Brixton Academy with a smile

“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”.

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Music Reviews

Bloc Party’s Alpha Games is an album of our times

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.

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Music

Into The Never goes down the spiral

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.

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Live Reviews Music

Ghost haunt The O2

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.

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