Girl Trouble are a garage-punk band from Tacoma, Washington, who have been powering out guitar-based coolness since 1983, and if history teaches us anything, it’s that bands who have been around that long either get tired and run out of ideas or they find a good groove that they can ride almost infinitely. Girl Trouble fall into the latter category, and they continue to find joy in three chords, a cheap guitar run through a cranked-up amp, and a stomped-out 4/4 rhythm.
2026’s As Is is the first studio album from Girl Trouble since 2005’s The Illusion of Excitement, and if a two-decade-plus recording layoff might suggest they’ve gotten a bit rusty, a couple spins of the album confirm that’s hardly the case. Kurt P. Kendall’s big, beefy vocals, Kahuna’s…
Category: rock
…features new cuts ‘Emotionally Unavailable’ and ‘Medication’, as well as rarities ‘Dirty Looks’, ‘Sharpening Knives’ and ‘Overload’. The deluxe release is rounded out by a collection of demos and early mixes of tracks from the original album.
The story of Suede has never been one of steady linear progression, but even so, 2022’s Autofiction sent their needles zigzagging all over the charts, a tectonic reboot that shifted the direction of their already impressive comeback era.
Antidepressants plugs into similar post-punk energies – Killing Joke, The Chameleons, The Cure – but as the PiL-like title track’s untethered jolt and jeer shows, Suede’s emotional safety catches and musical circuit breakers are very much off.
Through a background chatter of mechanised…
Released in 1986, Seventh Star was the twelfth studio album recorded by Black Sabbath for Warner. The first of three collaborations between guitarist and Black Sabbath founder member, Tony Iommi and former Deep Purple and Trapeze vocalist Glenn Hughes, the album featured the MTV and radio hit “No Stranger To Love.” Pressed on black vinyl, and also available on CD, this newly remastered edition now includes the single remix version of “No Stranger To Love.”
An often misunderstood and underrated album, 1986’s Seventh Star was never intended to be a Black Sabbath release, as the band had effectively broken up following its disastrous 1984 tour in support of career low point Born Again. Instead, Seventh Star was conceived…
Thin Lizzy’s debut album is their latest to be remixed and expanded – featuring remixes, single-only and EP material, rare and unissued radio sessions and 11 unreleased outtakes.
…Coming for the 55th anniversary of the Irish band’s first album, the Thin Lizzy box follows similarly expansive sets featuring remixed and rarities-packed versions of the albums Nightlife and Fighting (released last year in the 7CD collection 74-75) as well as Jailbreak and Johnny the Fox (chronicled in the 5CD/Blu-ray anthology 1976 back in 2024). As with those sets, engineer Richard Whittaker has remixed the full album as well as subsequent EP New Day from the original tapes; the new album mix will be available in stereo alongside the original mix. Two BBC…
Flying in from unexpected angles, Jack White’s albums this decade so far have proved him to be as creatively fidgety as ever. Following his 2022-released diptych Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive – the first sonically outré futuristic rock, the latter an acoustic-leaning album that wandered through country, folk and even jazz – there came the stunning stylistic consolidation of 2024’s No Name. Rather than be tempted to retrace the template of the latter, White’s thoughts have already moved on.
A certain playfulness, however, remains in terms of White’s pre-release teasing of Frozen Charlotte. While white label copies of No Name were furtively slipped into the bags of shoppers at the Third Man Records stores in London,…
Preparing for the final song of his Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour on Friday (May 22) night in Cleveland, Bruce Springsteen reminded the Rocket Arena crowd that “the E Street Band was built for hard times.”
Those times have inarguably become harder during the seven-and-a-half weeks since the 20-date trek began in Minneapolis, and it was evident on Friday that it’s only made the group, 20 strong on this outing, harder and Springsteen even more focused and resolute in his mission.
Cleveland marked the 17th date of the tour — and the start of its final week — which is likely to culminate in an even more pointed and poignant reckoning on May 27 at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. The tour wraps May 30 in…
Aussie hard rock combo Rose Tattoo have persisted on and off with many personnel changes for many decades, despite the deaths of most of the early band’s lineup. Emerging in the late 1970’s with a bluesy blend of strident hard rock and melodic, no-frills heavy metal, the band’s first four albums yielded the hits “Bad Boy for Love,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw,” “Nice Boys,” and “Scarred for Life.” One of Australia’s premier hard rock acts, Rose Tattoo found less success overseas, though they did influence American acts like Guns N’ Roses, Keel, L.A. Guns, and Nashville Pussy, all of whom have covered the band’s songs.
Rose Tattoo was formed in Sydney in 1976 by ex-Buffalo guitarist Peter Wells and — with the additions of former Buster Brown…
The lineup of the oddly titled SPLAT! may only be 3/5 of the Deep Purple that gave us the iconic riffy ’70s “Smoke on the Water” hits. But considering those days are over five decades in the past, you might not know it.
A trio from that classic Mark ll lineup — bassist Roger Glover, singer/songwriter Ian Gillan and drummer Ian Paice — remain. And even though they are 80, or close to it, (relatively new guitarist Simon McBride who joined in 2022 is just 47) there is no question from the throbbing licks on opening track “Arrogant Boy” that no vitality or spark is lacking in these performances from guys who could be sitting back collecting residual checks.
SPLAT! arrives just two years after 2024s =1, another late-career juggernaut that…
Like Tony Allen’s drumming in Fela Kuti’s band, or Clyde Stubblefield’s beats for James Brown, there’s something essentially timeless about krautrock rhythms. Can’s Jaki Leibezeit and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger created a rhythmic language that is “motorik” in every sense – a way of delineating forward-momentum, a propulsive groove that links rock music’s physicality with the repetition of electronica. Perhaps this is why a genre of music that emerged in a West German counterculture of the early ’70s continues to represent futurism and progress, even for bands who have absolutely no contact with Germany – from Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch to Chicago’s Lifeguard; from Sao Paulo’s Bike to Bristol’s Beak; from London’s Snapped Ankles to Venice’s Squadra Omega.
By 1976, Uriah Heep was on shaky ground. Although they had scored a big success with Return to Fantasy, the group was suffering from personality conflicts (vocalist David Byron left after this album) and division over their musical direction. This tension is visibly apparent on High and Mighty, an album that shows flashes of the group’s old firepower, but is ultimately sunk by a combination of unfocused experimentation and uneven songwriting. It starts promisingly with a solid first side: “One Way or Another” is a surging, dramatic hard rocker that features Ken Hensley trading verses with bassist John Wetton, and “Misty Eyes” is an engaging up-tempo tune that trades the group’s hard rock thunder for a sound built on some tasty acoustic guitar riffs.
The volumes of music referenced in the title of Gnod’s latest dispatch are slated to total three, all of them drawn from just shy of a week in the studio. In many ways, this Salford-originated experimental group are different – in personnel, setup, lifestyle – from their beginnings, two decades ago this year, but by no means comprehensively so, and this sort of nose-to-tail approach to serving up their recording sessions is reminiscent of when there’d be a new Gnod release practically every other month.
Moreover, on the evidence of Chronicles of Gnowt Vol.1 there’s no reason to think they’re offering us offcuts. With vocals featuring only sporadically, it lacks the polemical feel of some of their releases, but insularity can be very fruitful…
It is true that the number of artists covering that currently popular ground between Americana and pop/rock. Yet the key there is how distinctive their music is – whether they separate themselves from the rest and whether they come up with enough individual elements to separate themselves from the rest. A hard task that gets even harder if you go the independent (self-releasing) way.
Singer songwriter Amelia Day can easily paste her photo along with everything that is described above – her music is right in the center of that now ever-popular sub-genre, and she is doing it all by herself with her latest 7-song EP, Ego Trip.
She knows best what the title relates to, but on the evidence of her songs here, there’s no ego trip involved on her part here – she can…
Incredible live concert from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting one of the band’s first ever shows in Europe, at Düsseldorf Philipshalle on 27th September 1976.
When Rainbow finally landed in Europe for their debut live shows there, it was on the back of both the albums ‘Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’ and ‘Rainbow Rising’ having charted, so the band were playing sold out venues, and what a band… with the line up consisting of Ritchie Blackmore, Ronnie James, Cozy Powell, Jimmy Bain and Tony Carey. As one of the cornerstones of British Rock, Rainbow, led by the never-predictable but ever-astonishing guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, became synonymous with some of the most well regarded and popular charting Rock songs of the seventies and eighties.
Take a look at Thames & Hudson’s magnificently illustrated coffee table tome Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco, and among the phantasmagorical, hallucinogenic artwork promoting nights at venues such as the Fillmore, Winterland, Carousel and Avalon ballrooms, three names trailing clouds of lysergic glory occur more than any others – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Yet although the Dead and the Airplane have become the stuff of legend, the other corner of the original San Fran acid-rock trinity has been rather forgotten. This 79-track boxset chronicling Quicksilver’s protean iterations over seven albums in the space of five tumultuous years – along with a generous helping of bonus tracks…
Emerging from the gentle coastal terrain of South Cornwall, England, The Heavenly Bodes’ debut LP, The Green Hills, is, at times, a reflection of its surroundings. The album’s opener, “De Gruene Heuvels” (the album’s title in Dutch), and its closer, “The Heavenly Bode,” both have a jangly late-’60s country-rock vibe reminiscent of The Byrds and Mike Nesmith’s solo output. “De Gruene Heuvels” bears a resemblance to The Monkees’ tune “Circle Sky” from the cult classic film Head, with its freaked-out fuzz guitar lines layered over jangly rhythm guitar. “The Heavenly Bode” uses a similar formula but adds shimmering guitar work and fiery fuzz leads to propel it along. Both songs possess a down-home style filtered through a kaleidoscopic haze.
Grateful Dead is dipping into its archives for a 60th anniversary concert release going back to the band’s earliest years.
Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA (7/3/66) arrives on 2 CDs, digital/streaming, or 3 LPs. The concert, recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley, previously appeared as part of the 2015 box set 30 Trips Around the Sun. Featuring Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir, the show has been mastered for this release by Jeffrey Norman with speed correction and restoration by Plangent Processes.
Songs include the earliest known recordings of “Cardboard Cowboy,” “You Don’t Have to Ask,” and “Tastebud,” as well as a cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love.”