Chubby and the Gang - The Mutt’s Nuts
You know the score by now: aggressive rock band releases first album packed to the rafters with direct power-pop anthems, before dialing things down for a second effort which is a more restrained effort to make headway into the mainstream.
While it would be a tall order to expect London punks Chubby And The Gang to, a) give a damn about the mainstream, or b) even consider dialing things down, they’ve clearly given the idea some consideration. Whilst diversifying their sound a bit, they’ve added yet more aggression, power and pace; for those familiar with last year’s Speed Kills this will sound unlikely, but it’s true.
Their punk hardcore sound has lengthened, rather than broadened. On their debut, no song clocked in over three minutes, whereas here they’re almost indulgent by comparison, yet it just mainly shows that their stamina has improved.
The first six tracks are an unfiltered onslaught; the title-track, which opens the album, features the band referring to themselves in the lyrics and announcing their return. It succinctly captures the freneticism of early Green Day uncannily and, were it not for the London accent at the end thanking us, they could be mistaken for the Californian trio.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/08/review-chubby-and-the-gang-mutts/
Idles - Live At The Louisiana - 23rd August 2021
Now then, where were we?
Although IDLES weren’t cut off mid-flow when the pandemic hit (coming as it did between album cycles for them), they do have some lost time to make up as third album Ultra Mono nears its first anniversary.
Fittingly, their first ‘proper’ gig (i.e. one with a crowd) since December 2019 is a homecoming show at tiny, 140-capacity Louisiana, and also a tantalising teaser for their next big Bristol show at The Downs early next month.
Their first at the venue since 2015 (as local legend Big Jeff informs your correspondent afterwards), the atmosphere is surprisingly calm before the gig, almost as if no-one can quite believe it will happen.
As the band take to the stage (the only way they can, walking directly through the crowd) and open with the metallic, slicing grind of ‘War’, what feels briefly like a collective sigh of relief transforms into an immediate channelling of the righteousness that is the band’s modus operandi. We’re immediately transported back to a place of reassuring comfort.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/08/review-idles-bristol-louisiana/
Wings Of Desire - Amun-Ra
From the ashes of the late Inheaven, who burned briefly but brightly over the last few years of the previous decade, rises Wings Of Desire.
Chloe Little and James Taylor’s first EP under the name – End Of An Age – was more inward-looking and introspective, whereas on Amun-Ra they aim for the stars once again, with success.
Amun-Ra is named after the Egyptian deity, the transcendental creator of the universe and the god of light, which should give you some idea of the subject matter included.
Exuberant opener ‘Choose A Life’ riffs on the infamous and instructive Trainspotting monologue (‘Choose a life, get a job, pick a wife, fuck it all,’) while covering the nature of friendship and self-love. Yet it’s delivered through a spectrum of gloriously ecstatic shoegaze on a summer breeze, the type of music to listen to on a starry summer night and divine in its majesty.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/08/review-chubby-and-the-gang-mutts/
George Harrison - All Things Must Pass (50th Anniversary Edition)
Coming hot on the heels of its 30th and 40th anniversary editions, The Quiet One’s masterpiece now comes with even more bells and whistles including, in the uber deluxe version, a wooden bookmark made from a felled Oak tree from Harrison’s estate. All for the reasonable price of £859.99.
While that is probably too rich for my, your or even Paul McCartney’s blood, it has to be said that few other albums are worthy of such comprehensive attention.
With the (understandable) domination of John Lennon and Paul McCartney compositions throughout The Beatles’ career, George Harrison was left to stockpile his own work – barring a track or two for each record – throughout the 1960s until the Fab Four officially split in April 1970.
Wasting no a second and armed with a plethora of songs, George Harrison entered three studios in London in May determined to make up for lost time.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/08/george-harrison-pass-50th-review/
Chris Watson - Secret Garden
Sometimes a song stops you in your tracks. Beholden to it’s beauty, it envelopes you for it’s entire run time before you awaken from your haze and sadly realise that you must return to the real world.
‘Secret Garden’ is one such track. Carrying the perfect summer vibe, the listener is gently brought into it’s orbit via the tweeting of birds before the luscious Parisian accordion kicks in. A sumptuous melody carries the listener through the verse and chorus then, just when you think you’ve got a handle on where Watson is taking you, a spiky, watertight guitar solo, seemingly lifted directly from the 1960s, takes the song somewhere else for a few glorious seconds before a final round wistful melancholia.
If I hadn’t been told this was a debut single, I’d never believe it. Polished and pure, it’s the essential soundtrack as we enter the last few weeks of summer.
Secret Garden is released digitally everywhere on Friday 6th August through Colorama Records, the brainchild of Andy Crofts (The Moons, Paul Weller).
LUMP - Animal
The bridesmaid of the Mercury Awards (four nominations and counting), Laura Marling returns in tandem with her part-time collaborative partner Mike Lindsay of Tuung for their second outing as the charming moniker LUMP (in fairness, the name was provided by Marling’s five-year-old god-daughter) which is also their ‘mascot’, a furry hulking animal which appears on promotion etc.
Lindsay and Marling supposedly met on the bowling lanes at a Neil Young aftershow, with Lindsay promising to provide ‘strange, wonky music’ to which Marling could attach subconsciously obscure words and, while their first album was met with warm if not glowing reviews, it appears the pair felt there was much more left in the tank.
With an intent to offering an alternative to her usual confessional style, Marling adopts a more stream of consciousness approach; while the songstress should be lauded for a different attitude, it does unfortunately result in a mixed bag when it comes to musical enjoyment.
Inhaler - It Won’t Always Be Like This
It seems churlish given what has been going on in the world over the last 18 months to discuss pressure when talking about rock stars and not healthcare workers, but everything is relative.
Imagine being in a young, upcoming band. Imagine striving to get a record deal. Imagine then striving again simply to make an impression. Then, as you are building a healthy amount of momentum, your stock in trade is removed from under you, so your debut album (which has pressures of its own, least of all being signed to a ruthlessly impatient major label) is held back for a year, yet you can’t ply your trade and harness your sound.
Then imagine your dad is the face (and voice) of one of the biggest bands of all time.
Whilst it’s unfair to mention singer Eli Hewson’s father (Bono Vox, by the way) in reference to Inhaler – an entirely unrelated (if you will) entity – the frontman has played a shrewd game: he knows it will be brought up in every article or review and so, rather than disassociate himself or be petulant, Hewson Jnr has been refreshingly open and courteous about the fact. They can’t beat you around the head with it if you own it.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/07/inhaler-always-be-review/
Lightning Bug - A Color Of The Sky
One of the great musical cities in the world, New York is famous for the bands it has spawned over the decades, many of who can lay claim to shaping modern pop culture.
Against such a backdrop of creativity and innovation, it must surely be easy to harness the vibrancy, energy and diversity of the city into music, yet the fact that the method is tried and tested equally inspires artists to think differently.
Lightning Bug have always operated on the fringes of the city’s scene, with several false starts. Despite having never played a gig before their debut album was released nearly seven years ago, said album was a mini-hit, with a spot on the NME’s ‘Best Debut Albums Of The Year’ list in 2015.
The Lounge Society - Silk For The Starving
Earlier in the year music fans were treated to a glut of albums that were delayed because of the pandemic.
We are now in the second wave (if you will) of lockdown albums; those recorded during that awful period, with a third wave of albums in a few months that will be joyously uplifting as we (hopefully) sample freedoms that we once took for granted.
Yet have a care for the young bands, those that were taking earnest steps into the world of music in early 2020, starting to build-up a following or harnessing their craft through live shows. Cut down in their prime, all momentum stalled, many will have to start from scratch.
Having plied their trade in their native Calder Valley – now an unlikely hotbed of British music (Working Men’s Club and The Orielles hail from nearby) centred around The Trades Club and The Golden Lion – The Lounge Society are the latest on the seemingly endless Speedy Wunderground conveyor belt of exciting new music.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/06/the-lounge-society-silk-review/
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds - Back The Way We Came (Vol. 1)
Upon launching his solo career in 2011, Noel Gallagher found himself in a position he hadn’t occupied for nearly twenty years; facing an unknown future. His former band Oasis were so well-established that their cycle was unwavering: write, record album, tour, repeat. Whatever the virtues of their material (which were frequently decried), the iconic band could always rely on selling out tours and playing to the masses.
Ten years on, we have a clearer picture. Liberated by numerous different factors, Noel Gallagher has simply reaffirmed his position as one of the UK’s foremost songwriters, ably demonstrated by this retrospective.
The self-titled debut was his strongest collection of songs for a decade and a half, with the album being so successful that any doubts he may have had now probably seem ridiculous. The grandiose ‘Everybody’s On The Run’ may be lyrically insignificant (his default setting of preaching positivity) but proceedings are more about bombast and scale, completed by a sublime string arrangement. After spending a decade apologising for Be Here Now, Noel Gallagher was going big again, with the Crouch End Festival Chorus supplying added grandeur for good measure. His first solo single, ‘The Death Of You And Me’ (how we speculated over that title) take it’s cue from ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’, but the inclusion of some New Orleans jazz hinted Gallagher was tip-toeing away from the confinements of his former band.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/06/review-noel-gallagher-back-way-came/
Review - James - All The Colours Of You
You may not have noticed, but James are quietly becoming bigger and more important than ever before.
The common myth – as singer Tim Booth has pointed out in promotion for this, their sixteenth studio album – is that the band aren’t popular anymore yet sell more tickets than they ever have.
The point Booth is making, of course, is that the media may not care much for the band yet the people still do, demonstrated by their arena tour later this year and their prestigious headline slot as ‘London reopens’ (and therefore so does the UK…cough, cough) at Kenwood House at the end of June.
There are few bands better suited to the occasion. For nearly forty years James have been consistently harnessing their craft, and few can have a better catalogue of uplifting, crowd-engaging songs: the songs on All The Colours Of You will slot seamlessly into their impressive canon.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/06/review-james-colours-you/
Interview - Jim Glennie, James
Back in 2018, legendary band James released an album entitled Living In Extraordinary Times against a backdrop of climate change, the rise of right-wing populism and race divides which were bubbling under the surface.
For context, it was eighteen months into Donald Trump’s four-year term as President of the United States, during the height of the Brexit debate, shortly after a record period of summer heat in the UK. No-one had even heard of George Floyd, and COVID wasn’t even a word in the common vocabulary.
With that in mind, Live4ever’s first question to Jim Glennie, founding member of the band, was simply: Do you wish you’d saved that album title?
“Could it get any more extraordinary?,” he replied. “It’s gone from extraordinary to bizarre. When we called the album that, they were extraordinary times, they were bonkers. I bet everyone in history, whoever you ask in whatever period, says they are living through extraordinary times.”
“It’s just gone even madder and stranger. I hope it’s just some bizarre anomaly that we never have to go through again. Something we tell the grandkids about; the days when we used to wear facemasks in Tesco and not the beginning of something new, where we have to go into lockdown every couple of years.”
That, in a nutshell, sums up James’ approach to music over the last few years. Since their reformation in 2007, the currently-seven-piece band have steadily become both more mainstream (not that they ever weren’t) and, to their immense credit, much more explicitly politically conscious.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/05/live4ever-interview-james/
Interview - Adam Young, The Howlers
Pre-pandemic, London three-piece The Howlers were making steady inroads with their garage/post-punk rock, with the gigs gradually increasing in capacity and their steady run of singles starting to garner attention from the likes of Steve Lamacq.
Worldwide events acted to curtail any further progress, but that was insignificant compared to their personal situations.
“We all suspected we had it (COVID-19) at the beginning,” frontman Adam Young tells me. “Cam (drummer) definitely did. We were just keeping each other going. For the first time Gus (bass) opened up about his mental health, while me and Cam openly struggle with ours.”
Tragically, the darkness wasn’t just limited to the band members: “During the pandemic I lost two family members to COVID-19. During that time it was really difficult for us, because we’d just lost our career path, I’d just lost family. It was a difficult time for us, but we used that time to reflect on the band and who we were as people and as a family.”
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/05/the-howlers-live4ever-interview/
Interview - Louise Wener, Sleeper
Louise Wener speculates: “Given what’s happened subsequently, and the last few years, it feels like a golden period. That rose-tinted spectacled view of it is only going to entrench. It could be the last magic moment in the way we lived in western democracy, who knows?”
“We were at peace because we didn’t care as much. It was just a construct. I don’t think New Romantic bands sat and thought about their New Romantic-ness. It’s either over-analysed or people are ‘blah’ about it. It’s either too much or too little, but it’s somewhere in the middle.”
“We were just chancers trying to make a record that someone liked. We didn’t sit there thinking about our place in this commentary of Britpop. I think the way it’s written about now is overwrought. It didn’t bother us because we didn’t give it validity.”
Right, that’s the compulsory Britpop question out of the way. On to business.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/02/live4ever-interview-sleeper/
Caught Beneath The Landslide: The Other Side of Britpop & The 90s
For the uninitiated, Kevin Cummins is one of rock’s (albeit not exclusively) foremost photographers.
To anyone with a cursory knowledge of iconic imagery in music, his work will be familiar, having captured everyone from Joy Division to George Clinton.
Last year he released a book of his work which chronicled the Britpop years (While We Were Getting High) during which he was the NME’s chief photographer and now, so as to give the book the chance to shine, under his name an accompanying compilation is being released.
If you think you don’t need another Britpop compilation, think again. This is no ‘Biggest Britpop Anthems’ or anything so vulgar, but a collection of curios and lesser-heard tracks by the biggest (and not-so-biggest) bands of the 1990s.
The choices are summed up by the Oasis inclusion; it would be bizarre not to have the track which the compilation takes its name from (‘Champagne Supernova’), but rather than the over-played version from (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, here we are treated to a lesser-heard, Brendan Lynch mix of the song.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/05/review-kevin-cummins-landslide/
Luwten - Draft
If you choose an unusual name it will stick with you throughout your career, as Amsterdam-based songwriter Tessa Douwstra is finding out.
However, if you’re clever about it, it can work in your favour. The literal meaning of Luwten is ‘a place without wind’, which reflects her second album more concisely than most reviews (including this one) will. There is no tumult or chaos within; Draft is a calm and ordered piece of work.
The looped staccato vocal clip which opens the album nags away throughout ‘The Thought Of You’, as if to reflect the anxiety and increased heart rate when a certain someone embeds themselves in your psyche.
Laundromat - Red EP
Meet Me In St Louis frontman Toby Haynes releases the final part of his ‘colours’ trilogy of Laundromat EPs after the Blue and Green efforts last year.
Exploring lyrical themes of mental health, friendship and erstwhile politicians, it’s arguably the most complete set of the three.
Once again the production is muffled, akin to Unknown Mortal Orchestra, yet that increases the intimate air; a scrape of orchestral strings announces Flat Planet, which begins with a strident bassline before gnarly guitars are introduced halfway through. It crams a lot into its three-minute runtime.
Brits & Pieces - Volume II
The first in this series (can we presume?) of compilations was released in back in December.
It was an initiative set up by indie fan Marc Rossiter (he of the Brits & Pieces) with a few objectives; to showcase the UK’s still flourishing independent music scene, to revitalise compilation albums as a whole and, most nobly, to raise money for the unsigned bands featured on the album.
With patronage from Robert Carlyle, Steve Lamacq, Clint Boon and Peter Doherty amongst countless others, and available from Rough Trade stores, Volume One hit number 54 on the Official Compilation Chart.
When compiling the first album, Rossiter simply floated the idea on Twitter and awaited responses. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that he was swamped with requests (and probably has been since), certainly more than could fit on one album, and so, some five months on, we have the sequel.
As is apparent from the title, the album spans the UK with artists from all over the nation but proves, by sheer volume, that the North is a hotbed of music. ‘Twas ever thus.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/05/review-brits-pieces-ii/
Interview - Ben Thatcher, Royal Blood
‘A lot of people have boxed us into the rock and roll thing, but Mike and I came from a pop background; pop and funk. This new record shows some of the other influences that we like in music.”
“Mike was always a fan of having an instrument and making it sound like another instrument; in the first band I was in with him, he had a keytar that he made sound like a bass. Then he had a bass that he made to sound like a guitar, and now he’s got it sounding like some keyboard.”
We don’t hear much about the keytar nowadays, so to hear it played a formative part in one of the biggest bands in the world is a surprise, but it shouldn’t be: Royal Blood defy expectations.
A duo consisting of bass and drums shouldn’t work, and yet the evidence suggest that it palpably does. After two wildly successful albums, Royal Blood have broadened their palette to incorporate French disco and The Bee Gees as influences (among many others) for new album Typhoons.
When I caught up with drummer Ben Thatcher for the second part of our Royal Blood double-header, he explained how the duo used the last year to their advantage.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/04/royal-blood-interview-2/
The Coral - Coral Island
Mainstays of British alternative music for nearly twenty years, The Coral purposely walk out of step with whatever is regarded as cool that week.
They’ve always offered glimpses of their unique viewpoint, whether it be of hickory docks or of gypsy market blues, but it has only ever been allowed to be witnessed from afar, a netherworld of mischief. No more.
On Coral Island we are specifically and cordially invited into their world across 24 tracks. For those intimidated by the time required to commit to such an undertaking, fear not; nine of the said tracks are interludes, narrated by the grandfather of the Skelly brothers. As we navigate the funfair of the island, the album clocks in at under an hour.
The narrator, Ian Murray (otherwise known as The Great Muriarty), has a voice which both evokes his years of experience but also has a sprightly, impish quality which suggests it’s a family trait, but he’s a teller of tales rather than a ringmaster, as whimsically befuddled as the rest of us.
On opener ‘Welcome To Coral Island’ (also the title of Part One of this double album), he tells us that, ‘you become an impression of yourself, whatever that means,’ a clear sign that we should leave logic in the harbour.
https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/04/review-the-coral-island/