Watching it at Chapter on Friday and then hearing producer Geoff Barrow, lead actor Marc Bessant and principal writer Rob Williams talk about the processes, creative decisions and challenges was a real treat.
Buzz report here.
As with the recent Pavement soundtrack album, it's hard to assess Animal Collective's sonic companion-piece to Sam Fleischner's documentary film Jetty outside the context of the film - but, if it's being released as a standalone record, then needs must. Expect ambient weirdness rather than wonky pop thrills.
Buzz review here.
After a good run - The Offing, The Perfect Golden Circle, Cuddy, Rare Singles - Jesus Christ Kinski is the first Benjamin Myers novel in a few years that I haven't had the opportunity to enthuse about for Buzz. Centred around irascible German actor Klaus Kinski's infamous 1971 one-man show playing Jesus, the book is very different to anything he's written before - but then that's his modus operandi, and the reviews suggest it's another winner.
Appearing as a guest on Jen Bowden's Northern Voices podcast recently, Myers talked about Jesus Christ Kinski and some of its predecessors, as well as discussing diversity and tokenism in the publishing industry and having not a chip but perhaps a crisp on his shoulder as a proudly northern writer in a world that still revolves around London and the south east.
The conversation left me all the more convinced that I really must seek out his early novel Pig Iron. It was also good to learn that the big-screen adaptation of The Offing will be filming next year, with conversations about a similar treatment for The Perfect Golden Circle in process and a new novel and novella set for publication in 2027.
Amid the relentless torrent of shit, a rare good news story: that of striker Richard Kone's remarkable route to becoming a Championship footballer with QPR and an Ivory Coast international potentially destined for next year's World Cup.
What particularly caught my eye was that Kone's journey began with the 2019 Homeless World Cup here in Cardiff, where he represented his country as a teenager. As I reported for Buzz, it was a brilliant event - though one that owed its existence to Michael Sheen's financial backing, with funding having fallen through at the eleventh hour.
Kone claims that the experience was "life changing". I can only hope that Sheen has seen Kone's story and takes pride in the impact that his generosity and general enthusiasm has had.
I wasn't really that bothered about missing out on seeing My Bloody Valentine on the current tour - until I read Daniel Dylan Wray's report from Manchester, that is.
It's a wonderful review, cogently making the case that subjection to noisy music may potentially be a profoundly cathartic experience: "There is a remarkable feeling of clarity and serenity that hits when this music lands at full force - a potent and uplifting feeling of peace and harmony can be triggered when you submit yourself to this onslaught and become sucked up in it."
Wray also makes mention of the fact that MBV paid tribute to Mani, who was for a short time a bandmate of Kevin Shields in Primal Scream: "Those who saw Primal Scream live during their XTRMNTR era, in which Mani was on bass and Shields was on guitar, speak about it with a giddy reverence of a band operating at the full throttle peak." I'm no PS fan generally, but you can count me in that number.
Wray's debut book Groovy, Laidback And Nasty - a history/profile of the music scene of his native Sheffield - is due to be published by White Rabbit in May next year, and, as a fan of pretty much everything he seems to do for the Guardian and the Quietus, I'm eager to get my mitts on a copy.
It was a curious coincidence that no sooner had I got my head out of Paul Morley's latest book on David Bowie than Ned Raggett was opening his Quietus piece marking the 40th anniversary of Psychocandy with Bowie's dismissal of his fellow Velvet Underground fans as "awful" and "so sophomoric". He wasn't wrong about many things, but it's fair to say Bowie was well wide of the mark when it came to The Jesus & Mary Chain.
Raggett situates the band behind this now-legendary debut in the lineage of artists who have instinctively understood that the combination of "hooks and noise" simply works. The Jesus & Mary Chain would dial back the obliterating feedback on later releases, but even at this early stage, Raggett notes, "they pretty clearly loved the sweet stuff and not just the sour, the winsome and beautiful, not just the Jesus fuck of it all". The clues are all there in the album title.
Raggett also acknowledges that, simple though the lyrics often are, they are often perfect - especially right at the start of lead single 'Never Understand': "The sun comes up, another day begins / And I don't even worry about the state I'm in."
GWENIFER RAYMOND / SAM GRASSIE, 19TH NOVEMBER 2025, CARDIFF PARADISE GARDEN
It comes as no surprise whatsoever to learn that Sam Grassie was a Bert Jansch Foundation Young Artist between 2020 and 2022. No doubt the late fingerstyle legend would have been flattered to hear his influence coming through loud and clear in a guitarist of the new folk generation. Glaswegian Grassie produces fingerpaintings of what feel like pastoral scenes shadowed with darkness; as such, he's a perfect support act for the evening's headliner.
No stranger to Wales, he performed in Green Man's Walled Garden last year, and is no less engaging in this rather smaller but equally horticulturally themed space. "I have a back-up set for when people are talking", he admits with a laugh - but the audience's respectful silence (well earned) ensures he never needs to fall back on it tonight.
If we're going to laud overseas visitors like Marissa Nadler for their entrancing takes on traditional American music, then it's only right that we should be equally fulsome in our praise of the incredible talent doing likewise on our own doorstep. Gwenifer Raymond may have decamped to Brighton, but she's clearly enjoying being back on home turf, delighted to have been able to nip to her mum's for cake between soundcheck and showtime.
Hers is mountain music, transposed from Appalachia to the Garth. Armed only with an acoustic guitar, she is a summoner of storms, a lightning rod, an orchestrator of elemental forces. That she achieves this without the aid of technotrickery, merely through skill, is astonishing. She was once quoted as saying of certain old bluesman "I loved how they could make the guitar sound as if there was more than one playing"; at times tonight, it sounds as though there might be three or four, duelling with each other in different time signatures.
Raymond's distrust of her own singing voice and consequent preference for instrumentals has had the bonus of giving her greater creative licence. The heroes of her youth, Nirvana, became so jaded with the verse-chorus-verse structure that they wrote a song about it; in refusing to be bound by it herself, she is free to be more inventive, explorative and adventurous.
This gig may be to promote new album Last Night I Saw The Dog Star Bark, but the show is stolen by the incredible 'Hell For Certain' from 2020's Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain. Its intensity and aggression betray her background in grunge and punk; not only is a hard rain gonna fall, but on occasion it genuinely pelts it down.
I'll be honest: the first glimpse I get of Raymond is at the merch stand afterwards. The combination of low/no stage, seated performer and cordon of lanky guitar nerds is not conducive to clear sight lines, even for a six-footer. But no matter: rather like being blindfolded, it feels as though your sense of hearing is quickened, and without the distraction of the visual those of us towards the back are able to focus purely on these expressive stories told without words, savouring an intimate audience with a virtuoso.
(An edited version of this review appeared on the Buzz website.)
It's not often that the shower of shite currently calling themselves the Labour Party gets something right, but the decision to ban all reselling of event tickets for anything over face value should be welcomed - even if it has been a mystifyingly/frustratingly long time in coming.
The likes of Radiohead, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and The Cure were among the musicians and bands to put pressure on the party to keep their election pledge to tackle the problem of touting.
Prior to the announcement, Stubhub and Viagogo were predictably bleating about the supposedly damaging effects of a ban, such as fans being induced to resort to unregulated sites - as though a nominally regulated racket was somehow much preferable. What a tragedy that their business model has now been trashed - and that the business regulator is scrutinising their operations.
When Nigel Godrich was working on what turned out to be Pavement's final studio album, he claimed he wanted to create something that would "reach people who were turned off by the beautiful sloppiness of other Pavement records". It was a curious ambition for a self-declared fan of the band to want to airbrush out precisely what made them so distinctive, and the resulting record, Terror Twilight, is much maligned. It's like Malkmus and crew have been tamed, scrubbed up and squeezed into a suit and tie that's a couple of sizes too small, shod in brogues that pinch at the toes and heel, and sent off to pitch themselves to a board of executives.
I got the same feeling listening to Hecklers Choice, their new best of compilation - which, though featuring only two tracks from Terror Twilight, is uncharacteristically lean, clean-cut and business-like in its selection.
By contrast, the soundtrack to Alex Ross Perry's film Pavements, released on the same day, is much less all killer, no filler - and much of the filler in this instance is largely incomprehensible if you haven't seen the film.
Buzz reviews of both albums here.
It's fair to say that any disappointment with either/both has been offset by the fact that they've sent me back to the albums. For years, I've been happily declaring Brighten The Corners my favourite, but it's been Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain that's been on particularly high rotation of late.
Reviewing Tortoise's new album Touch for Buzz recently and reading Louis Pattison's Guardian feature on the band reminded me of Pattison's article "The Untold History Of UK Post-Rock", written last year for Bandcamp.
In it, he traces the term "post-rock" back to a Wire piece by Simon Reynolds from 1994. Reynolds was celebrating the nascent genre's sense of creative freedom and experimentation, in much the same way as he did with regard to the immediate post-punk period in Rip It Up And Start Again.
Pattison argues that by the late 90s, there was a glut of UK bands building on the pioneering work of Bark Psychosis, Slint and Tortoise: "[T]he beauty of this era was there was no consensus about what that 'post' in 'post-rock' meant. Everything was in flux, and exactly how the music of tomorrow would sound was up for grabs." I might add that the disparate nature of
Fridge's Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers make a great point about Radiohead's role in "[taking] the ideas of post-rock and transplant[ing] them into a mainstream context". OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac may not be revolutionary records, but they exposed mainstream listeners sucked in by 'Creep' and The Bends to much more complex music that strayed from a strict rock template.
Mogwai were my primary gateway drug, though, with the Glaswegians coming to form a quarter of what I'd identify as post-rock's equivalent of thrash metal's Big Four: Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Ros. I loved them all, and still do, but there's no doubt that their emergence more narrowly codified what the term meant. As Pattison observes, "the sound seemed to harden into formula, coming to mean a largely instrumental music focused around a particular dynamic: play quiet, then loud, then quiet again. Post-rock as a genre would persist, but some of its initial freedom had been lost."
The purpose of his article is not to lament this loss, but to flag up some overlooked gems from "five particularly fertile years between 1996 and 2001". I'm familiar with Billy Mahonie and to a lesser extent Hood, Fridge and Aereogramme, but really should know Pram, Seefeel and Rothko better, and Philosopher's Stone, Eardrum and Fonn are all new names to check out. The late 90s is often seen as a rather dismal period for music, but Pattison proves that (as ever) plenty of interesting activity was going on beneath the surface.
Ever since my first live encounter with Marissa Nadler, at Godspeed You! Black Emperor's ATP in 2010, I've been desperate to see her again. Mercifully, the opportunity finally presented itself in the form of a Cardiff date on the short UK leg of her current European tour in support of new LP New Radiations. Needless to say, she - in tandem with partner-in-crime Milky Burgess - did not disappoint.
Buzz review here.
Buzz long-read report here.
If you only read one thing about Husker Du, make it the chapter from Michael Azerrad's superlative Our Band Could Be Your Life. But if you read two, or need a more condensed history/primer, then Stevie Chick's recent piece for the Quietus is highly recommended.
Chick invites Bob Mould - fresh from speaking about the reformed Sugar - to take a wander even further down memory lane, recalling the band's beginnings in the basement of a St Paul record store, their decision to escape the creative dead end of hardcore punk ("constricting and dogmatic") by bringing in melody, underground success and band breakdown, and patching things up with Grant Hart shortly before his death.
Greg Norton also contributes his reflections, including on his post-Du career in the catering industry: "I discovered that mental health and addiction are as bad in restaurants as in the music business."
Terri White's mini-documentary on child poverty for the Guardian is alarming and eye-opening, not least because of the staggering, shameful statistics that it spells out: 37 per cent of children in Greater Manchester live in poverty, and 75 per cent of kids living in poverty nationally are in working households.
Drawing on her own personal experience, White speaks to an assortment of people, including mums and staff at charities, in a film that underlines the devastating impact of the two-child benefit cap in particular.
The cap is a policy that was introduced by the Tories but that Labour seem reluctant to scrap; indeed, six MPs were suspended for calling for exactly that last summer. In White's film, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, brands the cap "abhorrent", and to his credit he's since backed that up by putting pressure on Keir Starmer to ditch it, as a measure that has "no moral basis".
As White emphasises, child poverty is both preventable and a political choice. The prospect of pleas to remove the cap being heeded seems unlikely, though, given the current state of the party under Starmer's leadership - and I'd strongly advise that you avoid looking at the YouTube comments section if you don't want to despair at the views of your fellow citizens.
Ever since being baffled by a library copy of TNT in my youth, I've never fully grasped what Tortoise are all about. Long-awaited new album Touch hasn't totally won me over, but they do come across as more approachable and less intimidating. Buzz review here.
With the record's release date nearing, the Guardian's Louis Pattison spoke to the band about their early days (once again underlining the inestimable value of cheap rent and the availability of large inner-city spaces for the creation of art), as well as hometown friends (Steve Albini) and British admirers (Squid, Geordie Greep). What comes across particularly is their melange of wildly divergent musical influences - rock, jazz, dancehall, dub, classical - and consequent openness to stylistic experimentation.
On a related note, the Guardian should be commended for their apparent crusade to raise the profile of mid-90s post-rock. The 30th anniversary reissue of Handwriting seems to have been all the excuse they needed to publish a profile of Rachel's, whose music - like that of Tortoise - bridged the gulf between the mainstream and the classical/avant garde.
Listening to Just Mustard's We Were Just Here is like staring at the ripples on the surface of a murky pond, and then finding yourself repeatedly dunked into the chilly depths. With the caveat that I have a nagging feeling I may have underestimated the band's third LP, here's my (necessarily kneejerk) review for Buzz.
Buzz review here.
Not a day goes by without new reminders of the damage that the internet generally but social media in particular have done (and continue to do) to our political landscape. Dangerous echo chambers, amplified misinformation/disinformation, catalysed hate, compromised democracy, intensified culture wars...
Yet it's worth noting, occasionally, that the internet is still seen very differently elsewhere in the world. For Afghani women and girls, for instance, it has been a source of vital connections and a means of personal emancipation through education - a chastening reminder of a positive, revolutionary potential that we in the West have almost completely lost. But as the BBC's Mahfouz Zubaide recently reported, this "last hope" has now been extinguished by the Taliban, and the picture seems bleaker in Afghanistan too.
Buzz review here.
It makes a change for a musician to be giving tours rather than going on them - but it's become a way of life for Idlewild's Roddy Woomble. The long-time Iona resident spoke to the Quietus' Stevie Chick about how he's taken to showing visitors around the island during his downtime from band duties.
Those duties have ratcheted up again recently with the release of a tenth album, this one self-titled. It's curious to think that a band as ragged and chaotic as they once were have lasted so long (with the odd hiatus along the way).
Woomble claimed that "the new record's very much what Idlewild fans have probably wanted for quite a while, referencing ourselves a wee bit: 100 Broken Windows and The Remote Part." While it's a solid enough album, that rather oversells it - it's more like a middle-aged man's idea of what those records are like than a realistic representation. As Oliver Moore-Howells put it in a lukewarm review for Buzz, they're neither idle nor wild these days.
That many fans pine for the 100 Broken Windows/The Remote Part era is entirely understandable - it's when Idlewild were at their most fascinating. They may not quite have ever struck the improbable balance between Black Flag and REM that Woomble had envisaged when they set out, but Hope Is Important and even the Captain EP had given more than a few snatches of a melodicism erupting through, and the fact that production duties on 100 Broken Windows were shared by Shellac's Bob Weston and Manics polisher Dave Eringa speaks volumes about where they were at.
That Black Flag/REM hybrid is mentioned in Steve Miller's Toppermost article on the band - as ever, a concise and helpful primer for anyone not already in the know. Miller rightly notes that with The Remote Part, "as the sharp edges were further smoothed, it's arguable that the band was at risk of losing some of its identity", and alludes to "a push and pull between a band that was trying to reach across the Atlantic, and one that wanted to remember its roots".
That tension was a source of creative energy but also of unbearable internal friction and strain. The Remote Part was the tipping point; something had to give. Once bassist Bob Fairfoull left under a cloud in 2002, having lost the civil war for Idlewild's future, and Woomble promised "As of next year we're going to be a different band really", what had made them so engaging was sadly lost. They've carried on, making a series of sedate, reflective records that have their own merits, but I for one miss the days when tunefulness was forced to fight its corner.
"I want to see if people are still interested." So said Bob Mould to Rolling Stone's David Browne in announcing that Sugar are back with a new song and a selection of live dates. I think "interested" may be an understatement...
For many of those who were too young for Mould's previous three-piece, Husker Du, but were energised by Nirvana (myself included), Sugar's beefy power-pop was a revelation. 1992's Copper Blue was one of a handful of albums for which I owe a debt of gratitude to the local librarian who stocked the CD shelves - a tour de force that still sounds better every time I put it on.
I've seen Mould perform Husker Du songs with No Age at ATP (and been slightly grumpy about it), and even witnessed him play 'Hoover Dam' and 'If I Can't Change Your Mind' at a sweltering Globe, when his solo tour brought him to Cardiff three summers ago. But a full Sugar set is a tantalising prospect. Fingers crossed, then, for more dates beyond the two already announced for London.
And what of the new track, 'House Of Dead Memories'? It certainly has the familiar fire in its belly. The fury and focus of much of Mould's last two albums, Blue Hearts and Here We Go Crazy, must have helped to pave the way for Sugar's resurrection - he's now clearly back in the right headspace to team up with David Barbe and Malcolm Travis. Here's hoping for a full album.
I'll admit to being a little unsettled by the new Antlers album Blight. Partly this is because its gloomy reflections on environmental apocalypse are discomfortingly bleak - though, it should be pointed out, not without good reason, in light of claims that the planet has reached its first climate tipping point. But partly it's because the "fuck around, find out" narrative and especially the implication that human extinction might be a good thing is not a million miles away from the arguments typically used by ecofascists.
However, maybe this is reading too much into things. Let's give Peter Silberman the benefit of the doubt. The record is a heartfelt personal response to an unfolding disaster - one that we absolutely should be confronted with and acknowledge, albeit belatedly (arguably too late), rather than one that we should be able to continue to conveniently ignore.
In many ways, encountering Blight was like bumping into an old flame, its understated beauty and power helping to rekindle a love that, since 2011's Burst Apart, had gone cold.
Buzz review here.
2025 saw the sad death of genius songwriter (not a phrase I use lightly) Brian Wilson. It's also seen the return of the Besnard Lakes, a band very much after his own heart: masters of intricate composition, conjurors of studio magic, purveyors of blissful harmonies, creators of a self-contained world all of their own that you can live inside for days or weeks.
The Besnard Lakes Are The Ghost Nation doesn't mark a radical departure from what has gone before, but it does offer a new set of songs to swoon over.
Buzz review here.
I like to imagine JR Moores as a savage beast caged in the corner of the Quietus offices, pacing back and forth hungrily until another unsuspecting gazelle is sent his way to be torn limb from limb. Inviting him to get his teeth stuck into Richard Ashcroft's new album Lovin' You was always going to yield spectacularly bloody results, maintaining a consistently high score on the snort-laugh-ometer.
Ashcroft is without doubt one of this island's most chronically delusional artists. He's sorely mistaken in believing that his shit not only doesn't stink but merits being repeatedly inflicted on a wider audience. He remains convinced that he's a rebel - and indeed he is, a rebel against all semblance of quality or creativity.
All of which makes him an entirely deserving victim of Moores' withering wit. A choice example: "One of the higher brow comparisons suggests that the object of his wooing has 'da Vinci eyes'. On hearing this ode she might prefer the ears of Van Gogh."
Since reading Moores' demolition job, I've had the extreme misfortune of hearing the album's lead single 'Lover', and can only say that Ashcroft has got off lightly.
And all of this is not even to mention the album cover, which (as someone pointed out on Bluesky) makes it look as though the beachgoers would rather commit mass suicide by walking to a chilly death in the sea than spend another minute in the company of Ashcroft and his acoustic guitar. And, frankly, who can blame them?
Have you heard the one about the Orthodox Jewish housewife who lived a double life entertaining punters with her racy and uproarious hi-NRG routines in Manchester's gay clubs in the 1980s? I certainly hadn't, until Alexis Petridis told Avril A's remarkable story in the Guardian earlier this week.
You've got to love a good old-fashioned British eccentric with a devil-may-care attitude and a healthy disregard for personal dignity.
It's a shame that Upchuck's latest album I'm Nice Now - their first for Domino - doesn't really do them justice. But that's more a reflection on their explosive live performances - lightning like that is notoriously hard to bottle.
Buzz review here.
Happy thirtieth birthday to Sonic Youth's magnificent Washing Machine. To mark the occasion for the Quietus, Stevie Chick has written one of the very best music articles I've read in ages.
As for so many, grunge was my gateway drug, and Dirty was my first exposure to Sonic Youth's noisy delirium. But when I first saw them live, at Reading 1996, the set was predominantly composed of songs from the previous year's LP, a magnum opus to match the much-celebrated Daydream Nation (and blessed with considerably better recording quality). My tiny teenage brain was instantly and forever fried.
Chick does everything right in terms of setting the scene for the album's creation: grunge gone overground, Kurt Cobain dead, a grieving and disillusioned band seeking to retreat from/find a dignified and creative way out of the new corporate rock reality. Similarly, he crafts a credible narrative: Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star was a first abortive attempt to break out (it remains, for me, a scratchy and patchy affair), but they changed tack for Washing Machine, made good their escape and never looked back.
As all the best album appraisals should do, it's given me a newfound appreciation of tracks that I'd previously regarded as relatively inconsequential ('Unwind', in this case). It also offers valuable insights - such as into how their tour with Neil Young turned out to be mutually beneficial, and how the album's signature sound (trebly and free) was shaped by Kim Gordon's decision to largely lay down her bass in favour of a guitar. (As it turns out, I had already read about this, in Goodbye 20th Century, where David Browne argues that Gordon's collaboration with Julie Cafritz in Free Kitten was the catalyst.)
Where Chick's article is truly exceptional is in his descriptions of the record's two longest and most spectacular songs. Here he is on the glorious moment when the title track resolves itself into a groove: "Then the third and final section, where the guitars cease to operate within a realm charted by notes but rather dealing more in pure texture. From halfway through the song, Moore (in the right channel) switches from mutant-blues vamping, to booming raga tones, before being engulfed in distortion. As Gordon strums the rhythm and guitarist Lee Ronaldo ekes out shrieks of feedback, Moore's fuzz-toned and wah-tethered guitar opens wider and wider. It's a truly psychedelic moment, one that reminds me of an old friend's description of being stoned as being like a bubble rising up through your body and popping inside your head. Moore's screeching buzz ascends in frequency, before unhurriedly dipping again, the four musicians backing down from this moment of furious intensity to another musical conversation it feels like we're eavesdropping."
And then there's the extraordinary album closer, 'The Diamond Sea', which (slightly unusually for Sonic Youth) veers off into the leftfield not once but twice. After a brief reprise of verse and chorus, it ventures even further out than before in what Chick refers to as "a series of shifting, abstract passages of feedback, amplifier abuse and pedal fuckery that is beautiful, that is charged with emotion, that feels like spiritual free jazz. It feels like all the emotion, this uncontained loss and grief and anger and sadness, pouring out, so pure and untrammelled it won't obey song-form. To some it will prove unlistenable; to others, myself included, it feels impossibly moving." I can attest to that, even when you're hearing it while sat hungover in a Pizza Hut at Butlins. (Whoever put together that ATP playlist deserves a medal.)
The sub-five-minute edited version on the 'Little Trouble Girl' single is a mere curio - something to listen to once and then file away. No, only the full 20-minute original can really satisfy. Members of Mogwai would certainly agree; in Electric Wizards, JR Moores writes about how they would religiously listen to it backwards as well as forwards.
If I'd been writing a piece like this on Washing Machine, I would probably have tried to find a bit more space for 'Little Trouble Girl', arguably the biggest outlier in the entire Sonic Youth canon. Likewise, 'Skip Tracer', one of my favourite Lee songs, would merit a mention - not least because its spoken-word lyrics give the lie to any insinuation that they were humourless and self-important: "The guitar guy played real good feedback, and super-sounding riffs / With his mild-mannered look on, yeah he was truly hip / The girl started out in red patent leather / Very 'I'm in a band', with kneepads."
I also take slight issue with the suggestion that Washing Machine "map[ped] out the new territory they'd explore during the rest of their career". Certainly, having been at a crossroads, they opted to "continue on this charmed, fearless path, laudably unconcerned by the material world they'd flirted with and then rejected, occasionally frustrating listeners but, more often, indulging us in the magic they could wreak whenever they truly let loose". But they only followed that path so far; after the acutely avant garde abstraction of 2000's New York Ghosts & Flowers, they actually started cycling back towards the centre, and by the time they got to Rather Ripped in 2006, they were back to bottling the lightning in pop-length songs. Swansong The Eternal is a fantastic album, at least in part because it echoes the early 90s records.
Chick does however have more of a point if you factor in Thurston Moore's post-Sonic Youth solo career. After the cathartic blast of the Chelsea Light Moving record and (to a lesser extent) The Best Day, 2017's Rock 'N' Roll Consciousness and 2020's By The Fire both have a free, languid, explorative style familiar from Washing Machine.
Enough nitpicking. Chick's piece does an astonishing job of capturing what it's like to listen to these songs and have your mind blown all over again.
It's only been a month since I wrote about Nick Cave's increasingly troubling politics, but the fact that he's doubled down in a post on The Red Hand Files, and the manner in which he's done so, are nevertheless deeply depressing and deserving of comment.
Responding to a fan's message, he declared himself to be "neither on the left nor on the right" and claimed to be "finding both sides indefensible and unrecognisable". On the surface of it, this is the inverse of "There are good people on both sides", but it amounts to the same thing.
I understand his point about nuance and complexities often being lost in our increasingly polarised political landscape, and agree that sometimes people should simply acknowledge their ignorance on a topic and keep quiet.
But there are some issues for which staying silent is not an option - like a genocide that is taking place before our eyes, for instance. You don't have to understand all of the geopolitical history to know that what is happening in Gaza is profoundly wrong and should be condemned unreservedly. Cave, however, airily rejects "moral certainty" together with "herd mentality and dogma".
Particularly offensive is his comment "I am disturbed on a fundamental level by the self-serving, toddler politics of some of my counterparts" - another dismissive swipe at those in the BDS movement (Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Thurston Moore et al), and others. He added: "I believe we have an obligation to assist those who are genuinely marginalised, oppressed or sorrowful in a way that is helpful and constructive and not to exploit their suffering for our own professional advancement or personal survival."
This cynicism about other artists' motives leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Do Kneecap owe their significant public profile to their very vocal support for Palestine? In part, yes. But it takes far more courage to do what they have done and speak out at every opportunity, in the face of the repressive force of the state, than to sit on the fence sneering at a supposedly fashionable cause.
Many photographers make it their mission to document "things that will soon be gone forever", but few go to lengths quite so extreme as Ragnar Axelsson. In an article for The Photographic Index, a new site founded with an objective "to explore photography as a cultural force", former LIFE editor-in-chief Bill Shapiro spoke to the Icelander about his extraordinary practice.
A passion that began (as it has for many) with the likes of Eugene Smith, Ernst Haas and Henri Cartier-Bresson became an obsession, and for the last 40 years Axelsson has been taking pictures in the Arctic, battling against elemental forces, isolation and extreme cold. At one point, he reveals, he came very close to losing a thumb to frostbite.
Axelsson is fond of photographing those who live and work in these inhospitable conditions, but also concerned to capture the impacts of global warming on this most sensitive of environments. The Arctic is, he claims, "incredibly beautiful" - something that his arresting black-and-white images underline - but that beauty is increasingly under threat.
The extraordinary poem - available to read in full on the site of the London Review Of Books, which first published it - left an indelible mark on me when I first encountered it. Prompted by the desecration of graves in the cemetery where Harrison's parents were buried, V is a mirror up to the realities of Thatcher's Britain in the mid-1980s. As fellow Yorkshire poet Blake Morrison put it in his introduction to the poem in the Independent, "it describes unflinchingly what is meant by a divided society, because it takes the abstractions we have learned to live with - unemployment, racial tension, inequality, deprivation - and gives them a kind of physical existence on the page".
Typically, then, Tory politicians and press (and Mary Whitehouse too, of course) frothed and fulminated against its "bad language" - both an attempt to whip up a moral panic and a cynical distraction technique to deflect attention away from what Harrison was actually trying to say. There was also an evident disgust at Harrison's perceived (ab)use of the poetic form - and indeed the deliberate echoes of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard - to make his point; this was supposedly the sacred transformed into the profane. Yet, as underlined by the supplementary evidence reproduced in the second Bloodaxe edition, V struck a chord at least as widely as it struck a nerve.
Not only did the episode expose a whole swathe of reactionary philistines, it also underlined that poetry was not dusty and moribund; on the contrary, it could still be a living, breathing artform with the capacity to genuinely connect with people on an emotional and intellectual level and to offer insightful commentary on contemporary society. Not bad, as legacies go.
To say the making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was a fraught experience would be an extreme understatement. For a BBC article to mark the re-release of Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the documentary consisting of footage shot by Coppola's wife Eleanor, Daniel Dylan Wray spoke to some of those involved about the behind-the-scenes traumas, tantrums, misdemeanours and misfortunes. I think it's safe to say they don't make 'em like that anymore...
"If you saw Martin Parr and didn't know who he was, you would barely notice him. He is Mr Invisible and Mr Normal rolled into one." So begins Wendy Jones' introduction to this extract from her collaborative book with/about Parr. She's absolutely right - I said as much at the start of my review of Lee Shulman's recent documentary I Am Martin Parr (which is now available on iPlayer) and had it confirmed at Green Man last month, when Parr passed through the crowd unacknowledged by anyone except me.
And yet, as Jones also notes, his life has also been "a life of its century", remarkable in so many ways. "And he photographs it all. He's like a photographic Forrest Gump."
The title of the book, Utterly Lazy And Inattentive, is ironic. It seems absurd to think that those terms, taken from a school report, were ever applied to Parr, a man who is never not working and who has forged a career out of being observant.
In her introduction, Jones explains that Parr's reluctance to speak candidly and personally about himself ruled out a conventional biography, so she changed tack. By inviting him to talk about and through his pictures, she was able to elicit insights into both his worldview and his life.
The Guardian extract features some of his most celebrated images and covers everything from his switch from black and white to colour and Henri Cartier-Bresson's dislike of his Small World series on global tourism, to the perfect cuppa and the horrors of clingfilm.
An image of a woman at a petrol pump from Spending Time prompts Parr to set out what is perhaps his key principle, and one that rings true for so much documentary photography: "[T]here's something very interesting about boring. Something that seems very ordinary at the time becomes interesting when you look back at it later." In many ways, Parr's chief skill is his prescient ability to identify what will be most fascinating a few years down the line.
At a time when (to quote the Quietus on Bluesky) "flagshagging wrong 'uns" appear to be ubiquitous, rallying for racism and violence under the banner "Unite the Kingdom", Nadeem Din-Gabisi is a particularly fascinating voice: a musician who, through new album Offshore and his general aesthetic, is determinedly exploring the complex and often conflicted relationship that many second-generation immigrants have with England.
On the one hand, Din-Gabisi is happy to declare "I feel that we don't antagonise the far right enough". But, on the other, creating an alter ego called Jack Surname George in the Land of Hope and Glory and kitting himself out in full red-and-white football lad kit is not merely a matter of crude provocation. As his conversation with Patrick Clarke amply illustrates, he's refreshingly thoughtful and sharp on identity, politics and nationalism.
Football is the most watched sport in the world and so it takes a very special kind of photographer to offer a fresh, unusual and frequently comic perspective. In Peter Robinson's images, a selection of which have recently been on display at the OOF Gallery in London, the beautiful game wasn't always beautiful - and indeed it wasn't always the focus, with the viewer's attention often drawn more towards the backdrop or to pitchside spectators or fans in the stands. As with Martin Parr and Robin Weaver, the act of observation seems to have been one of his prime subjects.
About all of the little gems of information peppered throughout the text. I had no idea, for instance, that Richey James' vision for the follow-up to The Holy Bible was a record that sounded like "a mix between Nine Inch Nails and Screamadelica and Pantera". Mercifully, we got the magisterial Everything Must Go instead.
About how Cameron's discussion of the material on The Holy Bible really brings out what an extraordinary album it is - raw, tortured, provocative - especially given the timing of its release at the peak of Britpop.
About the book's insights into the band's unusual creative dynamic, whereby the lyrics are almost always written by Nicky Wire and then given to James Dean Bradfield to sing, while Bradfield and Sean Moore come up with the music. Bradfield doesn't seem fazed by continually having someone else's words put in his mouth - though he admits that he hasn't always understood what Wire (and James) have handed him, or indeed agreed with the sentiments or views expressed.
About how their songs often inadvertently but sometimes deliberately echo the work of others - artists as diverse as Simple Minds, Guns 'N' Roses, Pink Floyd and ABBA. I now won't be able to hear 'Little Baby Nothing', 'No Surface All Feeling' or 'Intravenous Agnostic' without thinking of Bruce Springsteen, Smashing Pumpkins and Dinosaur Jr/Sonic Youth respectively.
About their dogged survival instinct and their perpetual attempts to write their way out of creative cul-de-sacs and reinvent themselves while still retaining their recognisable identity - something that is all the more remarkable when you consider that, as gobby, contrarian, self-styled generation terrorists, they initially envisaged releasing just one album and then pressing the self-destruct button. However patchy recent records have been, I'm very glad they didn't.
Rarely can there have been a TV series so deserving of sweeping the board at the Emmys than Netflix's Adolescence. The awards - for the actors (Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty), the writing (Graham in collaboration with Jack Thorne), the direction (Philip Barantini) and the whole shebang - were more than merited.
Graham excelling as a troubled soul in a grimly gritty drama series is of course nothing new - see the This Is England trilogy, Boiling Point, Time and The Virtues. But Adolescence was a first foray into TV acting for his rookie co-star Cooper, who was only 14 at the time of filming but delivered an astonishing performance as the wayward teenage boy whose misogynistic crime sets the plot in motion. Petrified by fear when arrested in the first episode, he reappears in the third (a phenomenally tense hour in an interview room with Doherty's child psychologist) full of bravado - his mask of nonchalance slipping briefly, unable to contain his inner rage.
Aside from it being Cooper's debut, the other main talking point was the decision to film each of the four episodes in a single shot. There have been suggestions that, while technically impressive (especially the choreography required in the school setting of the second episode), it's gimmicky and show-offish. I'd disagree - as in Boiling Point, the technique serves a very particular purpose, ratcheting up the intensity by never allowing the characters to relax or the audience to blink.
As a parent, Adolescence was an extremely tough watch - tougher even than Season 4 of The Wire. Knowing that you can have so little influence in the face of other factors in terms of guiding your own child's behaviour and protecting them from harm is, frankly, terrifying - especially when you have a son about to begin navigating the choppy waters of teenagerhood.
This is partly why I wasn't so sure about the clamour to screen the series in schools - it's hardly an unambiguous cautionary tale. Not only does it focus on the family of the perpetrator rather than on the family of the victim, but it also offers no easy narratives or simple solutions. In The Virtues, Thorne and Graham at least gave some explanation for the lead character's psychological damage; in Adolescence, the situation is more nuanced and complex, with Graham's character's inability to accept or comprehend his son's subtle radicalisation and actions and his consequent feelings of helplessness likely to haunt the audience too.
But then that complexity is the reality, and it's the mark of a high-quality series that it treats its viewers as grown-ups, avoiding facile conclusions. TV can't be expected to have all the answers. What Adolescence has helped to do is to expose the nature and scale of the problem and get us asking the right questions.
Yet again, I've found that the prompt to finally checking out a particular musician's work has been reading their obituary. Very poor form.
On this occasion, the musician in question was Bruce Loose, and the obituary was written by Stevie Chick for the Guardian. The company that Loose's band Flipper kept and the roll call of their admirers - Nirvana, Melvins, REM and Thurston Moore, to name but four - should have been enough to induce me to investigate their back catalogue long, long ago.
The news also reminded me that Flipper were due to play at tiny and much-missed Cardiff venue the Moon three summers ago - minus Loose, but with a bonus Mike Watt - only for the whole tour to be cancelled because of guitarist Ted Falconi's health issues. Had that gone ahead, it would no doubt have been a proper "I was there" gig.
It's fair to say that parenting is no picnic, instantly bringing with it a deluge of anxieties and pressures that, while often natural, are fuelled and exacerbated by societal norms and expectations, advertising and social media. Amid the daily grind, and the herculean effort it sometimes takes just to get from one day to the next, it can be hard to find any room to enjoy or even reflect on the experience.
All of which is why Kirsten Lewis' photobook Unsupervised is so powerful and poignant. Its message - "Life is messy. Parenthood is messy. Childhood is messy" - is a source of reassurance for parents the world over, including Lewis herself: "While the intention of this book has always been to give the global community of parents an opportunity to be seen, honoured and celebrated, this process has revealed something much more personal. At the end of the day, I created the book I needed."
In stripping away any artifice and pretence, and instead offering the unvarnished truth, Lewis' remarkably candid images constitute a project that "questions the pressure of perfection widespread across all social media platforms with their carefully 'curated' windows into family life". But Unsupervised is more than merely a stark expose of the gulf between fiction/ideal and reality; on the contrary, it's largely a heartwarming affirmation of an extraordinary and resilient bond. In her words, "[t]he ability to provide evidence of a child's admiration and adoration for their parents is one of the best gifts I can provide as a photographer".
One Welsh legend (Aneurin "Nye" Bevan), played by another (Michael Sheen), on the Wales Millennium Centre's biggest stage? When the National Theatre's Nye came to Cardiff for a second time late last month, it was always going to be box office gold.
Tim Price's play tells the story of Bevan's greatest achievement - the establishment of the NHS - but does so by tracing what made him the man he was, and the obstacles that stood in his way: his upbringing in the working-class community of Tredegar; a childhood stammer that affected his confidence about speaking in class; his father's affliction with the miner's curse, black lung; the scorn of the establishment; the resistance of doctors and the British Medical Association to his plans.
Sheen's Bevan is a feisty character fired by injustice, urging unity in the fight for rights, but he retains a cheeky charm, even in skirmishes with the likes of Winston Churchill. Having recently read David Peace's The Damned Utd and rewatched Sheen's turn as football manager Brian Clough in the film adaptation, I found it hard not to see parallels between the two historical figures: larger than life, charismatic, egocentric, stubborn, defiant.
The play isn't an unmitigated triumph - some of the jokes are of the sort calculated to provoke polite performative theatre laughter rather than genuine guffaws, and the scene in which Archie Lush introduces his schoolboy pal Nye to the joys of borrowing books feels a bit too much like a crude dramatisation of the Manics' famous line "Libraries gave us power".
But Sheen is a tour de force, capturing a character at several different points throughout his life, and the supporting cast are strong. The staging is imaginative, most notably when the hospital curtains are transformed into the benches in the House of Commons. (I also very much enjoyed Clement Attlee's motorised desk - which admittedly sounds like the name of a racehorse from The Day Today.)
Nye's message is in many ways uplifting, illustrating the positive change that can be achieved through vision, determination and collective action. And yet it begins with Bevan in hospital, incapacitated on what turns out to be his deathbed, and the whole story is told as a series of hallucinations. He never makes it out of his pyjamas.
Just as Bevan is ailing, so is his creation. The play trumpets the fact that, since the advent of the NHS, life expectancy in the UK has increased significantly. What it doesn't spell out is that life expectancy is now in decline, and a health service undermined by decades of underfunding seems to be on its last legs. In the current climate, Nye is - inevitably - a politically charged play; to celebrate the NHS is to implicitly draw critical attention to how it is being dismantled.
With the world of politics seeming to descend into even more of a shitshow by the day, the election of Zack Polanski as leader of the Green Party has been a rare source of positivity.
As George Monbiot argued in his Guardian column, Labour's utter failure to challenge Reform and indeed infuriating and indefensible persistence in pandering to the right have opened the way for the Greens to gain significant ground - most obviously, by having the courage that Labour lack and calling out capital as the cause of the country's woes, rather than immigration. (You could add to that list Brexit and ideologically motivated austerity cuts - the former something else that Labour seem terrified of criticising, and the latter something they seem content to perpetuate.)
Personally speaking, I welcome a Green Party leader who is bold and outspoken - even if, as one friend in the know pointed out, Polanski might need to work harder on having readymade responses to the inevitable scornful ripostes. There also appears to be some concern that he may undermine the painstaking, conciliatory work that the Greens did to steal a pair of rural seats from the Tories.
But ultimately party members gave him overwhelming support, and I too want someone saying the things that are currently going unsaid (even if that seems provocative in some quarters) and standing up to Reform's inflammatory and racist rhetoric. What's more, as Monbiot points out, Polanski's election doesn't signal a change in direction for the party; on the contrary, the manifesto is already established, but now has someone willing to shout more loudly about it.
Not for the first time, I find myself wanting to buy into Monbiot's optimism - on his logic, the stage certainly does seem set for the Greens to come on strong. But he's been wrong before, left red-faced as a naive idealist. In the early days of lockdown in 2020, he prematurely celebrated "the unexpectedly thrilling and transformative force of mutual aid" and confidently declared that "there are no neoliberals in a pandemic" - only to file a piece a few months later blasting the Tories for capitalising on the situation and lining the pockets of their pals. His concluding claim in this latest article - that the Greens may "contribute to what could prove to be, in 2029, the greatest electoral reset in our modern history" - veers into characteristically hyperbolic territory.
Still, it's something to cling to, isn't it? And we sure as hell need that.
Jason Everman has the (perhaps dubious) distinction of being kicked out of both Nirvana and Soundgarden before they hit the big time - but it's arguably his post-music career that's most fascinating. He spoke to Avaunt's Matthew Sedacca about what he's been up to since getting the boot from grunge's two best bands: undertaking military service in the Special Forces (including a stint in post 9/11 Iraq), studying philosophy and history, becoming a foodie and preparing to sail around the world.
I've long loved Nick Cave's finest put-down. You know the one: "I'm forever near a stereo saying 'What the fuck is this garbage?' And the answer is always 'The Red Hot Chili Peppers'." So it came as something of a disappointment to learn that Cave has disowned the comment, declaring it "just the sort of obnoxious thing I would say back then to piss people off".
In truth, he's right to acknowledge that Flea's response, at least, was "classy", in that the bassist reiterated his love for Cave's music even though the feeling wasn't mutual. What's all the more remarkable is that bridges have since been built to such an extent that Flea joined Cave and Warren Ellis on stage during the Carnage tour, and that Cave has contributed vocals to a song on Flea's solo trumpet album.
Cave won't work with just anyone, though. He may have praised Morrissey as "probably the best lyricist of his generation - certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated and most subtle", but he turned down Moz's invitation to lend vocals to "an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written" - one that "began with a lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro".
What's troubling, however, is that Cave conceded "I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level". Factor in his robust anti-BDS position, his unrepentant stance on attending the Coronation two years ago and some of the statements made on The Red Hand Files, and it's becoming harder to avoid drawing the conclusion that his politics are drifting increasingly rightwards.
Martin Parr and Don McCullin are two of the nation's most renowned and celebrated photographers, and so, for a fan like Peter Dench, exhibiting alongside them both at the La Gacilly Photo Festival was "in equal parts exhilarating and surreal".
I guess it perhaps goes with the territory, but this isn't the first time I've seen McCullin described as a man who has evidently been scarred by his many experiences of working in combat zones. As Dench puts it, "[k]arma is pummelling him with a lifetime of guilts and ghosts".
It's a sad state of affairs when an outfit as original and tidy as Field Music are struggling to make ends meet to such an extent that they're forced into performing as a Doors covers band. Their predicament really underlines just how tough the current climate is.
What's remarkable, though, is David Brewis' bullish attitude: "There are tons of musicians who subsidise work by playing in some kind of entertainment band but mostly don't talk about it because it's seen as naff or embarrassing. It's like a dirty secret. But me saying it out loud, because I have no shame, illustrated something unspoken."
Brewis' transparency is both bold and refreshing. Like Gareth of Los Campesinos!, he seems to be on a mission to lay bare the financial realities of the music industry for mid-tier bands with a reasonable profile - as disheartening and disillusioning as they are.
Loath though I am to spread the word about the wonders of my home county (it's relatively quiet, and that's partly why it's so good), Dan Richards' recent Observer article about enjoying Northumberland from the vantage point of a biplane deserves to be read.
It was nice to see plugs for Barter Books, Ad Gefrin and the Jolly Fisherman. The fact that there's now somewhere in Alnwick serving up a 14-course tasting menu (Sonnet) was news to me - one for the agenda next time we're up that way.
"Everything dies / It's just the way", sings Marissa Nadler on 'It Hits Harder', the opening track on her latest collection of siren songs, New Radiations. No one does bleak and beautiful quite so well. Buzz review here.
To mark the album's release, the Quietus invited her to pick one track from each of her ten records to date, put out over the course of the last two decades. In conversation with Irina Shtreis, she talked about sources of inspiration (the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Eastern European folk, the TV series Unsolved Mysteries), underlined her incredibly good taste in collaborators (Randall Dunn, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, Chris Coady, Mary Lattimore, Blonde Redhead's Simone Pace) and revealed some perhaps surprising musical influences (Pink Floyd, Hole).
At a time when accessibility in the arts is an extremely hot topic, it's refreshing to learn of two exciting opportunities for creatively minded people close to home.
First, SHIFT - Cardiff-based champions of experimental music and performance art - have announced the launch of Through The Floor Radio next month. The mission statement is "to explore the boundaries of audio art and providing a platform for innovative voices, with a focus on experimental music, sound art, soundscapes, spoken word, radio experiments, field recordings, found sound, drama, documentary and live performances". They're inviting proposals from anyone who might be interested, particularly those keen to do something on a regular rather than one-off basis.
Second, Llanover Hall Arts Centre - thanks to a recent endowment - have brand-new audiovisual equipment and seating for their theatre space and are seeking proposals for how they might make good use of it through film nights. Get your suggestions in!