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THE HARD STUFF the ultimate ROCK REVIEWS jection
CLASSIC ROCK RATINGS
Elvis Costello & The Imposters
The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories) EMI
Echoes of his excellent past as the excellence continues.
It’s been a busy 12 months for Elvis Costello: he’s released the album Hey Clockface, a French EP based on it, and a re-worked, Spanish version of his 1978 album This Year’s Model. And now he’s back with The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories).
Like most artists of a certain age, Costello tends to refer to his previous musical output, and The Boy Named If encompasses many eras of Costello’s work. There’s the baroque pop of Imperial Bedroom on The Difference, there’s the passion of Blood And Chocolate on What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, you could almost put Paint The Red Rose Blue on Painted From Memory, and My Most Beautiful Mistake on King Of America.
But while everything here echoes its maker’s past, it all sounds new. Costello’s endless drive and passion don’t so much blow away cobwebs as dynamite the nearest dam and send them to a watery death.
He describes his recent work as “records that are happening right now”. And he’s not wrong. The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories) is excellent.
David Quantick
Big Scenic Nowhere
The Long Morrow HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS
Kick out the jams, mutherfuckers!
Featuring Bob Balch (Fu Manchu), Tony Reed (Mos Generator) and Bill Stinson and Gary Arce (both Yawning Man), this heavy-rock supergroup has experimentation and collaboration woven into its desert-scorched DNA.
Born out of an epic three-day jam session, The Long Morrow shares its genesis with 2020’s Lavender Blues EP and continues in the same uplifting progstoner vein. Defector (Of Future Days), Murder Klipp, Lavender Bleu and the short but sweet Ledü (inspired by Led Zep and Husker Dü – the clue’s in the title) are fine slices of groovy cosmic rock. But the real star of the show is the sprawling 20-minute title track, which combines dreamy Floydian atmospherics with bold and crunchy hard rock riffing, and features guest space travellers Reeves Gabrels (The Cure, David Bowie) and Per Wiberg (Opeth, Spiritual Beggars) unleashing some truly astounding sounds and amazing music.
A magnificent sonic voyage from start to finish.
Essi Berelian
Volumes
Happier? FEARLESS
Volumes lay bare their cautionary tale of optimism.
With the return of their original vocalist, Michael Barr, the Angeleno metalcore band shake up their polyrhythmic prototypical formula. Happier? delivers hit after hit, flowing seamlessly between highly refined sonic grooves, melodious clean choruses and bellowing screams.
As far as heaviness goes, it does not disappoint. Laden with infectiously bouncing instrumentation, FBX and Void are soaked with industrial and nu-metal influence, but Malevolent’s beefy djent bass lines dominate as the album’s heaviest contender. Bend glides in as a palate cleanser with catchy R&B vocals, the track a far cry from the band’s previous work, indicative of their tumultuous journey following the devastating passing of ex-guitarist Diego Farias. Happier? has an ethereal dissonance, mirroring the antithesis of their lyrical motif. The outro’s introspective production is respite to the roller-coaster of emotion served up in this album.
Amgad Abdelgadir
Artifas
Reflections IMAGEN
Tennessee metalcore quintet’s belated second.
Despite releasing their debut album to considerable acclaim in 2015, a combination of label trouble, poverty and perfectionism left the band unable to build on it until now. Reflections deserves to propel them back in the right direction, though, on the back of a boomingly powerful blend of emo melodicism, nu-metal punch and alt.metal aggression.
Scottie Somerville’s voice switches from a soulful croon to a desperate yelp to a fierce metalcore roar at various points, backed up by the malevolent churn of Cody Criswell and Mikey Miller’s riff barrage. And the band’s penchant for highly yellable choruses, as evidenced on the yearning frustration of Inside The Machine and Leave Me For Dead, will surely do them no harm.
Johnny Sharp
Nell & The Flaming Lips
Where The Viaduct Looms BELLA UNION
Bizarre collaboration of Nick Cave covers.
Of all of the Flaming Lips’ madcap ideas – that’ll be puppet shows, brain-melting live visuals, and shows where the audiences is socially distanced in inflatable bubbles (that’s just for starters) – getting 14-year-old singer Nell Smith to sing Nick Cave covers is perhaps the most outré. Although they’ve previously covered albums by the Stone Roses, The Beatles and Pink Floyd with varying degrees of success, there’s something unsettling about someone this young tackling adult themes, not least on murder ballad The Kindness Of Strangers.
Moreover, given the idiosyncratic nature of Cave’s music, where the production and instrumentation are crafted to suit the lyrics, the Flaming Lips’ dreamy and minimal approach isn’t wholly successful; the echo deployed on Smith’s distracts, while on the sense of menace and dread is absent.
