From dark age to middle age, Nick Cave is such a far cry from the blood-spilling junkie of rock legend that these days you’re likely to encounter him commuting to his 9 to 5. Except of course that his job is writing and making music, his new album is called Nocturama and there are, he admits, some sizeable blow-outs in the memory banks.
Th' Legendary Shack*Shakers' third album continues their exploration of the musical demons that dwell in the shadows and side-shows, and come to life in murder ballads and mountain hollers. They have shape-shifted these musics into something new, powerful and, at times, monstrous.
This is Murder Ballads made celluloid – epic, edgy and contemptuous of the standards imposed by convention. It’s also an endlessly fascinating, morally complex proper Western despite the potential for Skippy sightings.
JOHNNY DOWD is a 50-year-old Oklahoman who runs a haulage company. He is also a singer-songwriter who explores life s deepest, darkest sides. Interview: Peter Murphy
LA, Joshua Tree, Alabama, New Orleans . . . Kristin Hersh verbally back-packs her way around the most significant places in her life and career thus far.
Interview: Nick Kelly.
World Without End is a dance with the dead, a seance of lost souls, a slow waltz with the dark side of human nature. If that sounds like something you’d sooner avoid, then stop and listen with an open mind.
Grappling with weighty political themes is grist to the mill for Colin Meloy of Oregon art-rockers The Decemberists. He’s even written a song about the Shankill Butchers.
Inevitably, The Best Of Nick Cave ... The Bad Seeds can only hint at the scope of the band's back catalogue. But if one listens to the group's ten studio albums chronologically, there are no gear-grinding changes of direction or radical overhaulings of the sound, all the more remarkable considering the amount of personnel that passed through the line-up.
The songs of Laura Cantrell are steeped in the timeless values of American country rock. But Cantrell, a former Wall Street banker, is a thoroughly modern artist.
They arrived on the scene almost two years ago, determined not to let their unorthodox upbringing and dazzling cheekbones overshadow their music. Now, with their supremely accomplished second album, 2004’s Aha Shake Heartbreak, Kings Of Leon have established themselves among the rock’n’roll elite – from which position they’ve begun to enjoy the perks of rock stardom. “I’m actually getting laid now,” a relieved Caleb Followill admits. words Phil Udell
While the album opener (‘Dissociate’) takes a while to kick in, the incessant riffing of second song ‘No Easy Ride’ is a suitable sucker punch to the nether-regions.
With the death of Johnny Cash two weeks ago, music’s Mount Rushmore finally crumbled. From the hell-raising country outlaw of the ’60s to his final incarnation as a patriarchal figure intoning songs of guilt and redemption, Cash’s voice resonated down through the years with undimmed intensity. In this special Hot Press tribute to the Man In Black, Peter Murphy talks to Cash collaborators Sandy Kelly and U2, and recounts the turbulent life and times of one of the most iconic figures in 20th century music
In the kingdom of the bards, Kristin Hersh is queen. Taken as a whole, her back catalogue represents one of the most individual bodies of work of the past 20 years. From the crazed manic-depressive clouds which stalked the early Throwing Muses records to the relative serenity of the acoustic solo outings, Hips And Makers and Strange Angels, Hersh's work is stamped with her own idiosyncratic imprimatur.
It's been a long strange trip and no mistake, one that describes a discernible line from
Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music through to the Handsome Family.
But there's even more going on beneath the surface. GREIL MARCUS, the music critic's music critic,
is PETER MURPHY's guide on a mystery train whose other passengers include Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Mark Twain, Nick Cave, The Blair Witch, Bill Clinton, The Band, Siniad O'Connor, Beck, William Burroughs, William Faulkner and Bob Dylan. And that's just the first class carriage. All aboard
'Girl From The Hills' opens Dot Creek's debut with a quietly twanging guitar, before a plaintive male voice urges someone to fetch water from the spring, and you think, 'OK, I'm in the middle of Nowheresville, Alabama.
From the early excesses of the Birthday Party through meisterwerks like The Good Son to his new release, Live Seeds, Nick Cave has spent nearly fifteen years probing those crevices of the human psyche that few care, or even dare, to venture into.
Here, in a highly personal, in-depth interview, Gerry McGovern grills the god of Goth about his ambivalence towards and obsession with religion, his love of dysfunctional people, his thoughts on the past and his hope for the future, oh, and how to reconcile life as an internationally renowned icon of doom with being a mummy’s boy! (Only joking, Nick!).
30 years after the savage Tate/LaBianca murders that epitomised the dark side of the American hippy dream, CHARLES MANSON aka God aka The Devil, continues to exert a potent influence on popular culture. In part one of a two-part feature, PETER MURPHY recalls the twisted vision of a charismatic man whose personal interpretation of The Beatles Helter Skelter helped give rise to one of the crimes of the century.
It's a little disconcerting reviewing the new album by an artist who died over six months previously, but this album stands as the last will and testament of Mark Sandman, Morphine's singer, songwriter and bassist, who collapsed and died on stage last summer.
Welcome to the weird and wonderfully wicked world of the Black Romantics, last heard playing second fiddle (and cello) to Jack Lukeman on his debut Wax album
A match made in ... heaven? The Handsome Family - the husband and wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks who make beautiful, if rather spooky music together.
In which, after a year spent in the Savoy, our film editor declares her craw full to the brim with CGI animals, gloomy rom-coms and Celtic Tiger thrillers. But there were more than a few pearls in the pig-trough too.
