“Helix” is the ninth track on portals//polarities. With this dramatic, acid house-leaning slab of shoegazing-infused electropop, Night Tapes make the case that they’re the real deal.
The tour by the 81-year-old Mulatu Astatke which is currently under way and this album seem to be giving off different messages. Coming to London on 16 and 17 November, it is being marketed as a farewell. Last night's show at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels had lured a full house through being billed as “his very last concert on Belgian soil". Paris’s Salle Pleyel mentions “une grande tournée d’adieu”.
Robert Plant is magnificently well-equipped to shine as a consummate musical survivor: not only has his voice kept its magic, with a range from sensual caress to ecstatic howl, but he’s deeply rooted in timeless music, Scots-Irish and American folk as well as the country blues.
For the trio of Biffy Clyro, the years since their previous album, 2021’s The Myth Of The Happily After, have provided a valuable lesson in cherishing their achievements and close friendship. First playing together when they were 15, Simon Neil and brothers James and Ben Johnston are now seated comfortably at the top table of the UK’s modern rock scene.
With their second album Altar, the Irish combo NewDad has moved from the love-embittered shoegaze of their 2023 debut Madra toward a worldlier perspective married to a comparatively sophisticated but confrontational style. Some reviewers have suggested it’s poppier, but tunes like "Other Side" (with its deceptively quiet start), “Misery”, “Puzzle”, and “Mr. Cold Embrace” are happily closer to post-punk.
Neil Hannon has been recording and touring as the Divine Comedy since 1989 and has tried a fair few flavours along the way, from chamber pop to Britpop, while sounding fundamentally himself throughout. Rainy Sunday Afternoon, however, sounds like a stocktaking, a deep breath and a meditation on late middle age.
Westerns had long been popular with German cinema audiences, some of the most successful being early 1960s West German adaptations of novels by Karl May, a slippery late-19th writer whose books were hugely admired by Hitler. East Germany’s state-run studio DEFA responded by producing The Sons of Great Bear (Die Söhne der großen Bärin) in 1966, the first of East Germany’s "Indianerfilme".
For the past decade, the Ohio alternative superstars Twenty One Pilots have cultivated a deep lore starting with 2015’s Blurryface, and continued through the subsequent albums of 2018’s Trench, 2021’s Scaled and Icy, and seemingly concluded with last year’s Clancy. Yet the duo of Tyler Joseph (vocals) and Josh Dun (drums) left proceedings on a cliffhanger.
“It’s a long way up from rock bottom/There’s been times I felt I could fall further.” So runs the opening line of Ed Sheeran’s eighth studio album. It’s delivered with the quavering falsetto-voice-breaking that’s become default for sung emotion. Like much of the album, it’s a “poor me” lyric. A generation has grown up with popular music ruled by solipsistic whining, with Sheeran leading from the front.
Everyone’s favourite angsty pop-punk nerds are back, balancing new with nostalgia and synths with guitars, this is exactly what fans have been waiting for after a decade-long hiatus from the Minneapolis rockers. The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World is an album that not only continues Motion City Soundtrack’s legacy but expands on it and gives a glimpse into what the band have been focusing on in their time off. Their sound is as recognisable as ever, and the album is sprinkled with various 2000s alt-rock star collaborations just to make the nostalgia even sweeter.