The massed rock audiences which caused Dave Grohl’s old band such angst have fuelled the Foos. This tenth album was finished early in their 25th year, with a celebratory lap of 2020 festivals booked.
Their PR cannot put the band name in the header of promotional emails, as they’ll go straight to the spam bin, but Swedish punk outfit Viagra Boys have, nonetheless, become a name to contend with. It’s their wild live persona that’s put them on the map but their second album raucously – and tenderly – demonstrates they also have the range and the songs to explode into something bigger.
When satire becomes redundant, all that’s left is to tell it like it is. Drive-By Truckers released The Unraveling in January 2020, but Covid couldn’t dim the relevancy and glowering power of its requiem for Trump-trampled American hopes.
In 2020, one archive release exerted a more forceful presence than any other. Live At Goose Lake August 8th 1970 caught The Stooges as they promoted their second album Fun House. The source was a previously unknown, professionally recorded tape documenting the whole album as it was played live, in its running order. Iggy Pop and the band were hard yet sloppy, tight yet rough, always blazing. Wonderful – and a reminder that musical surprises still crop up.
It’s become something of an end-of-year list cliché to say that 2020 has been a great year for music despite being a catastrophic shitstorm when judged by any other metric you care to mention.
“Ah!” says 2020, “but clichés are clichés because they’re true,” and sits back smugly, arms folded, conveniently forgetting that this is a cliché in itself and so leading us into a whirlwind of circular reasoning. That’s just so 2020, right?
Given Dylan’s last album of originals was in 2012, and his standards phase had concluded with a slightly meandering three-disc set in Triplicate, expectations of anything other than an archival release or new tour announcement from Dylan in 2020 were low – until, that is, some weeks into the first lockdown, when his longest ever song dropped out of a clear blue sky.
It didn’t take long for The Stooges to acquire an afterlife. They played their final show in February 1974. In May 1975, Nick Kent wrote a multi-page feature for NME on the ups and downs of Iggy Pop and Co. In September 1975, Sounds reviewed a new album by the defunct band titled Metallic KO. One side of it was recorded at that final show.
The music year draws to a close and theartsdesk on Vinyl presents its festive selection. We go easier on the cheesier at this time of year, but there are also gold nuggets in there too. Time to buy the vinyl lover in your life a little something? Here's a vibrant cross section of many, many kinds of music on plastic, running the gamut from Neil Diamond to a feminist concept album about mermaids.