THE HARD STUFF
Hollywood Vampires
Rise earMusic
California’s starriest hobby band pull back the covers for their second album.
Separating the artist from the art is never the easiest trick to master. So while the presence of Johnny Depp in the band would have been the ultimate cool injection a decade ago, the allegations of domestic abuse made against him by his ex-wife Amber Heard make Hollywood Vampires a rather more problematic listen. It all leaves a distinctly sour taste, although Depp’s bandmate Alice Cooper was quick to defend him when speaking to Billboard: “All the stuff you heard last year about Johnny, ninetynine percent was just bull. I’ve never seen him look better in my life. I’ve never seen him happier. I’ve never heard him play better. And the way the press would have it is he’s a total destruction and ready to die. Totally not true.”
Whatever the truth of the matter, the whole situation has provided inspiration for the supergroup completed by Aerosmith’s Joe Perry. While their 2015 debut was stuffed with covers of songs by deceased rock’n’roll greats, in a nod to the now deceased members of Cooper’s old drinking club who have passed on to the great dive bar in the sky, this time the scales are tipped in favour of originals that take a defiant stance, from the classic Cooper stomp and swagger of The Boogieman Surprise to Welcome To Bushwackers, a good-old-boy boogie featuring Jeff Beck and John Waters that pointedly stands as an ode to smoking, drinking, fighting, womanising, and allround bad behaviour. ‘Nobody tells me what to say or tells me what to do,’ goes the mantra. ‘Ain’t got a thing to prove to you, what goes around comes around.’
At the other end of the scale are some colossal missteps. We Gotta Rise is basically Vindaloo by Fat Les with a political agenda, while foreshortened piano interlude The Wrong Bandage has more than a whiff of Spinal Tap’s Lick My Love Pump.
There are a handful of covers here, and they’re all reverently respectful to the source material. So while you can never hope to compete with the perfection of David Bowie’s “Heroes”, their version is done flawlessly (if rather pointlessly), as is a raucous romp through the Jim Carroll Band’s People Who Died, while a gorgeous take on Johnny Thunders’s You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory is a gentle highlight at the heart of the album.
Rise is long, sprawling, rather unfocused record that could have done with editing down to the strongest points, but when Hollywood Vampires are good they distil the spirit of classic rock as effortlessly as you’d hope from men of Cooper and Perry’s calibre.
Emma Johnston
L7
Scatter The Rats Blackheart
Fuzzed-up savage lurching at its finest.
In these trying times there’s very little that one can depend upon: economic unions shrink, civilisations crumble, ice-caps melt and oceans die, yet L7 stand firm. Here’s a band that aren’t about to go EDM anytime soon.
L7 identified their particular niche (simplistic pop-literate grunge fury with a side order of uncompromising Solanas-styled feminism) over 30 years ago and, aside from the odd 13-year sabbatical along the way, have been ploughing their singular furrow ever since. Perhaps incredibly, Scatter The Rats is only L7’s seventh album (but like AC/DC, when you’ve hit the perfect formula, why flog it?), and their first in – brace yourself – 20 years.
So they’ve mellowed, right? Honed their compositional and technical skills in the general direction of progressive maturity? Not exactly. To be perfectly frank, Gardner, Sparks, Finch and Plakas – a quartet with more actual grime in their sound than can be found in Stormzy’s entire back catalogue – still sound as toxic and ornery as ever, their songs sharp and savage, their solos short and sweet, their vocals still capable of freezing testicles at 50 paces.
One man’s meat and potatoes, this man’s steak and chips.
Ian Fortnam
Roger Daltrey
Tommy Orchestral Polydor
Tommy can you hear me?
There have been more orchestrated versions of Tommy than you could shake a deaf, dumb and blind boy at. This latest one comes from Roger Daltrey’s US and European tour of the Who’s rock opera last year with a variety of orchestras and a rock group in tow.
Given an upgrade by composer David Campbell, this 21st-century Tommy takes no prisoners. The orchestra assails you from both sides, with the rock group squeezed into the middle, and Daltrey’s voice needs all the restorative powers it was given nearly a decade ago to stay on top of it all.
Some of the orchestral re-imaginings are clever, like the violins taking over the guitar parts on Pinball Wizard, but there’s not a lot of subtlety. There’s not much emphasis on the original plot-line either, which may be deliberate given that child abuse has taken on an added toxicity that now even affects its composer Pete Townshend.
Hugh Fielder
Dinosaur Pile-Up
Celebrity Mansions
Parlophone
Major-label debut from Leeds alt rockers sets them up for the next leg of their journey.
After a decade slogging it out on the indie circuit, Dinosaur Pile-up’s fourth album finds them settling into their new major-label home. And they’ve embraced the opportunity wholeheartedly, glossing Celebrity Mansions with a pop sheen that’s sunny, funny and fully prepped for the summer festivals.
There’s a blurred boundary between inspiration and pastiche at play – the title track is so Weezer it might as well be wearing black-rimmed specs and a cardigan as a disguise, while Stupid Heavy Metal Broken Hearted Loser Punk skewers postmillennium pop-punk with affectionate snark. Elsewhere, playground chants are set to thrash riffs, a whiff of grunge sincerity – more obvious on previous records – adds an element of grit, and Pouring Gasoline lands somewhere between Foo Fighters and Feeder. A deeply British, Wildheartsian exercise in ridiculing clichéd members of the music industry on K West, meanwhile, shows that even after being invited to join the club, lifelong outsiders will always be able to pinpoint and shame the vanity and ridiculousness at the heart of the inner circle.
Emma Johnston
Lukas Nelson & Promise Of The Real
Turn Off The News (Build A Garden) Fantasy
Mother Nature’s way of staying high.
When you’re Willie Nelson’s son, it’s a given you’ll have wellconnected chums. But this isn’t just a case of Lukas aid. Now established as Neil Young’s backing band, and with a major role in the soundtrack to , Nelson and POTR are so adept at Tom Petty-style rock (witness the chugging ) and Byrds-flavoured harmonies ( has elements of Gene Clark’s ) that their only problem is finding a sound that transcends the setting. They do that on the R&B-drenched and lay down ecocredentials on . Willie adds cool acoustic, and Young’s pump organ puts some into the acoustic version of the title track. With Shooter Jennings’s outlaw holler and Sheryl Crow doing her backing-singer bit, the results are country slick but the execution is flawless.
