Reviews

The Wildhearts

Renaissance Men GRAPHITE

Their first album in 10 years ticks all the right boxes – arriba! (It’ll never last, of course…)

Although touted as featuring the ‘classic’ line-up of Ginger, CJ, Ritch Battersby and Danny McCormack, these four made only one album together – the original Fishing For Luckies in 1994. They tried again later that year, but CJ was gone after the initial sessions for what became p.h.u.q.

CJ and Ginger smoothed things over in 2001, and Ritch has been back on the drum stool since 2005. So presumably it’s the return of bassist Danny – on stage for the Britrock Must Be Destroyed dates a year ago even though recovering from the amputation of part of his right leg – that has been the catalyst bringing this turbulent band full circle to how they sounded when he first joined in 1991.

Ginger reckons that previous album ¡Chutzpah! (2009, with Scott Sorry on bass) was poorly received, but this one deserves a Champagne reception. Whereas ¡Chutzpah! was lyrically brighter and musically drifting into power-pop at times, Renaissance Men gets darker and heavier again.

It isn’t gloomy, though. Far from it. The title track is joyous and triumphant: ‘Back in your face again, we’re the Renaissance Men… ARRIBA!/You need us around, you can’t keep a good band down…’ – plus a series of canny rhymes, including probably the first ever chorus to pair ‘DC-10’ with ‘men’.

Not just that song, but the whole album takes you back to the feeling you had the first time you heard Turning American; that impossible Beatles/Metallica, angry/funny nexus. It’s the Wildhearts remembering what they do best – and just going for it.

It starts at full tilt with Dislocated – which in places sounds like Motörhead, until a prime-cut Gingerbridge gives it away – then crashes, via a howl of feedback, into Let ’Em Go in which a gang chorus sings about rivers of shit. Fine Art Of Deception celebrates lack of commitment with sinister yet customary honesty: ‘Don’t let my proximity mean what it may imply/I’m just working on a way to say goodbye.’

The centre-piece of the album is Diagnosis. The best and longest of the 10 tracks, it builds slowly into a rant about mental health professionals and how they let people down. Ginger launches another brutal attack, this time on the pharmaceutical industry, in Emergency (Fentanyl Babylon), but he’s funnier when referencing drugs in My Kinda Movie and closer Pilo Erection.

So, is it as good as Earth Vs The Wildhearts? No. On a par with Fishing For Luckies and p.h.u.q.? Close – and easily the best thing since.

Neil Jeffries

Quireboys

Amazing Disgrace OFF YER ROCKA

Thirty-five years down the road and they still sound fresh.

We all know what you get from a Quireboys album: goodtime, trashy rock’n’roll. And latest album Amazing Disgrace delivers exactly what you’d expect. But, amazingly, these tracks sound so energetic and dynamic that they don’t sound at all formulaic.

As soon as Original Black Eyed Son glides into gear, it’s clear the Quireboys are not simply going through the motions. They’re out to prove that they still live through the music, and love it. And these not-so-young lads succeed admirably.

Yes, it’s the Faces getting paralytic with the Stones as ZZ Top flick cigarette butts in their drinks. But if some recent Quireboys albums have been slightly tame, now the band are off the leash. Seven Deadly Sins swerves into a dirty funk rash, Sinner Serenade cheekily bares its badass groove to everyone, and Slave #1 has the sort of sleazy emotion that would make any porn star blush.

The best Quireboys album for ages.

Malcolm Dome

Peter Doherty & The Puta Madres

Peter Doherty & The Puta Madres STRAP ON ORIGINALS/CARGO

Doherty’s new band shine, but can’t eradicate the mumbles.

Now he’s more of an idol to the championship eating community than to any kind of unified indie nation, Peter Doherty’s latest Libertines spin-off is operating rather more in the shadows than his previous sidelines. Which is unfortunate, because when he isn’t singing as though he’s still trying to shift a stubborn chunk of sausage gristle from his back teeth, this begins as among his most focussed and coherent collections to date.

Recording the album in a Normandy fishing village, the Puta Madres capture the languid pace of the place and prove an imaginative bunch, by turns quaintly retro-psych and evocatively pastoral – Miki Beavis’s mournful Dexy’s fiddle works wonders on seven-minute mood piece Travelling Tinker, Someone Else To Be and the lustrous Paradise Is Under Your Nose. Doherty himself remains endearingly cack-handed and poetically confessional but uncontrollably wayward. By the final third, the band appear to have given up and gone to the pub as Pete descends into his trademark mumbled fluff. Hopefully they plotted an album of their own.

Mark Beaumont

Grand Magus

Wolf God NUCLEAR BLAST

Back to the 1980s with you!

Sweden’s Grand Magus exist only to make a band like Monster Truck look like beacons of forward-looking musical genius. The trio’s eighth album lands much like the previous seven: with the dull plop of gristly meat and over-boiled potatoes dropping onto a cracked plate.

Wolf God is retrogressive in the worst kind of way: a saggy-arsed drudge through the dregs of the 80s plod-metal scene played by horse-drawn bozos drunk on nostalgia for something that wasn’t much cop in the first place. True, they have a rough idea of what a verse is supposed to do, and they take a swing at writing a vaguely memorable chorus here and there, but nothing connects. As Eric Morecambe might have put it: they’re playing all the right notes, but in a really flaming tedious order.

Even the song titles can’t be bothered to rouse themselves above the mediocre: Brother Of The Storm, Glory To The Brave and A Hall Clad In Gold shoot for Manowar, but completely miss the epic camp and unshakeable vainglory that makes that band so magnificent.

Move along, there really is nothing to see here.

Dave Everley

Jordan Rudess

Wired For Madness MUSIC THEORIES/MASCOT

Dream Theater keyboard player goes bonkers.

Here’s a word of warning: anyone expecting a straightforward, Dream Theater style experience from this, the latest Jordan Rudess extravaganza, is in for a shock. This album is the keyboard player opening up his creative pores and letting the artistry take flight. And it’s brilliantly crazed.

Rudess shows his passion for all sorts of genres here, and is never afraid to take risks. For example, can you believe he indulges in a dirty blues fantasy, on ? And not only has Rudess pulled in Joe Bonamassa for this one, it even includes a brass section! Elsewhere he taps into 70s-era Italian horror film soundtracks on , and throughout