Black Stone Cherry
Screamin’ At The Sky MASCOT
The one where they remind us why we fell for BSC in the first place.
They’ve been flying the flag for a distinct strand of unyielding southern rock for over 20 years. On Screamin’ At The Sky, album number eight, Black Stone Cherry’s formula remains reassuringly simple: songs that pack a ferocious punch; guitar fireworks that crash and burn; Chris Roberton’s grizzled, last-man-standing vocals; and an admirable refusal to lighten the load with anything as compromising as a ballad. If they came from South Wales rather than South Kentucky they’d be Stereophonics.
Rather than embrace the occasionally spacey wanderings of a Lynyrd Skynyrd or the backwoods twang of Molly Hatchet, they noted both the musical density of Daughtry-style grunge and the more bluesy side of the Allman Brothers or Johnny Winter without actually sounding like an overt blues band, if we forget their Back To Blues EPs of 2017 and ’19. It’s a fine line, but with the ferocious The Mess You Made spraying riffs like a catherine wheel and Not Afraid dishing the cascading grunge dirt, they straddle it impressively.
After 2020’s unusually flat The Human Condition was recorded at Jon Lawhon’s studio, he was out after 20 years at the bass coal face in favour of Steve Jewell Jr, formerly of BSC support act Otis. Last June they rented one of their favourite venues, the Plaza Theater in Glasgow (Kentucky not Scotland) and recorded most of Screamin’ At The Sky there. Whatever magic the new bass blood and the new way of recording brought, only they really know, but Black Stone Cherry haven’t sounded this invigorated since the breathless Between The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea.
Beyond the atypically sunny Smile World (‘Got that grateful disease, hope to make it infectious’) and the self-help hokum of You Can Have It All, the death of Robertson’s father from cancer in 2021 has brought lyrical gravitas, musical catharsis and, with Robertson Jr’s 40th birthday looming, a sense of mortality. ‘It’s been a while since I felt like this,’ Robertson reflects on R.O.A.R., ‘I’m so sorry for all that I’ve missed.’
All that’s right about Black Stone Cherry explodes on the turbo-charged Out Of Pocket, which rattles along with a blinding intensity, the genuinely comforting (albeit with Roy Kent from Ted Lasso-style gruffness) Here’s To The Hopeless, and the mighty Nervous which kick-starts with John Fred Young’s whiplash drums before Robertson asks: “Is anybody listening?” On this evidence, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
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John Aizlewood
When Rivers Meet
Aces Are High ONE ROADS
Power and passion in equal measure.
Just three albums into their career, husband-andwife team Aaron and Grace Bond just seem to get better and better. This album’s two mellow tunes, Golden and By Your Side, demonstrate the kind of creative and performing chemistry that simply flows from the heart. While the sweet and romantic stuff is pretty impressive, there’s no denying the heavy blues firepower they muster on the other eight tracks. With the clear aim of creating an uncompromisingly hard-rocking album, the riffing on bruisers like Seen It All Before, the title track, The Secret and seismic album closer Five Minutes Until Midnight is singularly monumental – an incendiary blend of genre authenticity and primal guitar muscle, while Grace’s crystal-clear vocals positively soar on Play My Game and Perfect Stranger.
Preceding albums We Fly Free and Saving Grace were exceptional, but Aces Are High raises the bar yet again.
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Essi Berelian
Corey Taylor
CMF2 BMG
Slipknot frontman lets his imagination run riot on his second solo album.
When Slipknot first arrived in the mid-90s in a tornado of puke, blood, violence and dead crows in jars, not many of us would have put money on their raging frontman to out-Bon Jovi the New Jersey cowboy himself. Yet here we are, with Breath Of Fresh Smoke, a softfocus, unashamedly romantic country-rock ballad more suited to the squishiness of Valentine’s Day than to the jump-scares of Halloween.
It’s just one example of how Corey Taylor channels all of his other ideas – the ones that don’t fit into the Slipknot or Stone Sour worlds – into his kaleidoscopic solo work. The focus on this album never stays still for long, bounding from lowkey Led Zeppelin mandolin intricacy to glam-grunge, poppunk show tunes to chilly, depressed goth balladry, U2 radio-rock cheese to blazing, Anthrax-esque guitar solos. The result should be completely unhinged, a splatter of styles grating against each other like fractured bones, but somehow it works – ascattershot glimpse into Taylor’s restless mind.
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Emma Johnston
Everclear
Live At The Whisky A Go Go SUNSET BLVD
No sleep til the Whisky.
Thirty years is a grand old age for any band, and Everclear obviously had a great time celebrating on their anniversary tour late last year during their first ever gig at LA’s famed Whisky A Go Go.
Unsurprisingly, material from 1995’s Sparkle & Fade and 1997’s So Much For The Afterglow albums feature most heavily, the audience singing along to Heroin Girl, Heartspark Dollarsign, Everything To Everyone and Father Of Mine, and a couple of World Of Noise oldies turn up in the form of Nervous And Weird and Fire Maple Song. Leaving the 90s nostalgia behind, two excellent new studio bonus cuts – Year Of The Tiger and Sing Away – demonstrate frontman Art Alexakis’s continuing and formidable songwriting prowess.
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Essi Berelian
New Model Army
Sinfonia EARMUSIC
Selection of career-spanning tracks receive orchestral treatment.
Determined not to fall into the trap of putting a hat on it and calling it a thing, the aim of New Model Army’s reworking of backcatalogue gems with the Sinfonia Leipzig orchestra was to create a unified bandby Def Leppard.
