Cock Sparrer
Hand On Heart CHERRY RED
Street-punk progenitors stand firm.
Uncannily ageless, the most widely respected, enduringly influential yet bizarrely overlooked punk band in the genre’s history have produced an eighth album (52 years into their career) that’s as strong, if not stronger, than anything they’ve ever done.
An East End institution, they continue to be the most unpretentious, most entirely street street-punk band of them all. The blurring hardcore riffs, the ubiquitous ‘woah-oh’-ing mob vocals, the casually deployed anthemic choruses are all pretty par for the course. The Sparrer’s deeply indebted spiritual progeny (Rancid, Dropkick Murphys et al) have long-since mastered the band’s core MO, but what marks out the five-piece (all four original ’72 founders and a newbie rhythm guitarist of a mere 31 years standing) as a monogeneric species is their lyrical content (terrace camaraderie, pub wisdom, loyalty, buying your round, standing your ground) all delivered by Colin McFaull’s unwavering yet emotive, stentorian vocal. Aside from My Forgotten Dream’s unexpected yet effective strings, this is Cock Sparrer business as usual, playing to their strengths. The song titles (With My Hand On My Heart, I Belong To You, Here We Stand) ultimately say it all.
All hail the street-punk Iron Maiden. ■■■■■■■■□□
Ian Fortnam
Sheer Mag
Playing Favorites THIRD MAN
Third album from Philadelphia four-piece.
History plays tricks on the mind. Take Sheer Mag. On one level they’re from the past. There’s Tina Halladay’s Brody Dalleesque vocals, a love of Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, a riot-grrrl undertow, 10cc-style quirkiness and Kyle Seely’s unbridled, timetranscending guitars. More specifically, I Gotta Go almost evokes Elliott Randall’s sizzling guitar solo on Steely Dan’s Reelin’ In The Years; there are doo-wop backing vocals on When You Get Back; Moonstruck isn’t the only moment to suggest Pilot’s January; Eat It And Beat It pitches its tent somewhere between Slade and Alice Cooper.
So far, so (delightfully) derivative. But there’s a twist. For all that they’ve taken from others – someone here clearly has a wonderful record collection – Sheer Mag are their own men. They don’t even sound dated.
They’re urgent on the title track, where Halladay rattles out rhythm guitarist Matt Palmer’s lyrics with a conviction bordering on zealous, but she’s more considered on Don’t Come Lookin’, which somehow manages to combine raw with tasteful. All rock life is somewhere in this glorious melange.
They’re not perfect, of course. Playing Favorites lacks the career-defining standout that will catapult them into a bigger league, and sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its intriguing parts. They’re well on their way, though. ■■■■■■■□□□
John Aizlewood
Feeder
Black/Red BIG TEETH MUSIC
Expansive double album filled with ambition, expression and attitude.
There’s a lot to be said for a band releasing their first double album late in their career, and into a landscape where anything more than an EP can struggle to find its place on Spotify. There’s something of an Indian summer feel around Feeder with 2019’s vibrant Tallulah and 2022’s very welcome Torpedo both showing something of the prickly energy that surrounded the band when we all spent a summer jumping up and down to Buck Rogers.
It’s a sadly familiar story: success, suicide, a career riding high or in the commercial doldrums. But, to Feeder’s credit, this record sounds as box-fresh as they did all the way back when. It was partly written in lockdown, which shows in the occasional bout of muddy introspection, but Grant Nicholas is on something of a creative flyer in songs like the twisting Lost In The Wilderness and the blistering, choppy pop of songs like Scream and the arm-waving ELF. You can only sit back, sigh and admire their hwyl. ■■■■■■■□□□
Philip Wilding
Mark Knopfler
One Deep River BRITISH GROVE/EMI
Straits mainman delivers one of his best solo records.
To paraphrase Kenneth Tynan on Eugene Ionesco, once you’ve heard all of Mark Knopfler’s solo albums, you’ve heard one of them. There’s one or two reflective world-weary ballads, a couple of reflective worldweary toe tappers, and some finely wrought reflective worldweary character studies that are self-contained short stories. Because the thing about Knopfler’s solo albums – of which this is the tenth, if you don’t count soundtracks – is that it doesn’t matter that they’re all cut from the same cloth, because it’s a brilliant cloth, part Dylan, part folk, part stadium melancholy.
One Deep River is one of Knopfler’s best. These are gorgeous songs, sung in a voice that sounds like it’s lived a life that’s full, and the character songs – which Knopfler has excelled at since Sultans Of Swing – are as poignant as ever. Roll on album number 11. ■■■■■■■■□□
David Quantick
James
Yummy VIRGIN
Manchester alt.rock mainstays teach the whipper-snappers a thing or two about 2024.
Well might Tim Booth rage against ageist stereotypes on Yummy’s most pumped and agile alt.rocker Rogue, rattling through a catalogue of his colourful former lives – punk, samurai, guru, saint and more – and declaring himself, at 64, ‘still mesmerised by cleavage’. There are, after all, bands a third of James’s age who struggle to document the social zeitgeist as astutely and inventively as Manchester’s art-rock legends.
This eighteenth album, continuing the sophisticated air of their second era with its merger of plush future-rock, graceful gospel folk and organic electro-pop, addresses our subservience to technology (Mobile the Gen Z mental health crisis (Stay), democracy’s façade (Our and the desperate day-to-day struggle of life in post-Truss Britain (Way Conspiracy theory groover even gives credence to recent CIA UFO whistleblowing, although the deep philosophising of and are, emotionally speaking, far more cosmic. When finally confronts the reaper on the wry, fearless it’s in the style of a bombastic 1950s prom ballad beamed in from a distant galaxy, warps and all. That’s James – reinventing against the dying of the light.
