Last year, the brothers Ron (79) and Russell Mael (76), known to the world as SPARKS,
who started their career 59 years ago, released their 28th LP, titled Mad! (stream below)
and took the road afterward for a tour that’s still going.
Now, the Maels have announced a live album. It’s named SPARKS LIVE ON THE MOON.
It’ll drop on planet Earth on September 14th. Pre-order info here.
The double LP comprises a full live set of 20 songs spanning the band’s 59 year career.
Sparks: “After our 2025 World Tour, we accepted an invitation to do a special one-off concert on the Moon, more precisely at the Taruntius Crater, near Mare Fecunditatis. Honored to be the first band to perform on the moon, let alone at the beautiful Taruntius Crater, we couldn’t have imagined the lunar fan interest, with all tickets being grabbed up within an hour. Sit back, close your eyes and imagine the wondrous setting, and enjoy Sparks’ first full concert album, Live On The Moon.”
Project: THE SANCTITY OF CROWS Who: An award-winning solo indie music project by Ian A Napier, who lives
in Scotland. He creates mostly instrumental, often cinematic music. Distinctive
genre-agnostic flights high above the confluence of the two great rivers Prog
and Post-rock.
Press info: “Mostly dark, sometimes menacing – even when the music is upbeat,
there is still often a mysterious undercurrent. Genre-agnostic as always, but hovering somewhere around Progressive Rock / Post-Rock territory.
It seemed like a good idea to have all the song titles on the album reference the concept of time in some way, and to call the album “Time”. When the nine titles were chronologically sequenced, they were found to manifest the endless cycle of birth, life, death and reincarnation.”
Album artwork
TUTV: Looking for a matching soundtrack that reflects the apocalyptic times we have to endure, because of the monstrous egos of narcissistic world leaders? This staggering opus is the one. It resonates like a metal Darkside Of The Moon odyssey. Otherworldly, ominous, and bone-chilling.
The overall colossal, bloodcurdling, and bombastic sonorousness evokes imagery from the Doomsday movie War Of The Worlds (2005), exploring Victorian-era fears of imperialism and technological destruction.
The album’s 14-minute centrepiece Living For Tomorrow seems to suggest that
there’s a weak light at the end of the survival tunnel. We can’t stop being hopeful.
Time is a titanic, instrumental work dominated by doom and gloom intertextures,
layers of gruesome guitars, theatrical synth waves, and at times industrial-rock shocks. This traumatic record accentuates the foreboding signs of the present times. The clock
is ticking. Armageddon is just around the corner.
Zia McCabe (keyboards, percussion): “We’ve been talking for years
now about getting as many of the covers we’ve done for specific territories
together and releasing them for all to hear. It’s finally happening.”
A total of 17 covers by legendary bands/solo artists.
TRACKLIST
Cherry Bomb – The Runaways What We All Want – Gang Of Four Primary – The Cure Kiss Off – Violent Femmes Goo Goo Muck – The Cramps Rain – The Cult
Straight To Hell – The Clash Sister Golden Hair – America Lay Lady Lay – Bob Dylan Ripple – The Grateful Dead Easy Chair – The Byrds Blackbird – The Beatles
The Beautiful People – Marilyn Manson Love Song – The Damned Jet Boy – New York Dolls She Sells Sanctuary – The Cult Inside The Outside – Love And Rockets
TUTV: Best covers album ever, to my ears. Why? Because The Dandys do a fantastic
job by revitaziling all those classic crackers, the buzzing and fuzzing Warhols way. No
lousy copy/paste performances whatsoever, what happens/happened on so many
covers records.
Pin Ups excels in sonic ingeniousness and absorbing implementation.
They speed up originals, they slow down originals, but most of all, they immerse
them all in a whirling psychedelic bath, resulting in amazeballs renditions, revved
up with a mind-blowing barrage of hefty hooks, unlimited licks, rotating riffs, and Herculean bass/drum/synth extravaganza.
If you’re not familiar with some/all of the originals (people that live on Mars), you would think that Pin Ups is the Portland‘s mean groove machine’s new original LP. For those about to rock, The Dandy Warhols pin you up. After all these years, they’re not in the slightest passé.
London’s punk oldtimers THE DAMNED
celebrate their 50th birthday this year.
50? Time storms forward mercilessly.
Their debut LP Damned Damned Damned from 1977
still is one of the best punk albums ever, in my book.
They now have a new one out, named NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE.
Their 13th longplayer. One with nothing but covers of 60/70s pop songs.
It’s a deeply personal and celebratory record to the memory
of co-founder/guitarist and musical architect Brian James,
who passed away on 6th March of last year.
The LP closes with a powerful farewell. The Rolling Stones‘ 1965 cracker ‘The Last Time‘, featuring Brian James himself, taken from his final live performance with The Damned in 2022 in London.”
Rat Scabies & Dave Vanian – The Damned at Lokerse Feesten, Belgium – August 2025
Photo by Turn Up The Volume
TUTV: Expect covers of songs by Pink Floyd, The Stones, Lovin’ Spoonful, The Kinks, The Creation, The Stooges, The Yardbirds, The Weeds, and a couple of others. The fact
that the record is a tribute to the late Brian Jones is the main message here. Kudos
to them for doing this. For me, after two spins, I went back to that supersonic debut LP.
Band:XIU XIU Who: Seasoned Californian
art noise duo based in Berlin.
They aren’t the lazy kind of artists. In their 22-year-old career, they have
canned/released 14 LPs, with last year’s oddly titled, but very compelling
album, 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips
as the most recent one.
1. “Psycho Killer” – Talking Heads 2.“Warm Leatherette” – The Normal 3.“I Put a Spell on You” – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins 4.“Hamburger Lady” – Throbbing Gristle 5.“In Dreams” – Roy Orbison 6.“Sex Dwarf” – Soft Cell 7.“Dancing on My Own” – Robyn 8. “SPQR” – This Heat 9.“Lick or Sum” – GloRilla 10.“Some Things Last a Long Time”– Daniel Johnston 11.“Triple Sun” – Coil 12. “Cherry Bomb”– The Runaways
Press info: For XX covers aren’t about improvement, but reverence, aiming with each
song to be a small honorific offering to artists that have inspired them. Covers come from a broad range of inspirational touchpoints for the band that while far reaching, each feel
a fit from a band with such a varied sound, from the likes of Throbbing Gristle to GlloRilla, Robyn, Talking Heads and even Roy Orbison among others.
TUTV: To be honest, I thought XX would butcher the songs that they picked to cover. Overall, the melodies of the originals are treated with respect, but they embed them in their own characteristic noise textures of reverberating distortion and industrial rumpus. From Roy Orbison to Talking Heads. Mutha fuckin’.
Australia’s THE MUSIC website: “Mega riffs ready to send a festival crowd into raptures? Tick. A riotous celebration of the joys of getting back on the road? Sure. Rock anthems that address the weird place we find ourselves, with personal privacy and the pale blue dot we
call home under threat from dark forces? Several.”
TUTV: 31 minutes of running rock amok, producing as many licks, hooks and riffs,
possible in that short time. No arty farty baloney. No ego wanderings. No unnecessary digressions. Only combusting rock and bloody roll. They take a breather (well, sort of)
on 2 tracks, Real Love and lullaby Warped but ‘Easing Out Of Control’‘s dominating racket
is roisterous and boisterous. Hail, hail!
Back in 2009, NICK CAVE published a darkly comic novel about a sex-addicted salesman, titled The Death of Bunny Munro. When it came out, Cave and his longtime sidekick and bad seed WARREN ELLIS scored an audiobook.
Now, The Death Of Bunny Munro has been adapted
into a TV show, and Cave and Ellis wrote a completely
different soundtrack for it.
It’s a compelling, goosebumps and gloomy score, with Cave‘s intimate piano play, Ellis‘ sinister violin pieces and shadowy synth textures are prominent in the middle.
It’s 99,99 % instrumental, a sombre and darksome symphony.
I’m not really into soundtracks (without seeing the movie, that is).
But the masterly duo have created a chilling opus that spellbinds
all the way.
Press info: “For more than three decades, AFI has been a band in a constant state
of reinvention. No album they’ve released has sounded much like the one before it, sometimes dramatically so. The band has never gotten too comfortable in one genre
or allowed themselves to coast on any successes.
It’s an approach that has regularly challenged their audience, as their sonic identity has shifted in wild, unexpected directions every few years. But on their twelfth album, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…, the members of AFI managed to surprise even themselves.”
Davey Havok (frontman): “I realize this is something we’ve said about our records
for years, but this record is starkly different from what we’ve done in the past. In our
33 years together, we’ve covered so much, musically, that I found myself daunted at
the prospect of doing something different, and questioning what that would be.”
TUTV: AFI display the same Goth grandeur and darkwave bombast Bauhaus were
so famous for. But they even take it a level higher with their galactic, bass-motorized tunes, supercharged with sky-scraping, nuclear choruses.
It all feels like watching a Götterdämmerung opera with vivacious vox Havok as the
star in the middle, surrounded by a full hellacious orchestra. Raise the stage curtain.
Aplause! Aplause!
Band: PÔT-POT Who: Irish/Portuguese quintet who infuse the propulsive grooves of krautrock
with a phosphorescent psych-rock radiance, all underscored by harmonium drones, hypnotic male-female vocal harmonies, and deep layers of rough-hewn texture.
Press info: “Evolved primarily from demos by multi-instrumentalist and lead vocalist Mark Waldron-Hyden during a period of grief and personal upheaval, the album came to life through a series of live, full-band studio sessions that document an exceptional array of talents, unified in an embrace of raw catharsis with a sweetly sinister edge. A defining element of ‘Warsaw 480km’ is its impressive range of influences and atmospheric topographies.
Waldron-Hyden about the record: “I wrote the first batch of songs while not really living in one place, so I think they have a kind of transient feel to them – developing them with the band helped me process an era in which I was emotionally freewheeling, so they remind me equally of the beautiful experience we shared as a creative unit and the difficult times that inspired them.”
“Ollie [Oliver Smith] and Sara [Sara Leslie] are experts at getting the most out of one pedal, a shitty amp, and a guitar they borrowed, a result of innate talent and years of experience; they use some modulation for dronier passages, but it’s their playing styles and understanding of ‘the vibe’ that are the secret ingredients.” This kind of intuitive connection and collaboration is incredibly rare, and with these ten pieces, pôt-pot accomplish something truly rapturous as they alchemize deep pain into a luminous reverie.”
TUTV: PÔT-POT are definitely psych rock fanatics. They explored the past, took notes and shaped a debut record that interprets their vision on the timeless genre. No, it’s certainly not a copy/paste job.
You will hear magnetizing echoes from legendary luminaries such as The Velvet Underground, Can and Love and modern era bands such as Black Angels, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols.
Warsaw 480km is stuffed with far-out Krautrock-like jams, hypnotizing riffs, kinetic rhythms, multi-layered jangly guitar layers, hallucinatory wanderings and psyched-out grooves. It’s an overall extravagant piece of trance-inducing work. Not many debut
albums have that mind-bending impact. Top-tier accomplishment.
KEY TRACKS: 22° Halo / WRSW / I AM! / The Lights Are On
Byrne: “Someone I know said, ‘David, you use the word ‘everybody’ a lot.’ I suppose
I do that to give an anthropological view of life in New York as we know it.Everybody
lives, dies, laughs, cries, sleeps and stares at the ceiling. Everybody’s wearing everybody
else’s shoes, which not everybody does, but I have done.
I tried to sing about these things that could be seen as negative in a way balanced by an uplifting feeling from the groove and the melody, especially at the end, when St. Vincent and I are doing a lot of hollering and singing together. Music can do that, hold opposites simultaneously. I realized that when singing with Robyn earlier this year. Her songs are often sad, but the music is joyous.”
Photo by: Ahmed Klink / Costume by: Tom Van der Borght
“At my age, at least for me, there’s a ‘don’t give a shit about what people think’ attitude
that kicks in. ”I can step outside my comfort zone with the knowledge that I kind of know
who I am by now and sort of know what I’m doing. That said, every new set of songs, every song even, is a new adventure. There’s always a bit of, ‘how do I work this?’ I’ve found that not every collaboration works, but often when they do, it’s because I’m able to clearly impart what it is I’m trying to do. They hopefully get that, and as a result, we’re now joined together heading to the same unknown place.”
TUTV: Well, I can’t add much to what the man said. He takes us on his merry-go-round. Probably his most upbeat longplayer ever. Lots of groovin’ and movin’, flamenco echoes and Mexican trumpets. Sonically, he entertains with frisky tunes and melancholic lullabies.
Lyrically, as usual, he comes up bizarre stories and bizarre song titles such as My Appartment Is My Friend, A Door Called No and I Hear The Buddha At A Cocktail Party.
My fav tracks: Everybody Laughs, When We Are Singing, that Buddha Song and The Avant Garde.”
