Irish giant stars U2 have just announced details of their upcoming album.
It’s their first in 9 years, following Songs Of Surrender, which was actually
one with reworked versions of old songs.
The new LP is titled Carnaval De Luz and is set for
release on November 13th. Pre-order info HERE.
The 12-song record is produced by Jacklee Knife and tackles themes of spirituality, friendship, freedom, and endurance. The news comes a couple of months after the
band’s two surprising 6-track EPs, Days Of Ash (February) and Easter Lily (April),
and the new CD/LP’s teaser single Street Of Dreams (July).
Bono:“Roll up, roll up, roll up! Bring your purple socks, your broken hearts, your
rose-tinted naivety… oh be amazed in the hall of mirrors. There will be loud guitars,
deep bass, some ecstatic rhythms and, yes, some silver tears will make an appearance.
Because in the near distance just outside our carnival of light there are all kinds of creatures. The same imagination that brings us our creativity can also bring us monsters. So we make
the drums louder. We build a bigger fire. We make our stories wilder and funnier. We make the melodies sweeter and the songs, they better shine, because if the world is in darkness we better not be.”
The Edge: “It’s a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs, and features
the first-ever use of flat-wound strings on a U2 recording. Just saying.”
Along with the news, we get the 2nd appetizer, named SILENCIO. It’s a solid gold footstomper with a red-hot chorus. I guess I didn’t hear them ignited like this since Vertigo (2004, gosh, that’s 22 years ago).
No expiration date for Liverpool‘s indestructible post-punk-pop rockers ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN (one of my all-time fav bands, on record and
on stage), fronted by big mouth/songwriter Ian McCulloch.
They just launched their 13th longplayer, their first in 12 years,
titled APPLES FOR ISAAC. No idea who that Isaac guy is.
Album artwork
Press info: After years spent performing their immense catalog of classics to
audiences around the world, the Bunnymen have recorded an album that is as
bold as it is vulnerable, that perfectly captures the essence of what makes
the band so great.
All but one of the tracks features the late Blondie drummer Clem Burke, who sadly passed away during its creation.
UNCUT (British music monthly magazine) says: “The album draws deep on Mac’s rich and strange memories of the 1970s, outside of the holy trinity of Bowie, Cohen and Reed. On an album keen not to outstay its welcome, you feel, quite reasonably, that this one should have run maybe three times as long.
‘If Apples For Isaac’ is the beginning of the descent, if it inaugurates the official start of the Bunnymen’s Late Style, this promises to be one of the great final seasons in British rock.
TUTV: Almost 50 years into their career, The Bunnymen come up with their first masterwork of the 21st Century after 4 average albums, but in the meantime, still delivering electrifying goods on their never-ending touring. It matches their 1999 LP What Are You Gonna Do With Your Life?
Like that grand opus, this new one is a near-solo Ian McCulloch effort, musically
and lyrically. Longtime brother in arms, Will Sergeant‘s role is relatively minimal.
As the line “Is this the blues I’m singing?” goes in their 1980’s classic cracker Rescue
that sentiment is all over the place right here. At 67 McCulloch also gets gripped by melancholia, by memories of a lifetime. He translates them into his often cryptic, poetic,
and shadowy language and embeds them in a stunning series of astounding tunes enflamed by his eternally awesome voice.
The outcome is strikingly vital. Not one weak moment, and with Can’t Be Sold, Brussels Is Haunted, I’ll Be Your Sunshine, The Light That Surrounds You, Lab Rats Ran, and We Prayed In The Dark as the 24-karat gold nuggets.
British blues rock tandem ROYAL BLOOD will launch their 5th full-length,
titled DEAD COMPANY on November 13th. Tracklist and order info here.
Press info: “Self-produced, Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher headed into the studio in 2025
with no deadline and no distractions. The result is raw, direct and stripped back to the essentials, with all the force and immediacy of Royal Blood at full tilt. Written with the
stage in mind, Dead Company is built to hit hard live.”
Album artwork
Thus far we can go nuts to two fired-up riff whoppers.
Press info: “In 2024, Steve and his wife Elisabeth took a road trip across America where
he witnessed the poverty and divisiveness in the context of the upcoming election that year. They were in a New Orleans club where a house band leader welcomed two Belgian musicians on stage by saying “welcome to the last season of America.”
This became the theme for the rest of their road trip and led to him writing the title track to the new album. A deeply personal, heartfelt reflection on the state of his home nation, The Last Season of America is a protest record in the truest sense.”
TUTV: The downfall of Trump’s Divided States Of Hate (“We got a criminal running this
place. He got lies written all over his face”) makes Seasick Steve angry, confused, mournful and combative. Except for MAGA, almost the whole wide world despises today’s America
for its current failure on many levels and its global, disastrous impact.
That’s the record’s main theme. Dark clouds hang all over Steve‘s doomful grooves
(Bad Things / Above Ground Boogie / Boottraps) and his brooding ballads (The Last
Season Of America / El Camino / Matilda From From Ottawa). He also goes after all “useless motherfuckers and parasites in the music industry“.
Steve doesn’t rock out much. He spits and sneers on many occasions. He boils inside.
No, this is not a happy album. It reflects the ill-omened signs of this historic, damaging,
and dangerously tumultuous American era.
Yet, in the end, Steve still believes in a healing metamorphosis if we all get together and make it happen, as he sings on the funky footstomper Bad Things: “There’s bad things, but we still can change. If you believe in hope, we can rearrange. I still believe in the power of love.” It’s not over yet is Steve‘s underlying belief in a redeeming turnaround.
Again, and it still puzzles me, that ominous times are often a fruitful
inspiration for musicians to write/make engrossing records. One of
the best I heard all year long, musically, thematically and lyrically.
Singles.
– THE LAST SEASON OF AMERICA –
It’s the last season of America
And we’ll never watch again
The show that we loved
Young: “It’s quite a special album to me. Music is a gift and when it comes
like this I really feel it. Everything here feels so good. I hope you will agree.”
Album artwork
TUTV: It’s the melancholic Young we hear here, strumming his acoustic guitar,
playing his harmonica here and there, and adding the fitting vocality, intimate
and kind-hearted. All very familiar. He looks back with old romantic memories,
soothing cogitations and nostalgic reveries.
Second Song sounds like a solo album from his
inexhaustible Archives, like candlelight moments
from bygone times.
A song about the intoxicating feeling of longing that comes
when you feel chemistry with someone, but aren’t sure if
it’s all in your head.
TUTV: The song’s footstomping, iterative, groovy drum/bass beat gets you in
a trance from the first listen. On top of the stream comes Nova‘s gentle and
crystalline voice. Transfixing pop ardour.
Okereke wrote the record in the wake
of a more than decade-long relationship.
“Every lyric you’re hearing on this record was something that
actuallyhappened to me. I had to tell the story, from start to
finish.”
📸 Charlie Pryor
Clash Magazine‘s verdict: “‘Anatomy Of A Brief Romance’ is a chronological account of a relationship from first glance to final goodbye. It may not be among their finest work, but ‘Anatomy Of A Brief Romance’ is surely a cathartic release for its composer and for listeners who see their own experiences reflected in it.”
TUTV: This new Bloc Party sounds like some old Bloc Party records, but not the great
ones (like the first 2) but the okay ones. Sonically, there are just not enough top-shelf tunes (except for the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed singles and a couple of other chipper ones), too many lukewarm pieces.
Lyrically, as aforementioned, all 14 songs (too many) serve to tell the story – from start
to finish – of a past Okereke relationship (so why didn’t you make it a solo one, Kele?). I always have mixed emotions about relationship albums. Does the partner like it that his/her love life goes public? What is her/his side of the story? And I’m not really interested in so many details of someone else’s romances. File this anatomy next to BC’s other just okay full-lengths.
On Half-Told Stories,half of the tracks are designed to rock out and freak out while trying
to pogo your way around the dancefloor in your head. More and more, the long-serving duo’s mix of trippy electronics and bouncy rock undercurrents comes with pumped-up, pounding decibels, like you can experience, among other stompers, to the full extent on the 3 dumbfounding singles (hear below)
Then again, half the record contains laid-back breathers, letting poetic storyteller Moffatlook out the window and reflect on all things weird whirling in his mind, with his trademark wit and dark humour.
Put everything – low and slow, fast and fervent – together and you know for a certified
fact that the Scots delivered another buzzworthy showpiece for end-of-the-year lists.
A deafening record about emergence, about recognizing
uncomfortable truths and finding clarity in their wake.
Artwork: “The luminous and deeply unsettling artwork of Bora Murmure,
THROAT SLAVE occupies a space somewhere between nightmare and revelation.
Like the glowing figure depicted on its cover, the record emerges from darkness transformed – beautiful, disturbing, and impossible to fully explain.”
It’s been 19 years since Australian rockers Jet‘s album Shine On
renowned American music website PITCHFORK gave an artist’s
album a 0/10 score.
Now 36-year-old Californian rapper TYGA (backronym
for Thank You God Always) gets the same ice-cold shower.
The 2 main motives for the devastating verdict are: A1 technology was
used to make the record, and the music is badly copied/pasted from
the 80s.
To get in the mood and before you read large pieces from
that review, listen, for starters, to the full-length’s single
below.
Here we go.
“Tyga is not the biggest rapper in the world. But earlier this year, he revealed himself to
be a man with a dream not dissimilar to Lil Wayne’s: to completely reinvent himself and his music. The vision was to create an entirely new character separate from Tyga, the rapper known primarily for the party songs he recorded in the early 2010s while serving Young
Money’s fourth banana, and a world for that character to embody for a whole-ass album cycle…
… Initially, Tyga implied this album was 100% human-made. “Even down to the mixing,
we used a lot of the old hardware,” he told People, citing the very specific examples of “delays, harmonizers. Everything that we used was stuff that they used in the ’80s.”
But then a week later, when asked by VIBE if he used AI on the record, he pulled an about-face and said, “For sure.” He defended himself by claiming that the public’s negative attitude toward AI tools is similar to how people felt about early Auto-Tune use, that “there’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” and besides, even if he got some musical elements from the record from AI, that “the writing, all the vocals are all me.” For good measure, he added in, “Why are people overexplaining how they make shit good?”…
… , $TARFACE is smug and complacent, an amalgam of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life. Given the amount of actual effort or even labor put into $TARFACE—which is to say, about zero—the margins on this thing must be amazing.
Stream it out of morbid curiosity if you must, but know that even a single listen runs the risk of making it profitable and therefore encouraging the music industry to commit such atrocities again.”
TUTV: I can’t shake off the idea that this is a very lazy, very stinking/suspicious, and very over the top review. I agree, if AI technology is used, it’s cheatingly stupid. But we don’t know for a fact how far the AI treatment goes: the whole record, or only the backing tracks, some or all of the musical parts and instruments.” To be honest, I have no idea aurally if/when AI is applied or not. I don’t know how you can detect that.
Then the butchering of the music in itself “$TARFACE is smug and complacent, an amalgam
of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life” is a sort of gratuitous and unfair opinion.
Decades-old music/genres recycling/reimagining these days is a daily, normal thing (for ages, actually). It happens with rock, punk, techno, metal, EBM, R& B, all the time. Are all those records shit? Nope.
Also, when Pitchfork writes that the album is “slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life”, how can the creator of it copy that type of music? C’mon.
I can’t get it out of my head that this journalist/writer didn’t like what he heard – and
that’s totally okay; everybody, of course, is entitled to his own taste/impressiin/opinon – but that something triggered him to go to extremes in his reflections, knowing that he would get a lot of attention (ours too) all over the internet (which happened) with his
‘0/10’ score. Did this guy use aggressive-oriented AI for his review? LOL.
To my ears, $TARFACE is a record stuffed with catchy synth dance-pop tunes, but a bit
too much of the same. I give it a 6/10. So, Tyga and this producer have no clue how to use AI properly; otherwise, it would have been a 10/10 masterpiece opus. Right?
