Back catalogue: Rock (All)

Review: Pianist Rachel Grimes is Rachel's and their sophomore album Music for Egon Schiele was originally released in 1996 on Quarterstick Records as a live score for a theatrical production about the titular Austrian painter. The performance of it was premiered in 1995 by Chicago's Itinerant Theater Guild with Grimes and two string players. The music is intimate and emotionally rich material that is stripped down to chamber pieces that rise and fall with real intensity. More focused than their debut Handwriting, this album blends melancholy, romance and beauty into a deeply affecting narrative that lingers long after the final note.

Review: "In Rainbows", Radiohead's seventh album, finally gets a physical release! It's one thing downloading this landmark album, but to actually hold this is something special. Not only do you get increased sound quality, but you also get the amazing artwork from Stanley Donwood. This album includes "Nude", a live favourite for many years that was originally written during the "OK Computer" sessions. More minimal that their "Kid A" period, "In Rainbows" does something that very few albums have done - its sound is distinct from previous Radiohead albums, but is still clearly Radiohead. Hail to the kings, they are back on top form.

Review: "In Rainbows", Radiohead's seventh album, finally gets a physical release! It's one thing downloading this landmark album, but to actually hold this is something special. Not only do you get increased sound quality, but you also get the amazing artwork from Stanley Donwood. This album includes "Nude", a live favourite for many years that was originally written during the "OK Computer" sessions. More minimal that their "Kid A" period, "In Rainbows" does something that very few albums have done - its sound is distinct from previous Radiohead albums, but is still clearly Radiohead. Hail to the kings, they are back on top form.

Review: Originally released in 1984 and celebrating its 40th anniversary with this lush black & red splattered vinyl reissue, Out Of The Cellar was the debut full-length from glam metal staple Ratt, often listed in the pantheon of pioneering hair-centric rockers along with Poison and Warrant. Their highest charting album, certified triple Platinum in the US, boasts easily their biggest hit single with 'Round & Round', while also offering some equally adored fan favourites such as 'Wanted Man' and 'Lack Of Communication'. This anniversary edition also comes complete with a bonus neon orange vinyl 7" featuring the unreleased B-side bonus track 'Reach For The Sky', recorded during the band's 1983 album sessions.

Review: Following on from their crushing 2020 EP, 'Beneath the Canopy of Compost', New York/New Jersey based death-doom new schoolers, Reeking Aura, deliver a punishing, pummelling blend of grandiosity and fury on their debut full-length, 'Blood & Bonemeal.' A concept album detailing the "caretaker of a desolate agricultural property and that person's struggles with morbid psychosis," this is a ferocious blend of doomscaping and death metal brutality, elevated by a three-pronged lead guitar assault. Ambitious and desolate in equal measure, with the cavernous and corrupt colliding in abrasive cacophony, this is essential metal extremity for the most hardened of audible masochists.

Review: Heavy duty stuff in all senses, The Residents channelled feeling following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US into this three-part concept album. Divided into 'Loss', 'Denial', and, finally, 'The Three Metaphors'. It's as powerful a listen now as it was back in 2002, when it landed on the ears of art rockers and others shellshocked by one of the most significant political events of the post-Cold War period. While there's always been a melancholy to The Residents, this is particularly audible here, although it's delivered through fascinating juxtapositions - the 1980s funk-esque of 'Wolverines', the Parisian pop of 'The Weatherman', the eerie soundscapes on 'Ghost Child', the Broadway balladry of 'The Car Thief'. A fantastic, dense listening experience, which is only elevated by the true meaning and message.

Review: The self-described "world's most famous unknown anonymous art-concept multimedia pop group" return with one of their most expansive, daring, absurd and bad taste visions to date. Doctor Dark is a project over two years in the making while the concept has been in inception for decades with its overarching theatrical narrative inspired by the real life case of James Vance, the young man from Reno, Nevada who tried to commit suicide with a shotgun in 1985 after listening to Judas Priest and the subsequent unsuccessful, infamous 1990 court case that followed. Combining this with the life of the real "Doctor Death" - Jack Kevorkian; the Armenian-American pathologist and proponent of physician-assisted euthanasia, said to have assisted in the deaths of 130 terminally ill people between 1990 and 1998, you get the culmination of an orchestra-backed punk-opera written in collaboration with co-producer/conductor Edwin Outwater and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Detailed as "a journey into the greasy world of euthanasia, drug abuse and an unhealthy obsession with heavy metal", revolving around "a couple of heavy metal kids (Maggot and Mark) and an insomniac Russian physician (Dr. Anastasia Dark)", the three-act modern theatre piece offers a head-melting sonic concoction of abrasive art-punk stylings emboldened by complex brass and horn work, with a deft balancing act of chaotic yet controlled punk and classical arrangements. With both CD and vinyl versions including a "read-along libretto", with listeners encouraged to read as they listen to the album, as well as a stage adaptation apparently in the works to follow upcoming live tour dates, this just might be The Residents' piece de resistance of avant-garde art-punk multimedia absurdity.

Review: Finish dub techno powerhouse Joachim Spieth welcomes UK artist Rhubiqs to his well-regarded Affin label for a debut appearance that sinks you into a widescreen world of ambient lushness. His Aegis of Silence album takes cues from divergent sounds like post-rock and soft ambient as well as drone and even modern classical. It's an ever-shifting soundscape with smeared pads and nostalgia dreams, half-remembered thoughts and a sense of mood that ranges from escapist and blissed out to more ominous and paranoid.

Review: Marlene Ribeiro's cult status has already guaranteed copies of this will be flying out faster than you can say "first album under own name after years as Negra Branca, a member of GNOD, and collaborations with luminaries from Valentina Magaletti to Thurston Moore". And her first offering as herself, as it were, rockets straight to the pinnacle of career highs to date, a record that's so full of ideas yet consistent and complete.

Produced between Ireland, Portugal, Madeira and Salford, partly inspired by Ribeiro's grandmother, Emilia, introducing her to the concept of "recording things, here and there". The result is this incredible combination of hallucinatory dream pop, found notes and captured moments, resulting in a vivid tapestry of hook-laden songs that are meditative yet catchy, late-night but bright and breezy.

Review: Polish prog rockers Riverside have seen some things in their time, and stuff. Now in their third decade, the outfit have borne witness to seismic changes in their homeland. 30 years ago, it was just emerging from half a century of dictatorial Soviet rule. Skip to today, and the country is part of the EU - more than can be said for some - and, until the invasion of Ukraine at the hands of Vladimir Putin, was one of Central-Eastern Europe's stronger economies in the Covid era.

Suffice to say, a lot has changed even since then, and ID Entity can in many ways be taken as a record that bookends different periods. Yes, the outfit have always had one foot in a retro-hued synth-guitar sound, but here that's expanded on, with lyrics worthy of the Plain English Campaign's Crystal Mark. A record made to encourage reflection - both of oneself, and the wider world.

Review: If you've ever heard Rob Zombie's account of why his parents left their life with a travelling carnival, taking their two young sons with them, then his obsession with gore and visceral horror begins to make sense. Shots fired, people's faces being smashed apart with hammers. A full blown riot complete with burning tents. A cinema-worthy redneck vision of a hyperlocal apocalypse. Of course, his love of blood and guts and the undead has evolved since then, with a slew of cult movies behind him, not to mention all those huge album successes that came beforehand, both with and without the band that catapulted him into the spotlight, White Zombie. Hillbilly Deluxe 2 is his fourth solo LP, and the first to be recorded with his full touring band, as oppose to session musicians. It's loud. It's heavy. It's unequivocally Rob Zombie.

Review: British progressive metal band Rolo Tomassi hail from Sheffield and since 2005 have built up a fine following and honed in on their own singular sound. This, Where Myth Becomes Memory, is their sixth full length and a high pressure follow up to the widely loved and acclaimed 2018 LP Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It. Once again the band manages to capture the unique energy of their love shows and all is lead by vital and powerful vocalist Eva Spence. She manages to go from hellish guttural screams to much more scene sounds in an instant and allows the intricate songwriting to really shine.

Review: Those with an intricate knowledge of the sadly cut-short career of the late, great New York experimentalist and leftfield disco specialist Arthur Russell will happily tell you that his most celebrated solo album, World of Echo, was not only developed over several years, but also utilised edited and chopped-up recordings of shows he performed in his home city in 1984 and '85. This release presents both of those performances in full, with Russell - performing songs to his own effects-laden cello motifs and little else - delivering sparse (but effortlessly emotive) early versions and 'sketches'. These are a mix of lesser-known songs and familiar favourites, including a haunting take on 'Let's Go Swimming', a medley of 'Hiding Your Present From You/School Bell', and the inspired 'Sunlit Water'.