Table of contents for October 2015 in Rolling Stone Australia

Grace Under Fire AFTER READING YOUR story on the making of Grace I dug it out after not hearing it for 10 or so years, and I have to say it sounds a little dated! Of course there are some classic tracks on there, but “Eternal Life” sounds a bit like Nineties jock rock. Just sayin’ . . . Kate Swann, Coffs Harbour, NSW THANKS SO MUCH FOR JEFF Apter’s story on Grace. There was so much detail there for a die-hard fan like myself. I never understood why so much of the album was cover versions until I read that he was discovered playing covers in coffee shops. It makes perfect sense that his debut should be a showcase for his perfect interpretations. Paul Weiss, Melbourne, Vic Suge Rush…

WHEN CHVRCHES came off the road la st November, bringing to an end the touring cycle for their 2013 debut The Bones Of What You Believe, they’d played 364 shows over two years. No wonder frontwoman Lauren Mayberry says they were “definitely ready to go off grid for a little bit”. By January, however, the creative juices were flowing and the Scottish trio gathered at Alucard Studios – the three-bedroom flat in Glasgow they converted into a studio, where they also recorded their debut – and set about writing the follow-up. Despite the fact The Bones Of What You Believe had propelled the band – also featuring Martin Doherty and Iain Cook – into the Top 20 in the UK, U.S. and Australia and established them as a bona fide…

COLORADO-RAISED ECO-ACTIVIST and rapper Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is only 15 years old, but he’s already a leading voice in the environmental movement. In June, Martinez stunned representatives of nearly 200 countries when he delivered an impassioned climate-change address at the U.N., and he’ll soon appear in a short film being produced by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. Last month, his band Earth Guardians (which also includes his 12-year-old brother, Itzcuauhtli) performed a main-stage set at the politically charged Arise festival in Colorado. “We don’t just get recognition because we’re young,” Martinez says. “We get recognition because we bring a unique conscious hip-hop to the stage that people aren’t seeing anywhere else.” Martinez enjoys the attention his music is getting. But he’s also young enough to know his entire generation is at…

British actress Bel Powley has appeared onscreen and onstage for a decade. But the 23-year-old’s role in the widely acclaimed film The Diary of a Teenage Girl involved a “scary” first – a series of sex scenes with co-star Alexander Skarsgård. “I’d never even had an onscreen kiss before,” she says, “let alone an onscreen shag. I was like, ‘This is the worst idea in the world!’ ” By the time the film was finished, she’d shot eight of them – “including the lesbian sex scene”. In Diary, Powley stars as Minnie, a 15-year-old in 1970s San Francisco who worships Iggy Pop, drops acid and just happens to be sleeping with her mum’s boyfriend. The film premiered at Sundance in January, earning a jury award and making Powley the It…

After breaking records as the highest selling show ever held at London’s Victoria and Albert museum, the David Bowie Is . . . exhibition has settled into its new home at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), where it will stay until November 1. The show is an audio and visual feast, and from the moment you slip on the audio guide headphones and enter the exhibition Bowie’s voice fills your ears with his narration and random recollections. His outfits, sketches and memorabilia (yes, there’s even his coke spoon) paint a picture of an artist with an incredible degree of vision and forward planning. The sequential order of the show and its oblique captions are confusing, no doubt by design, but that doesn’t detract from the experience one…

Eight years after teaming up with director Peter Bogdanovich for the documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream, Tom Petty is delving even deeper into his past by cooperating with his longtime friend and Del Fuegos guitarist Warren Zanes on Petty: The Biography (due November 10th). Zanes even got estranged former Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch to break his long silence and dish on their bitter split. “Petty’s story is a band story,” says Zanes. “That meant I didn’t just need his participation, I needed that band to open up to me. And I needed Stan Lynch to be among them.”…

I Am Cait Mondays, 9.30 p.m., E! I Am Cait is reality TV’s bombshell of the year – if only because it’s one of those rare fluke moments when reality TV slips over the line and starts to overlap with something that feels like real life. Not that Caitlyn Jenner is an ordinary person in any way, but her story has actual emotional content – which is the last thing any fan expects from Brand Kardashian. It’s touching to see her stumble into her new life as America’s most famous trans woman, especially since she never really got a handle on the celebrity hustle in the first place. Watching Cait try to figure out the things we all try to figure out – how to walk, how to talk, how…

Lily Tomlin is hot. The 75-year-old comedian’s Netflix show, Grace and Frankie (which co-stars Jane Fonda), earned her an Emmy nomination. Her new film, Grandma, a comedy about a lesbian who helps her granddaughter get an abortion, opens later this year. As Tomlin once said, “The road to success is always under construction.” Grace and Frankie is a show about two older women rebooting their lives after finding out their husbands are having an affair with each other. Why do you think it’s clicking? We embrace issues that old people have to deal with that, truthfully, aren’t so different from what younger people deal with. You can start over at any time, you know. In Grandma, your character helps her granddaughter get an abortion at a time when access is…

Vikki Thorn (bottom right) captions her photos of the Waifs recording their new LP, ‘Beautiful You’, in Byron Bay. (1) “Ms Donna straight from her beach yoga session ready to make it sing.” (2) “Josh was in vintage guitar heaven. When he cut ‘Cracks of Dawn’ there was silence in the room. Step aside, girls. We let him have a moment here and there.” (3) “What better than a baby to keep the love flowing . . . and a rack of vintage guitars.” (4) “We met Nick DiDia (producer) the evening before we were to start recording. We sat around and played through the songs acoustically. We tried to explain to him who the Waifs are, why we do what we do etc. Time was ticking and he said,…

CHRIS CORNELL IS IN A RESTLESS mood. Though the 51-year-old is at home in Seattle, and the tour in support of his upcoming solo album, Higher Truth, is still a few weeks away, the singer is filling his days not with rest and relaxation, but with “working on other songs and other albums and rehearsing and everything”. There’s not, he adds, “a lot of down time”. Laconic in his delivery yet intensely thoughtful – he’s prone to long answers that occasionally veer off course but always return to the point at hand – Cornell is currently in something of a creative purple patch. In 2012 he co-penned King Animal, the comeback album for Sound-garden, the Seattle quartet he co-founded in 1984. (He’s also just started writing for their new LP.)…

Robert Forster  Songs to Play EMI In rock as in life, there comes a time when it’s all about how lightly you carry your baggage. 2008’s The Evangelist was a palpable act of will for Robert Forster, the great album he had to prove to himself in the turbulence of Grant McLennan’s passing. This is the one he can’t help. Even if it takes seven years. “Songwriters On the Run” is the song from which the Cohen-esque album title is drawn. It’s impossible not to picture the Go-Betweens united again in the whimsical scenario: two noble jailbird bards on a mission of mystery and romance; half-whispered but gravely, like a fable to a sleepy child. The line between songwriter and protagonist is gossamer thin from the start. With its soft-shoe-stomp…

David Gilmour  Rattle That Lock Sony Give or take the orchestra booking, it’s fair to assume Dave Gilmour can knock off a brooding, scintillating guitar poem like “5am” before breakfast most mornings. His fourth non-Floyd album in as many decades gets a lot more elaborate and less penetrable as the ensuing panorama unfolds. But as always, you have to wonder whether those mega-platinum fingers aren’t the most eloquent tools in his kit. The mood conjured with co-producer and fellow art-rock traveller Phil Manzanera (Roxy Music) is as ominous as the cover illustration of crows in a gathering storm. Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson draws on Milton’s Paradise Lost, as you do, in the cryptic lyrics to the title track. The ponderous “In Any Tongue” is a gruff slog through a conundrum…

The last fight I had Me and BC from Dune Rats, we were really drunk and being idiots. He’s bigger than me and he had me pinned to the ground and was sitting on top of me and pouring beer on me. He always does this thing where he spits beer on me. I used to play with Dune Rats, and once we were opening for the Hives, and he was like, “Oi Sean, come here! Come closer!” I came closer and he took a big swig of his beer and spat it in my face and then counted the song in [laughs], so I had no choice but to start playing with beer all over my face. He’s the cheekiest bastard in the world. The last time I regretted…

Last year, Sydney pop-punk band 5 Seconds of Summer released a chart-topping debut and opened for One Direction. They celebrated their success by getting right back into the studio: In January, they moved into a house in L.A. and brought in members of their favourite bands – Good Charlotte, Goldfinger and Sum 41 – to help write and produce an upcoming LP (tentatively due this year). Get ready for an all-out 5SOS blitz: They’re headlining amphitheaters and arenas in America right now, and their label expects them to only get huger. “I think they absolutely have One Direction potential,” says Capitol Records’ Mitra Darab.…

DAVE GROHL WAS LOST IN A fog. It was mid-June, a few days after he had toppled off a 12-foot-tall platform during a Foo Fighters gig in Sweden, breaking his right fibula and dislocating his ankle. The damage was significant, requiring surgery and six metal screws in his leg. “A physical therapist told me it was like my ankle got into a 40-mile-per-hour car crash,” Grohl says. “It’s like my ankle got its ass kicked by Ronda Rousey.” Worst of all, the Foos had to cancel the rest of their European tour, seven dates in all. Their North American tour – including a 20th-anniversary concert in Washington, D.C., on July 4th – was in jeopardy as well. Now, as he sat in an OxyContininduced haze in London, Grohl had a…

OLD Patti Smith “Free Money” This is actually one of the better-written songs on Horses. Patti sounds plaintive, and then she spits out the lyrics, which she does better than almost anyone. The Kinks “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” One of my all-time favourite bands. I wish more modern bands listened to and absorbed the Kinks. The Bee Gees “I Started a Joke” The pre-disco-era Bee Gees wrote and recorded some of the great pop songs, almost on a Beatles level, like this Robin Gibb lead vocal. NEW Kendrick Lamar “For Free?” Hilarious. “This dick ain’t free,” Lamar says. Indeed! Lesson well learned. Lamb of God “512” While I like the backing track here, I must confess this type of vocal styling – what would happen if a werewolf tried singing?…

1. Empire of the Clouds (18:01) Penned on piano by Dickinson, at one point he worried that “this is sounding a bit Billy Joel”. Then Maiden’s three guitarists stepped in and put an end to those concerns. 2. Rime of the Ancient Mariner (13:38) Based on the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, until “Empire...” it held the award for ‘Longest Iron Maiden Song’. On the band’s Live After Death album, Dickinson memorably introduces it by saying, “And the moral of this story is this is what not to do if a bird shits on you”. Quite. 3. The Red and the Black (13:33) Also from The Book of Souls, it’s one of three songs on the record to surpass the 10-minute mark. 4. Sign of the Cross (11:16) One of the…

FIDLAR broke from obscurity in 2013 with a debut self-titled LP that preached three core values – skating, partying and getting loose. The young L.A.-based punks played shows like there was no tomorrow and partied with the same mindset. Something had to give. “I overdosed three times in a month – two times in one week!” says 27-yeard-old frontman Zac Carper. “It got to the point where I saw my life and I was like, ‘I am going to die if I keep fuckin’ doing this.’ With the first album, everyone clinged onto the whole party aspect, but really I was writing those songs because I was depressed.” As a result, FIDLAR’s second effort, Too, plays a little like a cautionary tale. Songs like “Sober,” “Overdose” and “Stupid Decisions” came…

IN ONE CORNER SAT GORE VIDAL, author and liberal bon vivant; in the other was William F. Buckley Jr., talk-show host and founder of the conservative National Review. It was 1968, and ABC News, desperate for ratings, invited them to debate the presidential conventions over 10 nights. ABC was hoping for some fireworks – and got them. By the time Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatened to sock his “queer” opponent in the face on live TV, ABC realised it had struck gold. That is the centrepiece of Best of Enemies, a documentary directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville that suggests this clash of celebrity intellectuals gave birth to the shouting matches that dominate today’s punditry. “As soon as I saw the first debate, I thought, ‘My…

The Song That Makes Me Cry R.E.M. “Hairshirt”, 1988 “The first song that ever made me cry. My girlfriend put it on a mixtape for me and I was missing her really bad, and I was in the bath in my mother’s house listening to this tape and that song came on and I just burst into floods of tears. Crying wasn’t a big thing when I was growing up, so to have that release was just huge. I actually got to sing it with Michael Stipe a few years ago, and it blew my mind. He told me it had brought a tear to his eye listening to it, too.” The Song I Want Played At My Funeral Willie Nelson “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”, 1975…

Foals What Went Down Warner When Florence + the Machine stepped up to headline Glastonbury this year, Foals were asked to fill their penultimate slot. They said no. For one, frontman Yannis Philippakis said he’d been smoking too many cigarettes. Secondly, the band hadn’t rehearsed the new material enough, and didn’t want to have to rely on the old songs. The timing of Foals’ fourth album, released at the end of the European summer, is slightly off for the London-via-Oxford quintet, but you can be sure that by December, when they perform at Falls Festival, they’ll have the new stuff down pat. For What Went Down – even more so than 2013’s Holy Fire – is a record made for festivals, furthering Foals’ progression from a mathrocky indie concern to…

Yo La Tengo  Stuff Like That There Matador/Remote Control The New Jersey band built around husband-and-wife Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan recently had their 30th anniversary. Instead of celebrating with yet another critically-acclaimed new album, they’ve put together this, a mish-mash of covers of other peoples’ songs and their own past work, plus two random new songs. It’s a trick they pulled off better on 1990’s Fakebook. Yo La Tengo are no strangers to the world of cover versions. For years they’ve supported their local indie radio station WFMU with an annual visit to the studio, where they play a cover of any song requested by a listener who calls in with a donation. In 2006, a 31-track compilation of those performances called Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics…

Jarryd James Thirty One Universal Jarryd James, former member of troubadour Matt Corby’s backing band, has made a much-publicised transition to solo artist this year. Buzz is huge off the back of just two singles – the ubiquitous “Do You Remember” and follow-up “Give Me Something” – but despite having two star producers on board in Joel Little (Lorde, Daniel Johns) and Malay (Frank Ocean), the Brisbanite falls shy of expectations with his debut LP. In fact, perhaps the biggest disappointment is that the record meets our expectations almost exactly – there are no surprises and nothing half as immediate as “Do You Remember”, just the familiar clipped beats and wounded falsetto that marked Little’s very on-trend nu-R’n’B work with Johns. And so we have tracks that are not awful…

Chvrches  Every Open Eye Liberator “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is a maxim artists either embrace or rally against. It’s been the foundation of AC/DC’s career; conversely, Radiohead have always been too busy moving forward to glance at their past. If Every Open Eye is anything to go by – and given that it’s only Chvrches’ second album, it might be a tad early to view it as conclusive proof – the Glaswegian trio seem quite comfortable sticking to what they know. Or, rather, improving on it. For while Every Open Eye is clearly cut from the same cloth as their 2013 debut, The Bones of What You Believe – pulsing electro-pop with hooks for days, paired with vocalist Lauren Mayberry’s wounded but defiant delivery; it was even…

Future DS2 A1/Freebandz/Epic Last year didn’t go the way Future planned. The Atlanta croon-rapper’s much-ballyhooed, under-performing Honest failed to make him the Trap King of Pop, and his relationship with R&B star Ciara fell apart. To regroup, Future went back to the strategy that drove his 2011 come-up: flooding the market with mixtapes, one of which, Monster, bore a surprise hit in the woofer-busting “Fuck Up Some Commas”. Or as Future tells it on his third studio album, “Tried to make me a pop star and they made a monster.” DS2 maintains some of the ragged edges and raw nerves of his mixtape work (its title makes it, technically, a sequel to a street-classic tape from four years ago). It has little of the far-reaching ambition of Honest, but what…

GARY CLARK JR.’S 2012 MAJOR- label debut, Blak and Blu, was one of the most acclaimed blues albums in recent memory. Recording in Los Angeles with pop and rock producers Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Fiona Apple) and Rob Cavallo (Green Day), the singer-guitarist fused classic influences like Willie Dixon and Albert King with a love for Nirvana and hip-hop, yanking traditional American music into the present. For his new album, The Story of Sonny Boy Slim, the 30-year-old Clark brought it all back home, recording in his native Austin in search of a more relaxed, familiar vibe. “I went in feeling vulnerable – I was very aware of the sophomore slump,” says Clark. “I really wanted to just come home and be in the studio, hang out and go back…

IT’S BEEN SEVEN YEARS SINCE TOM Petty reassembled Mudcrutch, the short-lived band he formed in the early Seventies, years before finding fame with the Heartbreakers. Mudcrutch’s self-titled 2008 debut ranks among Petty’s best recent work. Now, he’s readying a second Mudcrutch set. “I’ve spent the last month frantically working on material,” Petty says, noting he has four songs that he’s happy with. “The good thing about Mudcrutch is that everyone brings in a song, so I don’t have to write 12 or something. Following up the last one is intimidating because I think that’s one of the better albums I was ever involved with.” Mudcrutch originally featured drummer Randall Marsh and rhythm guitarist Tom Leadon (brother of founding Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon) alongside two future Heartbreakers, guitarist Mike Campbell and…

ON JULY 16TH, WILCO SHOCKED THEIR fans in the best way possible: by releasing Star Wars, the band’s first album in four years, for free on its website, with no advance warning. The album is Wilco’s best in at least a decade, full of loose, poppy rockers like “Random Name Generator” and “The Joke Explained”. Frontman Jeff Tweedy credits a tiny five-watt Fender Champ amp as his muse: “It just sounds like the biggest fuzzbox on Earth – those sounds reminded me of glam rock and T. Rex,” he says. “I adore that stuff, but I always thought I wasn’t androgynous enough to pull it off, you know?” After recording the basic tracks himself in the Wilco loft in Chicago, Tweedy brought in the other members of the band separately…

Chrissie Hynde Reckless: My Life as a Pretender SEPTEMBER 8TH Overview: Hynde chronicles her entire life, from growing up in Ohio to hanging out on the 1970s British punk scene to the wild first few years of the Pretenders. Motivation: “I’m approaching writing this memoir . . . as I would an album,” she said. “I hope it makes you root through your closet and dust off your guitar.” Revelation: Hynde spent so much time with the Sex Pistols that she wasn’t surprised when Sid Vicious was arrested for Nancy Spungen’s murder. “We were only surprised that he’d stuck it out as long as he had. . . .” she writes. “Who could forget [Nancy’s] shriek, a sound not unlike that of an untrained cockatoo. ‘Sid – SID! WHEN ARE…

1 HE’S RULING THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT Afie Jurvanen has spent the past 10 years making textured, spirited folk-rock as Bahamas, a bit like Toronto’s answer to M Ward. His first full-band Australian tour will hit three festivals in September/October, including Hunter Valley’s inaugural Dashville Skyline. “Festivals are a big part of touring for us,” he says. “That’s all we’re doing right now. It’s a good chance to have your music introduced to a lot of people.” 2 THE BAND NAME HAS PAID OFF, GOOGLE BE DAMNED Initially just wanting a title “for this art project I was starting”, Jurvanen relished the difficulty of finding the band online. But the name’s sunny connotations have trumped its Google-unfriendly limitations. “It conjures up imagery for people before they even hear the music,” he…

Fear the Walking Dead Mondays, 8.30 p.m., FX ATYPICAL SCENE IN Fear the Walking Dead: two cops around a Los Angeles hospital bed. Some junkie kid got hit by a car while he was running down the street screaming about the undead horrors he’d just witnessed – a drug den where a half-naked zombie girl is feasting on human flesh. One cop says, “You were raving about flesh and blood and viscera.” The dude mumbles, “I don’t know what viscera is.” Uh-oh – people eating people? This could be a bad sign. Is this just the drug-addled ravings of a zonked-out junkie? Or is America on the verge of a full-blown zombie apocalypse? You’ve probably already guessed the answer, w ith some help from the title. Fear the Walking Dead…

IT’S BEEN A LONG, SWEATY SLOG FOR SYDNEY’S Gay Paris. The band emerged in 2009 with a potent stoner/metal/blues blend and began touring relentlessly, pausing only to record two mind-bending independent LPs. The quartet’s new album, Ladies and Gentlemen, May We Present To You: the Dark Arts, is a more focused affair that sees Gay Paris capitalising on lessons learnt. Here, vocalist Luke Monks and guitarist Lachlan Marks share their wisdom. Thou shalt be on point lyrically Monks: “Don’t sing about rock & roll: you’re not AC/ DC. There’s no need to be Burroughs-level obscure or Plato-level deep, but lyrics can’t be an afterthought.” Thou shalt not work with big producers for the sake of it Marks: “With this record, we went to the U.S. and got caught up in…

JASON ISBELL FELT A RUSH OF familiarity when he watched the final episode of Mad Men on his tour bus. As he saw Don Draper go AWOL from his advertising job and embark on an aimless cross-country road trip, Isbell recalled his own life around 2008, after his first marriage had fallen apart and he’d been fired from the Drive-By Truckers due largely to his heavy drinking. Isbell bought a motorcycle and took off from his home in Alabama. “I drove down to Florida, back up through Georgia and visited some of the girls I had met on the road,” he says in a husky Alabama drawl. “It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself. I got home feeling and looking worse than when I’d left, just completely lost.” Isbell eventually…

DAVID GILMOUR’S UPCOMING album, Rattle That Lock, is his first solo LP since 2006’s On an Island, but it wasn’t supposed to take so long. “I meant to get back to work earlier,” says the Pink Floyd guitarist. “But certain things got in the way.” Gilmour is presumably referring to the 2008 death of Floyd keyboardist (and his main creative collaborator) Rick Wright; the arrest and four-month imprisonment of his son Charlie over a 2010 political protest; and Gilmour’s decision to transform some of Wright’s last recordings into the final Pink Floyd record, last year’s Endless River. With all that behind him, Gilmour was finally ready to focus on Rattle That Lock (due out September 18th), which he co-produced with Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera. It’s a loose concept record…

Apple Music Biggest strengths: Beats 1 radio is unique. Service integrates with iTunes. Deep, smartly curated playlists. Biggest weakness: Interface can be confusing for casual users. Free option: Non-subscribers can use radio – including Beats 1 – and Connect, but can’t access the on-demand library. Exclusive content: Growing – from Dr. Dre’s Compton to Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue. Spotify Biggest strengths: Easy to use. Elegant, well-developed mobile app. Lightning-fast streaming. Biggest weakness: Discovery features are weaker than Apple’s. A few major artists (Taylor Swift, Thom Yorke) aren’t available. Free option: PC users can listen to any track (with ads); app users only get Pandora-like radio. Exclusive content: Limited, but Prince debuted a new song on the service. Tidal Biggest strengths: The only major service with a full-CD-quality tier (for $19.99…

FRANK TURNER WAS ALREADY HALF- way across London when he realised he’d lost his tickets for the night’s entertainment – a gig by Canadian post-rock outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The show was sold out and he didn’t have any money to pay a scalper; worse, he’d not figured out how to tell his girlfriend, who was sitting by his side on the Tube, oblivious to the fact she was about to miss one of her favourite bands. “You know when your bottom lip trembles and you’re about to start crying?” he recalls with a chuckle. For no other reason than it seemed like the right thing to do, Turner continued his journey to the venue, all the while contemplating what he was going to say to his partner. When…

DAWN IS JUST BREAKING ON JUNE 5TH AT DJIBOUTI’S INTERNATIONAL airport, but it’s already boiling hot on the tarmac. Mohammed Issa, a rotund and mustachioed border-police officer, gestures to a massive U.S. Air Force transport jet – a grey C-17 Globemaster – sitting a short distance away. “Since the start of the war in Yemen, it’s been crazy here,” he says. “Military flights, humanitarian aid – sometimes there’s no space to park on the tarmac.” ¶ Djibouti is a tiny state of citrus-coloured shacks and goat-lined boulevards tucked into a barren, volcanic stretch of the Horn of Africa. It sits astride the narrow straits that lead to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, and is home to the U.S.’s only permanent military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, linchpin of…

Gary Clark Jr.  The Story of Sonny Boy Slim Warner Gary Clark Jr.’s credentials, which include performances with the Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Paul McCartney, Dave Matthews Band and other heavyweights, suggest this Texan bluesman is a firm favourite among the rock establishment, and thus perhaps a little inoffensive. And while the smooth production and virtuosic guitar playing may seem the dominant features on first listen here, further immersion reveals a record of more depth and variety than that suggests. Clark’s brand of blues-rock is fairly conservative – a vehicle for his elaborate solos, and certain tracks stick to that limited template. On others, however, flavours of gospel and, most strikingly, funk and hip-hop take Sonny Boy Slim into a different realm. Opener “The Healing”, once you overlook some uninspiring…

Delusion Moon Cooking Vinyl Chicago three-piece Meat Wave know there’s nothing new under the sun, happily drawing on the scuzz of Naked Raygun and the tribal chug of Jesus Lizard and Shellac to create a hybrid of everything that was good about noise-rock from the windy city. They know their home town’s musical legacy well and, most importantly, realise that genre nods will only get you so far. It’s Meat Wave’s palpable energy that elevates songs like “Delusion Moon” and “Cosmic Zoo” into pit-frenzy fodder. At times, their ample melodic wash threatens to overflow the simple skeleton of the songs – but it sounds bratty rather than contrived, a bit like Hüsker Dü at their best. Delusion Moon is a fully realised and confidently scrappy record that draws on true…

Disclosure  Caracal Universal Second albums are a bitch, so spare a thought for Disclosure. Two years after their debut Settle rode in on a white horse to revive UK house and save the world from the hammering headache of EDM, they’ve returned with Caracal, a record that doesn’t quite live up to the towering expectations. “There’s not really any club music on this one,” Guy Lawrence forewarned ROLLING STONE this year, and he’s not lying. Instead, he and brother Howard have recruited a dizzying cast of collaborators for a collection of songs that are close to indistinguishable – whether it’s R&B men of the minute the Weeknd and Miguel, new superstar (and old collaborator) Sam Smith or jazz singer Gregory Porter on vocals, the result is the same pop-structured, soul-streaked…