Rock

Mogwai
The Bad Fire
Rock Action ROCKACT166CD; LP: ROCKACT166LP

The Lanarkshire band have been going for 30 years and continue to produce music that’s both cryptic and epic. On ‘18 Volcanoes’ the vocals are typically half-buried in the guitar haze, but the magic happens in the mesmeric instrumental sections that build and surge into full power. The keyboard and guitar melodies of ‘Lion Rumpus’ are built on huge chord changes and energised by Martin Bulloch’s speedy drumming. Mogwai acknowledge their intra-band chemistry but can’t really explain it, and admit their song titles don’t really mean much. And although The Bad Fire – a name for hell in their parts – has been informed by personal trauma, it seems to lie outside all that, and exists in its own rarefied space. MB

Sound Quality: 90%

Manic Street Preachers
Critical Thinking
Columbia 19802859322; LP: 19802859341

Few who heard Manic Street Preachers’ 1992 glam-punk debut Generation Terrorists, a gaudy attack on Western pop culture, would have predicted that 23 years and 15 albums later they’d be a ‘classic rock’ act. But some early themes persist. The title track is a sneering critique of bland ‘lifestyle’ jargon over edgy disco-funk, sentiments taken further on the incendiary rock of the bile-fuelled ‘One Man Militia’. There’s a poignant sense of decay and time passing – singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield harks back to ‘a decade when I felt free’, on ‘Hiding In Plain Sight’, but these raw sentiments are typically balanced by exultant, widescreen tunes. MB

Sound Quality: 85%

Sam Amidon
Salt River
River Lea RLR027CD; LP: RLR027LP

On Salt River, American singer and guitarist Sam Amidon investigates what you can do with folk music – quite a lot as it turns out. ‘Oldenfjord’ is a mesmeric instrumental with picked guitar and flute lines criss-crossing over hand drum patterns, and his voice is reassuring on ‘Three Five’, a reworking of an American hymn. ‘Cusetta’ has traditional roots but incorporates rippling sax lines, brisk drumming and Amidon’s shimmering guitar, and he gives us lean, idiosyncratic takes on Yoko Ono’s cryptic ‘Ask The Elephant’ and Lou Reed’s ‘The Big Sky’. Fittingly, he arrives at no neat conclusions but he creates some captivating musical forms en route. MB

Sound Quality: 80%

Richard Dawson
End Of The Middle
Weird World WEIRD166CD; LP: WEIRD166LP

Dawson’s recent trilogy of albums has established him as one of the UK’s most original songwriters. He travelled from medieval times on 2017’s Peasant to the futuristic multi-dimensional fantasies of 2023’s The Ruby Cord, but here looks at characters around him, including school bullies, apparitions, the meticulous gardener of ‘Polytunnel’ and the humorous ‘old pal’s wedding’ tale of ‘Knot’. Dawson’s voice often flips into falsetto over rough-and-ready guitar, bass and drums, and edgy clarinet outbursts. Some songs are immediately melodic like the droll ‘Boxing Day Sales’, others have their own more complex logic, but all merit unravelling. MB

Sound Quality: 80%