Deacon Blue. The Great Western Road.
Ricky Ross wrote among the best 80s indie-pop songs, not least the life-affirming Dignity a few council employee dreaming of escaping his day-job by saving as much as purchase a dinghy and crusing away. Decades on, the exhilarating Late ’88 captures the carefree pleasure of the Scottish band’s heyday. It’s a vibrant slice of soulful, string-embellished nostalgia celebrating a time after they ‘were running, never stopping’, releasing platinum albums and writing hit after hit – like Real Gone Kid, with its unforgettable “whoo-whoo” refrain. ‘We seemed to do it all – and it all seemed so easy,’ Ross sings. But if songwriting is more durable for him now, at 67, you wouldn’t understand it.
Deacon Blue’s eleventh studio album is awash with sturdy tracks, not least Ashore, about somebody struggling to seek out their place on the earth. This big, lush melancholic ballad might have been penned for a West End musical, with its uplifting refrain promising: ‘I will not hurt you/Nor desert you/I will not let you go’.
Other gems embody the upbeat People Come First and the nice and cozy embrace of How We Remember It as they are saying goodbye to the metaphorical circus leaving city. The 12 tracks vary from melodic ballads to the pop funk of Turn Up Your Radio! through Americana – a positive nation riff opens the pensive ballad Underneath The Stars – however all of them share an emotional intelligence and charismatic Lorraine McIntosh’s bittersweet harmonies impress all through. The album opens with the plaintive title observe, easy piano flows right into a relaxed tribute to Glasgow’s West End, a spot, he sings, of ‘lost days and wasted journeys, undiscovered twists and turnings’. Typically self-deprecating Ross describes the fashionable space as “the place we wanted to be and we seemed part of it for about two months in 1987.”
Jimmy Page & The Black Crowes. Live At The Greek
Re-issued with 16 new tracks, this combustive 1999 collaboration at LA’s Greek Theatre finds Led Zeppelin guitarist Page on high kind with the US blues-rockers as they roar by means of Zep classics and swaggering Crowes gems like Hard To Handle. We get all the pieces from Heartbreaker to Misty Mountain Hop plus BB King, Elmore James & Fleetwood Mac covers.
Courting. Lust For Life.
Don’t let the album’s classical violin intro idiot you, the Liverpool quartet are nonetheless forging a playful path between indie rock and electronica. The opener builds right into a gallop earlier than they jog on to funky floor-filler Pause At You. They’re at their strongest on full-on rockers Namcy [CORR] and After You. The title observe, Lust For Life begins listlessly earlier than surging right into a banger.
Various Artists. Krautrock Eruption.
Opening with Conrad Schnitzler’s easy and hypnotically insistent Ballet Statique, that is extra a 12-track introduction to German synth-pop than a definitive compilation. It packs in Harald Grosskopf’s easy, repetitively enjoyable Emphasis, enlivened by hovering electrical guitar, together with Roedelius’s Glaubersalz with its off-kilter really feel and chilling synths. No Can although.
https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/music/2030422/deacon-blue-still-red-hot