Joy Press

Iggy Pop a déclaré un jour, à propos des femmes : « Aussi intimes qu’on puisse devenir, je les laisserai toujours tomber. C’est de là que vient ma musique. » Cette férocité masculine, cette répulsion vis-à-vis du féminin, c’est le rock’n’roll à son paroxysme. Que l’on songe aux hymnes machistes des Rolling Stones, au punk et sa glorification de l’abject, ou au culte que Can et Brian Eno vouent à la Terre Mère, la rébellion rock masculine s’est souvent ancrée dans un imaginaire où les femmes étaient sinon absentes, du moins allégoriques ou reléguées à l’arrière-plan. …

In 1997, Joe Lynn Turner released Under Cover, a collection of his favorite hard-rock classics. It was such a success that he followed it two years later with the appropriately-titled Under Cover 2. Turner has surrounded himself with first-rate musicians – Vernon Reid, Al Pitrelli, Jeff Golub, Greg Smith – and has expanded his musical outreach, taking on such numbers as "Wishing Well" and "The Race is On," along with such album-rock favorites as "Helter Skelter," "Waiting for a Girl Like You," "The Boys Are Back in Town," "Born to Be Wild," "Fool for Your Lovin" and "Mississippi Queen."

Pools of Sorrow, Waves of Joy is the debut solo album of Dutch composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Arjen Anthony Lucassen, released under the name Anthony. He sang leading vocals and played most of the instruments himself. However unlike most of his future works Lucassen doesn't play bass, with Peter Vink (future member of Lucassen's band Star One and future contributor of Lucassen's project Ayreon) playing all bass. The name of the album comes from the song "Across the Universe" (by The Beatles), one of Lucassen's favorite songs.

Raging Slab's first major-label album is pretty interesting in retrospect, in that it's both of its time and very clearly a harbinger of the future – which of course is all the more bemusing in that the band was so clearly inspired by the past more than anything else. The quintet's obsession with '70s rock trudge and stomp – perfectly evident with song titles like "Shiny Mama," "Get off My Jollies," and "San Loco" – pretty soon would get full validation in the grunge explosion and even the nü-metal fallout later. The clipped blasts of feedback on the verses of lead single "Don't Dog Me" aren't that far removed from what Ross Robinson would oversee in later years, while some of the massed harmonies at points – "Geronimo" is a great example – easily foreshadow Alice in Chains' take on it.

Following the end of her marriage to longtime collaborator and guitarist Darrel Higham in 2015, Irish vocalist Imelda May returns with her fifth studio album, 2017's dark-hued Life. Love. Flesh. Blood. Produced by acclaimed roots icon T-Bone Burnett, Life. Love. Flesh. Blood finds May transforming both her sound and image with a suitably haunting and soulful set of songs rife with heartache. Gone are her rockabilly-tinged grooves (and trademark pompadour), replaced with a ballad-heavy, reverb-soaked aesthetic and dark brown Chrissie Hynde-style shag, all of which befits her post-divorce attitude of mourn and move on. If her earlier albums matched '50s rock bounce with '80s new wave attitude, then Life. Love. Flesh. Blood is pure '60s songcraft, a Roy Orbison-esque combination of dusky Americana and vintage British soul.