Rattle

Former Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is not prolific. Rattle That Lock is only his fourth solo studio album (though it follows his late band's final album, The Endless River, by only ten months). Gilmour recorded some 35 songs for this set, some dating back 18 years. Trimming them to ten couldn't have been easy. Titled for John Milton's second book in Paradise Lost, Rattle That Lock is structured as an informal song cycle to reflect the sometimes random, sometimes weightier thought processes of a typical person in a single day. It begins, appropriately, with the instrumental "5 A.M.." Orchestrated by Zbigniew Preisner, Gilmour's signature slow, bluesy, Stratocaster sting enters just 30 seconds in, followed by fingerpicked acoustic guitars, gentle synths, and electric piano amid chamber strings to announce the title-track single.

Three of Szymanowski’s most important works show Rattle’s ability to energise music in which he believes. Sensuality and cogency blend in refined sound.

Conducting Bruckner, says Rattle, is a lifelong quest for some "extraordinary vista, some wonderful moment which leads you out of this world". This certainly rings true for Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, the opening theme for which is said to have come to him in a dream, played by an angel. This huge, glowing mountain-range of sound is all at once majestic, reverent and terrifying. This edition of the symphony by Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs was first performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle in September 2022, and the recording completes a set of three albums which also features Cohrs' editions of Bruckner's Fourth and Sixth symphonies. Making use of Bruckner's discarded fragments and lesser-known material through his many revisions, this set of albums is a must-listen for lovers of Bruckner's music, and gives us a glimpse into the composer's untold musical thoughts.

Former Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is not prolific. Rattle That Lock is only his fourth solo studio album (though it follows his late band's final album, The Endless River, by only ten months). Gilmour recorded some 35 songs for this set, some dating back 18 years. Trimming them to ten couldn't have been easy. Titled for John Milton's second book in Paradise Lost, Rattle That Lock is structured as an informal song cycle to reflect the sometimes random, sometimes weightier thought processes of a typical person in a single day.

This UK heavy rock band was an offshoot of Back Street Crawler, the band that had featured the late and legendary Paul Kossoff. Crawler comprised Terry Wilson Slesser (vocals), Geoff Whitehorn (guitar), John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick (keyboards), Terry Wilson (bass) and Tony Braunagel (drums)…

Functioning as both the soundtrack to the group's disastrous feature-film documentary and as a tentative follow-up to their career-making blockbuster, Rattle and Hum is all over the place. The live cuts lack the revelatory power of Under a Blood Red Sky and are undercut by heavy-handed performances and Bono's embarrassing stage patter; prefacing a leaden cover of "Helter Skelter" with "This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles, and now we're stealing it back" is bad enough, but it pales next to Bono's exhortation "OK, Edge, play the blues!" on the worthy, decidedly unbluesy "Silver and Gold." …