Having documented the British psychedelic scene with anthologies devoted to the years 1967, 1968 and 1969, Grapefruit's ongoing series fearlessly confronts the dawn of the Seventies with a slight rebrand. New Moon's In The Sky: The British Progressive Pop Sounds Of 1970 features (appropriately enough) seventy tracks from the first year of the new decade as the British pop scene adjusted to life without The Beatles. The 3-CD set concentrates on the more song-based recordings to emanate from British studios during 1970, whether from a pure-pop-for-then-people perspective or the more concise, melodic end of the burgeoning progressive rock spectrum.
“It’s important to bare my soul the way I have,” Frank Carter tells Apple Music. “I have a platform and a responsibility to use it for good, to ask questions and make statements that I know other people feel but maybe don’t have the bravery or the means to.” End of Suffering, Carter’s third album with The Rattlesnakes, is the product of two years of unflinching self-reflection. Confessional and courageous, it spans moments of both great joy and profound despair. “I’ve constantly validated myself through the opinion of others,” he says. “I’ve looked to fill that void with drugs and alcohol and sex and relationships, and they’ve all fallen short. It can only come from within. We’re human: We’re very complicated, we’re extremely multifaceted. The minute you try and repress any one of those faces, that’s when the problems start.” The music soundtracking these reflections is equally searching and absorbing. “We made sure that everything’s in there, from techno and dance through to Elton John and Black Flag.” This is Frank’s track-by-track guide to his journey.
Made in collaboration with over a thousand musicians and singers from across the EU, The State Between Us began as a project responding to the triggering of Article 50 and the dramatic shift in the national story that began in June 2016. Over the course of the next two years - against the backdrop of a relentlessly challenging news cycle and via large-scale recording sessions abroad - something unexpected emerged.
Big Business are a band. They play heavy rock. On that, we can all agree. Things get tricky when you try to classify exactly where on the musical spectrum the dynamic duo’s racket falls. “I guess psychedelic heavy metal punk rock? I don’t know. People always say ‘sludge rock,’ which I always found to be lazy and kind of inaccurate. A lot of our songs are fast, and it’s not like we’re playing a half-assed Black Sabbath riff over and over again. That’s been the struggle of the band. We’re a band that doesn’t really fit into what everyone else is doing,” according to drummer Coady Willis.
Known for their lush and atmospheric, largely instrumental music, the Irish/Norwegian duo Secret Garden rose to fame in the mid-'90s and have since won an international following for their gentle but emotionally evocative sounds, dominated by violin and keyboards and combining notes of Celtic and Norwegian folk, pop, and new age styles. The duo first came together to write and perform the song "Nocturne," which became Norway's winning entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. While they would dabble in vocal music on 2007's Inside I'm Singing and pare back their arrangements on 2013's Just the Two of Us, the sizable majority of their releases saw them remaining loyal to their trademark sound, playing music that touched the hearts and soothed the souls of their many fans around the world.