We’ve done the maths, and have come to the conclusion that the combined ages of all the bands featured this week is somewhere in the region of 1454 years, give or take a few decades. With all that combined wisdom and experience, how could these tracks not be great?
Alice in Chains - Man In The Box / Would? If you watched the Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship game at the weekend, you’ll have been witness to an extraordinary match-up, full of fake plays and onside kicks and players not doing the job they were supposed to do. What you might have missed was hometown heroes Alice In Chains performing on top of the scoreboard at halftime.
The Sonics - Bad Betty This, quite frankly, is astonishing. The Sonics must be getting on for about 300 years old by now, but this new release is a fearsome blast of wild, wailing garage noise, and it rocks harder than a bulldozer crashing into a rhinoceros at 54 mph.
Kiss vs Momoiro Clover Z - Yume No Ukiyo Ni Saitemina In any other world, a video featuring men of a pensionable age dressed as monsters performing with tiny Japanese pop stars would be viewed with enormous suspicion. In the world according to Kiss, it works, and it works brilliantly well. Why haven’t they done this before?
Motley Crue - All Bad Things All bad things must come to to end, and as Motley Crue announce their final ever show (that’s what it says here, anyway), they’ve released a video that celebrates the band’s decades in the business of rock. We’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Serj Tankian & Tom Morello - Crazy Train Here’s Tankian, Morello, Rudy Sarzo and Vinny Appice playing the Ozzy classic, Crazy Train. We’re not convinced by this yet — it’s strange hearing Serj sing a song so associated with another voice, and we’re not sure about the wibbly-wobbly guitar solo either — but we’re sticking with it, just in case. From the forthcoming Immortal: The Ultimate Tribute to Randy Rhoads.
Dead Sara - Mona Lisa This was suggested to us by reader Alex White, who “reached out” via the Twittergraph. Hi Alex! And thanks for getting in touch! Dave Grohl also likes Dead Sara (in 2013 he said they should be “the next biggest rock band in the world”), and you can see why: Mona Lisa is a thundering chunk of blues-rock, like Fleetwood Mac all messed up with with Queens Of The Stone Age in a massive blender made of steel.
David Bronson - Day By Day Is David Bronson related to Charles Bronson? Perhaps we’ll never know. What we do know is that Bronson is from Brooklyn, and that this song starts off all quiet and a little bit disappointing, but it’s a trick, because it slowly builds into an absolute epic of a tune, with chord changes and soulful backing singers and piano cascades and other elements that suggest bigness.
Bob Dylan - Stay With Me Ahh, Uncle Bob Dylan. What can you say about the croaky old goat? Probably nothing. He’s untouchable to many, a mystery to others, and releases new albums at a rate that suggests he never has the time to go on tour, even though he’s always on tour. Here he does Frank Sinatra, and, unlike anyone else covering the blue-eyed crooner, doesn’t sound anything like him. He just sounds like Dylan.
