New music: albums of Finnea, Revolverheld, Santana, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones

When a 72-year-old pop superstar like Queen drummer Roger Taylor deals with finitude, that might be okay. But a 24 year old? Finneas is Billie Eilish's brother, he has eight Grammys and recorded his debut Optimist while working on sister Billie's second album. And anyone who now thinks, "Ego - it has to be" is wrong. Finneas also understands moving, primarily ballad-like pop music that deals with the shadows of life. Badflower also draws from them, but the Californian band around the charismatic singer Josh Katz cultivates rock 'n' roll. Beautifully melodic, of course only until they smash and scream their songs. Enter! Listen!

Badflower rock over social upheavals

When they won the ESC this year, the excellent Italian band Maneskin stated that rock 'n' roll is still alive. Badflower from the USA on "This Is How The World Ends" now show that he's really kicking ass. The album starts off very quietly. On "Adolescent Love" Josh Katz sings about memories of the time of the first, innocent love and how it was destroyed by serene adults. Everything was romantic, but adult love afterwards was only violent. A sweet melody, a sobering conclusion. Advertisement

Badflower have it all with melodies, they are just as good in this area as the Imagine Dragons. Unlike their colleagues from Vegas, the L.A. quartet, who have relocated to Nashville, do not focus on pseudo-cool sound antics. The songs also don't follow a verse-chorus pattern, some begin harmoniously and then, shortly before the "cuddly rock" borderline, are noisily smashed by the instruments and yelled at by Katz.

And unlike the Dragons, Badflower are always urgent, they are at the mercy of social upheaval. The stories they tell are about selfishness and abuse, people who break (“Fukboi”) and people who get broken (“Tethered”), shallowness and depression (“Sasshole”) and the social discrepancies – here the cynical, unfortunate privileged of affluent societies who have everything, there the desperate, whose survival "on rubber boats in murderous seas" is uncertain ("My Funeral"). In Machine Gun, Katz poses the question of good and evil in conflict ("What if we're the terrorists?"). The king song of all these angry songs is "Everyone's an Asshole", a misanthropic broadside, also against ex-president Donald Trump, "who has no evidence and can still persuade a mob to revolt". Big disc. And: bet that no song of this rock 'n' roll hit will be heard on the radio? By the way – when is the Maneskin album coming out?

Badflower - "This Is How The World Ends" (Big Machine Records) advert

Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan and the Blues of Bad Times

"We live in a political world," Lucinda Williams observes -- a world where "wisdom has been thrown into prison," "where peace is not welcome" and "where courage is old hat". In "Political World" from their Dylan tribute "Bob's Back Pages", Stuart Mathis and Joshua Grange's needle-sharp guitar tones create an edgy atmosphere for eight and a half minutes. Not only is the song twice as long, it feels a tad more menacing than the original from Dylan's '89 album Oh, Mercy! These are ominous times when the devil can appear in the guise of a Man of Peace: "He could be 'the leader' or the local priest." Then “Everything Is Broken” – the guitars twanging dangerously, as if Henry Mancini's “Peter Gunn” had ripped into the song. It's not far from broken dishes to broken contracts. Advertisement

The blues reigns here from the opening bars of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry." And William's voice sings so deeply, as if Bob Dylan's songs were of her own pen. Her sources range from “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965) to “Time out of Mind” (1997). Like her colleague, Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde, on her Dylan album "Standing in the Doorway", the 68-year-old is not interested in famous songs like "Forever Young" or "Blowin' in the Wind". The hit of their selection is probably "Make You Feel My Love", a love song that Billy Joel, Adele and Garth Brooks, even Helene Fischer have recorded. "I'll go to the end of the world for you," Williams sings. Lucky you, Bob Dylan!

Lucinda Williams - "Bob's Back Pages: A Night of Bob Dylan Songs" (Highway 20 Records)

Santana is back on the pop road

In 2016, Carlos Santana proved that he can still burn off the old Latin rock fire with "Santana IV". With his former companions - drummer Michael Shrieve, percussionist Michael Carabello, guitarist Neal Schon and keyboardist and lead singer Gregg Rolie - the Woodstock master once again created a great, percussive masterpiece in which he and his singing Paul Reed Smith were not at all obtrusive played forward. The "Africa Speaks" that followed in 2019 was almost as unleashed - the old magic of jamming unfolded here over the full length of the album. Advertisement

Now the 74-year-old guitarist is getting, shall we say, more revenue-oriented. "Blessings And Miracles" is more in the tradition of "Supernatural", Santana's first dance-pop and all-star album from 1999, which at the time rained a veritable Grammy rain. Hip-hop is integrated, and Matchbox 20 singer Rob Thomas is there, who sang "Smooth" 22 years ago and with "Move" has another song with hit potential to offer.

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There's a little Latin flavor in "Medieval", a little 90's pop in "The 90ies" and probably the liveliest track "Around My Neck" (it's about sex) sounds like Prince on " Kiss” times – just in slow motion. The positive album title arguably owes more to the relaxed process of the 24-year-old singer-songwriter, eight-time Grammy winner, who created this highly melodic effort with no pressure while working in parallel on Sister Billie's second album, Happier Than You. The result: Sad can be so good. And an optimist is only one who sees the inclemencies and shoals of life, but who doesn't forget the hope - listen to Finneas' "Only A Lifetime".

Finneas - "Optimist" (Interscope)

"Let It Be" – Anniversary of the Beatles epitaph leaves nothing to be desired

What a pity, one might think while cradling the latest, precious Beatles brick in one's hands. Too bad they didn't include the films about the "Let It Be" sessions (for legal reasons) in this thick, beautiful box - the sad Beatles end-of-times flick "Let It Be" by Michael Lindsay-Hogg from 1969. Too bad also that no CD was dedicated to the “strumming”, the search for inspiration of the Fab Four, who played countless well-known tunes during the work-in-progress – even the zither theme from the post-war thriller “The Third Man” by Anton Karas. True Beatle maniacs have had this stuff on bootlegs that sound technically appalling for decades and would have liked to have owned many more of these highlights and obscurities in a slightly better quality.

The anniversary edition of the Beatles album, which was released in May 1970 when the band of all bands had just announced their resignation, but which was recorded before "Abbey Road" (1969), would also like the complete "Roof Concert" with which the Beatles reported back as a live band on January 30, 1969, upstairs from their Apple company building. So this celebratory edition of Let It Be is also a memorial to some missed opportunities. Included on the five CDs, in addition to Phil Spector's remastered official album and Glyn John's discarded version of Spring 1969, completed under the title "Get Back", are alternative versions of the songs from "Let It Be", early variants of some of the tracks, which were then taken to " Abbey Road" ended up ("Octopus's Garden", "Polythene Pam") or on early solo albums ("McCartney's "Teddy Boy", Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth" or Harrison's "All Things Must Pass").

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"Save The Last Dance for Me" by the Drifters they also play on this album, the It should have been a "return" - the one from the polished pop music since "Revolver" to the grittier, hand-crafted rock 'n' roll that the Beatles started with. After a while it was her last dance. Of course, the last word on “Let It Be” has still not been spoken with this box.

The Beatles – "Let It Be - 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Special Edition" (Apple/Universal)

Rolling Stones: Pearls and pebbles among the outtakes of "Tattoo You"

The Stones community can't complain - in recent years there have been all sorts of refined original albums and concert recordings for their shrine. Only on the ominous follow-up to "Blue & Lonesome" we continue to wait undeterred. In the meantime, a remaster of "Tattoo You" is coming out - that was another great Rolling Stones album in 1981. It contained the last of the classic Stones rockers in "Start Me Up", one of the band's finest ballads in "Waiting on A Friend" and the tight "Hang Fire" sounded like the band's turn to the post-punk era.

For its 40th anniversary, it is now released in a polished sound robe - enriched by an early reggae version of "Start Me Up" and eight outtakes, which, however, also show that the final selection for the album was for the right songs. Pieces like the bluesy "Trouble's A Comin", the up-tempo number "Fiji Jim" or the mid-tempo rocker "Living in the Heart of Love", released as a single, are more stuff for Stones fans who have to have everything. The Stones adaptation of Dobie Gray's rock 'n' roll gospel "Drift Away", on the other hand, catches fire immediately, as does the country swing "It's A Lie" or the Jimmy Reed adaptation "Shame Shame Shame", which has the charm of the Rolling Stones' early rhythm 'n' blues covers from the 1960s, and not just because of Jagger's squeaky harmonica.

The thick deluxe package of the birthday edition of "Tattoo You" also contains a lot of live recordings of the Wembley concerts of the subsequent tour, for which the concert album "Still Life" was released in 1982 (on which, among other things, the big Bopper cover "Chantilly Lace" was missing). It was the tour of boos. In Germany, Peter Maffay was driven off the stage by ignorant fans, in the USA Prince, who was still in the starting blocks at the time.

The Rolling Stones - "Tattoo You - 4-CD Box Set Limited Edition"