Our editor’s pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past seven days comes courtesy of Biffy Clyro and their eighth studio record A Celebration Of Endings – revisit the review and have a listen via Spotify:
“You don’t spend 25 years making music for a living without either collecting your share of the punches or having a strong instinct for self-preservation.”
“Biffy Clyro close their latest album with the words ‘fuck everybody’, a message deliberately left at the very frantic end of Cop Syrup. It’s a song on which otherwise Simon Neil sings about redemption, and contains a middle section with three-minutes-plus of gentle woodwind and acoustic guitar, as if the trio are about to subside into melancholy, happy just to be sad.”
“Far from it. A Celebration of Endings is meant, he’s said, to absolutely jar, to rattle our cages. After the vulnerability (his words) of 2016’s Ellipsis, the band – Neil and twin brothers James and Ben Johnston – have since been chastened by two acrimonious fallouts with members of their inner circle, a betrayal they felt as if it were the loss of family – which having met each other at the age of seven, they practically are.”
“As a consequence of that and many other things, 2020 is a very galvanised Biffy Clyro.”