Month: September 2005

There’s been much noise of late about Supergrass maturing, shedding that youthful skin, forgetting to clean their teeth, that sort of thing. Like playtime’s over or something. But is it not the truth that they’ve already achieved that, notably, as their career ploughed on through four consistently received albums? If the archetypal collective recollection of the band is a giddy, mutton-chopped teen rampage through tracks like ‘Alright’, ‘Caught By the Fuzz’ and ‘Mansize Rooster’, then have moments like the muscular Continue Reading

You never really believed that patience was a virtue, did you. That’s just a stalling feature rolled out by people who can’t make things happen. And what’s wrong with the right now, anyway? Well, sorry kid, turns out you were wrong, they were right. Live with it. As proof I offer you dinky little Oxfam-shop urban-folk rag dolls Alfie and this, their fourth album. Only they aren’t exactly dinky little Oxfam-shop urban-folk rag dolls any longer. Not quite.  They gave Continue Reading

If Shelly Poole really has ‘confounded musicologists’ with an album that escapes ‘definition’ and  ‘logic’ then it’s likely that they’ve forgotten the phrase easy listening. Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Tony Bennett, Neil Sedaka, Boyce and Hart – all were once idolised for their unpretentious brand of sweet and tender tunesmithery. They weren’t always cool, they weren’t necessarily sexy and they didn’t require phone-in votes, text-messaging or ringtones to gain ground on Top Of The Pops. And they relied, surprisingly, not Continue Reading

The Beatles refashioned the overreaching falsettos of Roy Orbinson, the rainbow harmonies of the Everly Brothers and the shuffling jiggery-pokery of Buddy Holly and left an indelible mark on history as the four feted pioneers of modern pop. Bloomington Indiana trio The Post evoke the spiralling misanthropy and climactic primal therapy of ‘OK Computer’ and they’re dismissed as copyists. History is a difficult beast to tame and the pen of the critic often presses down upon history like the wiry Continue Reading

Son of a US airman brought up in territories as wide and contrasting as Turkey and Holland would suggest a man who knows no barriers, sound, cultural, sexual or otherwise, so when adoptive New Yorker, house practitioner and occasional star producer, Armand Van Helden strays into the traditionally hostile territory of ROCK and starts some serious landscaping, you can be pretty sure that it’s going to cover a greater terrain than spandex and leather-trousers. And whilst everyone from Goldfrapp to Continue Reading

Some two years after Mickey Finn and Special K handled the last edit, Mickey Finn and Aphrodite’s boundary crossing, gangsta sampling ‘Bad Ass’ gets another welcome airing on the Aphrodite’s tempo shifting, genre jumping and acid dropping new album, ‘Overdrive’ out soon on Feed Records. With this release, ‘King Of Beats’ and world-renowned drum ‘n’ bass master, Aphrodite this time turns the strobes on a mighty mixture of influences ranging from Hip Hop and Dub, to brass and bhangra, roping Continue Reading

If you were to believe the liner notes, Paul Morley would have us accept that Luke Haines comes somewhere between Colin Wilson, Peter Cook, Joe Orton, a bottle of Worcester Sauce and a good old Sunday roast, and though there’s no doubting the contribution the Auteurs made to the circulation of Britpop in the early nineties, it would be a mistake to suddenly render Haine’s peculiar and idiosyncratic talent in the likeness of ANY kind of movement. Believe this kind Continue Reading

Cesar Comanche – founding member of the well established North Caroilna hip-hop collective, the Justus League and home to the act Little Brother who helped put the collective on the underground map with the success of their debut album, The Listening (2002). Moving on from 2002’s ‘Paper Gods’, Jacksonville’s most judicious MC peeks into the life of a group of musicians on the road. Based on and dedicated to a band both Cesar’s father and mother were in the seventies Continue Reading