The good thing about Simon and Felix is that they’ve never tried to argue that Basement Jaxx are anything other than what you get. Sure they’ve courted the UK charts with the kind of romance usually reserved for teenage crushes and the frantic hand movements of 40 year old virgins but their determination in bagging a hit has never been anything more than transparent; they want a hit and they want it now. As a consequence we’ve had no end Continue Reading
Texas born, New York bred dark-indie merchants Calla are an easy band to like, but this doesn’t feel like it was necessarily a straightforward album to make. You only have to read between the worry lines, hear the dead-weight hitched to and pulled along laboriously by the croaky vocal chords and notice that every strike of any guitar on the album looms ever-more grimly, either perplexed or dismayed, disorientated or anxious. It’s surely a druggy record – it has its Continue Reading
It was never really punk, was it? It was always in a spirit of extreme power-pop that the Buzzcocks carried out their sonic ram-raids – in like Flynn and out again in under three minutes, just like the early rockers, the two minute classics from Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, and the early Elvis. What the Buzzcocks did have in common with punk was the jab, jab, punch of verse and chorus stripped of any superfluous notes until only the Continue Reading
Layo Paskin and Matthew ‘Bushwacka!’ build upon their seedy but well heeled origins and the storm created by their 2002 hit, ‘Love Story’ with an album that falls unevenly between two camps. No I’m not talking about those fudgepackin’ uphill gardening kind of camps like Graham Norton and Lawrence Llewelyn – I’m talking about two different kinds of camps – the thumping, sizzling, beeping electro base-camp that is that beat-surrendering floor drill, ‘Life2Live’ and the salsa lounge-lizardry of ‘Me and Continue Reading
You’re at the bar, it’s a little crowded but nothing out of the ordinary. Welcoming, let’s say. Nobody looks overworked, there is a good vibe, it’s mellow. And yet, after what seems like (no, no, what HAS BEEN) a dire, thankless eternity of readjusting your gaze, top button, posture and wedge of crisp, visible, top-end cash notes in your most prominent hand, climbing onto the bar in one final act of lurid desperation, producing a weighty chunk of gold bullion Continue Reading
Unless you’ve released all your music on limited edition wax cylinder, are on official record as having used your facial muscles to execute a smile more often than punctuation marks in the last year, and definitely haven’t filled out a character questionnaire and left it lying around for the world to see in an act of confused vanity recently, you are likely to be labelled a child of the My Space generation. There’s nothing you can do about it. And Continue Reading
So, this might take some getting used to. Like Marmite. Or sodomy. Alec Ounsworth’s voice doesn’t exactly say “kick off your shoes and get comfy, would you like a drink and perhaps a massage?”. He is not Will Young, granted. Actually, it’s a lot nearer to saying “Jesus! Take that tarantula away from my genitals and remove the damn electrode from my bleeding nipple! Quick!”. Take David Byrne of Talking Heads, deprive him of oxygen and shoot him up with Continue Reading
When the first banging beats, crunching guitars and scrap yard lyrical mayhem of ‘Love Like Semtex’ and ‘Can’t Get Enough’ come crashing like pandemonium around your eardrums, you’re likely to be thinking of that daft Shaun Ryder fella lumbering around like a drug addled maniac with a pudding haircut on that show your smashed old Grandpa told you about: that Top Of The Pops in the nineties or at the very least those saucy dominatrix fellows, the Frankies in the Continue Reading
Pity or detest as you may Hippy Dicky’s output thus far this century, there’s something that keeps us rooting for him. Perhaps we shouldn’t be swayed so easily, but it’s only the sort of thing that’s pushed the likes of the Arctic Monkeys up from colloquial pub-punk to iPod-melting icons of cool. It’s the kind of thing that is usually the preserve of the young and reckless, that only usually gets smothered or exchanged or ridiculed as bands push their Continue Reading
Is it me or are Belle & Sebastian albums sounding more like a day at the office with each passing release? Don’t take that as some sort of errant snobbiness though, it really isn’t. Some of us have bloody nice jobs, in vibrant places of work. Some of us don’t, but you take the point. It’s just they have, in the space of 7 albums, morphed from a sheepish invite-only indie-pact with the curtains closed into an electrically-powered effervescent pop Continue Reading