Month: March 2006

On the press release there are quotes from Paul McCartney and comparisons with David Gray and Damien Rice all designed to reel in the reviewer. Names are tossed out like hooks over battlement walls – but… there’s no need guys. One listen to the ‘Walkin’ the Long Road’ EP and it’s pretty clear that Paul Wilkes stands for the Music without the Bullshit. It’s fragile picked guitar and a voice that works through a four song crescendo building up to Continue Reading

When Crud’s James Berry awarded this Mancunian folk troubadour a three-star rating for his 6-track ‘The Lines’ recording way back in 2003 he drew on comparisons that had already been forced with Badly Drawn Boy and ‘that cunt from Staind’. Well he was wrong, god-bless him. This Mancunian folk troubadour with his loose, fiery brush-strokes, his loping piano and delicate acoustic musings is really that c**t from Scunthorpe. And he’s far from bloody delicate too. Sure, he casts a similar Continue Reading

A prog-house album that gets progressively aciddy throughout. After two fair-to-middling releases from Hernan Cattaneo, that able-bodied DJ with a string of celebrity remixes to his credit, Dave Seaman, muscles back in on the Renaissance ‘Masters’ series building on the cheekily impressive 120,000 global sales he amassed with his last two ‘Master’s releases. And again, it’s the diversity of sound that is the secret of Dave’s success here; Dave’s ability to part the usual swampy waters of ambient and progressive Continue Reading

Being branded ‘clever’ can be to a record’s credit or it’s detriment in my book, and it’s usually the latter, if only because such cute, scandalous cunning is traditionally the reserve of one of two evils: those who know it all and those who like to sound like they do. We hate those who know it all for being too clever and we hate those who like to sound like they do for not really knowing enough. Nobody likes a Continue Reading

My Father In Law’s name is Derek, so without further ado I’m going to award this release a big fat four-star rating, showing that the success of any record can sometimes be a thoroughly arbitrary affair in the mind of the listener. On the otherhand, the success of a record can sometimes be down to a sharp, discerning pallet proportionate to the wisdom of its years; so both statements stand-up to scrutiny here. Whilst there’s something amusingly generic and geriatric about Continue Reading

Gary Numan’s critical stock has been rising steadily over the last few years thanks to some nifty sampling of his work combined with a more general reappraisal of  80’s music, and we all now have an excuse to revel once again in the strobe-lit intensity of his music. The press release for his latest album, Jagged, comes strewn with quotes from fans as diverse as Marilyn Manson, Beck and Afrika Bambaataa, belated praise for an artist who has often been Continue Reading

That The Fallout Trust have big, lofty widescreen ambitions is crystal clear on the evidence of their big, lofty debut album, ‘In Case Of The Flood’. Last track on the album, ‘Take Comfort From’ very nearly bagged it. The moody, sweet, deeply pleasurable misery derived from vocalist, Joe Winter lying prostrate in the speaker like some pleading, pilloried martyr unable to lift his cautionary tale beyond a sorrowful mumble and the crawling, minimal string arrangement curling like ivy around it, Continue Reading

This is a beautifully uncluttered album. Which isn’t to say it’s not messy. It is. It slouches too much, is torn, stained, trips over itself and is invariably a bruised victim of its own recklessness. But it is also brilliantly uncomplicated, lacking musical litter, surviving imaginatively on the fundamentals and their wits alone. And with that it follows in a fine line of similar boy/girl 2-pieces who couldn’t help but get to the point; The Kills, White Stripes, Royal Trux, Continue Reading

In the nineties, Cracker were one of dozens of American grunge-tinged yet radio-friendly bands that dipped briefly into the charts with songs like ‘Low’ and ‘Get Off This’. The years since have seen them fall out big style with their former label, Virgin, and while their ex-bosses are planning to release a best of compilation later this year, Cracker – now on Cooking Vinyl – have preempted this by re-recording their most popular songs and releasing them all together as Continue Reading

My, what an extraordinary and delicious curiosity shop of tunes this is. From the peculiar dramatics of the psychotic ‘Rubber Room’ to the cantankerous, wobbly sci-fi of The Fall’s ‘Lost In Music’ Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey have pooled some of the most savage and extreme mixtape burlesques in existence and still managed to give the impression they actually fit like pieces of the same grotesque puzzle. Whilst the emphasis is squarely on the quirky, the dark and the Continue Reading