Month: April 2007

Blond Redhead’s previous form has been that they have had no discernable form. Physical form, that is. Their wonderful and highly acclaimed last record, their 4AD debut and starting point for many ‘Misery Is A Butterfly’, was an ethereal drift, select flashes of sound caught in a net, an endless forging of soft textures. You couldn’t tell where one shape necessarily ended and another began. And yet without you really noticing, like the gradual aging of a face, masses formed, Continue Reading

A heatwave wouldn’t be a heatwave without a brand new Beach Boys collection, and there’s certainly no signs of a drought on that front. And yet it would take a real cynic to be anything less than chuffed about it coming as this one does with no shortage of curios, new stereo mixes and a beautiful selection of songs from the criminally overlooked ‘Surf’s Up’ album including Don’t Go Near The Water, ‘Til I Die, Feel Flows (appearing on Jarvis Continue Reading

2006 saw Made Records attempt their second major assault on the dance and club worlds with a slew of eager releases that included iio and Jimmy James (not he of the Bitish Soul band, the Vagabonds but the chap who dresses up as Marilyn Monroe and Cher and came up with the decidedly chintzy ‘Jamestown’ record sometime last year – a bit like Joe Longthorn, only more unsettling). And what you have here is a kind of sampler album. It’s Continue Reading

Much is made of Emil Svanängen’s lo-fi credentials, and rightly so. Before he was Loney, Dear he was just Emil in his Stockholm bedroom or parent’s basement, and Just Emil In His Bedroom had a multi-track recorder and a thousand and one songs in his head. And these songs slowly made their way onto CDRs which entered thousands of people’s possession through sales made by the boy himself at train stations and the like, apparently, long before first UK indie Continue Reading

It’s like stage hypnotism. Those first few swings of the pendulum seeming about as threatening as a damp kitten under general anaesthetic, you confident in your unshiftable immunity against attempts by entertainment ‘professionals’ (read ‘charlatans’) to take control of your senses, and so on. You are rocksteady, you are cynical, you are above it all. Until BANG! Your body betrays you, your sensibility breaks for the shadows and falls flat on its face and what remains is submerged into a Continue Reading

To question Bright Eyes for returning with a country album is somewhat akin to dissing Girls Aloud for deploying suggestive choreography, or Arctic Monkeys for coming from Sheffield and playing with the gain turned up. And yet when the first single, ‘Four Winds’, and eventually ‘Cassadaga’ showed up, that was exactly what we did. And it’s not that his electronic ‘Digital Ash…’ distractions led to distorted expectations – with distance, while adding to the richness of his body of work, Continue Reading

It’s all speculation really. An atom of inspiration comes hurtling through our galaxy at nearly a million miles per hour, a microscopic mite rocketing through a solid ice-sheet of apathy and indolence and twenty-seconds later on the lateral side of our brain, the speeding atom explodes and a lightning spread of nerve-activity sees it spin-off into another dimension – and sometimes bearing the germ of an idea, a tune, perhaps. It’s pollination at a cerebral level. One minute you’re heading Continue Reading

There’s a sense of comfortable dislocation that comes from listening to Serenaide’s ‘The Other End of the Receiver’. Over a decade ago my cold Sheffield bedsit would be filled with the thin white jangle of indie pop, and now here it comes again, only this time from a bunch of kids half a world away in the steam of Singapore and Indonesia, simultaneously incongruous and yet completely right. And it connects, and it makes sense, and I could be listening Continue Reading

Fair enough, it may be tongue in cheek, but it really doesn’t justify the kind of french-kissing enjoyed by the needlessly self-prolific ram-jam rap intro that comes courtesy of ‘Curriculum Vitae’. Perhaps it’s just Swedish humour, I don’t know, but whilst it caricatures the customary rap arrival, the hype and the usual fanfare – it just doesn’t really serve a point. First we have a black man barking at us to ‘turn it the fuck up’ and then he just Continue Reading

Heavens above, just look at the plaudits already: ‘if there’s anyone who honestly believes that there’s nothing new under the musical sun, this album might just blow your mind’ (Observer), ‘There is an undeniable musical hunger and a pioneering spirit at work here’ (Mojo), ‘utterley mesmeric’ (Q). It seems to my mind at least that the less clued-up you are or the less able you are to really connect with it then the general incidence of wild exaggeration and undisciplined Continue Reading