Month: January 2008

“Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma!?”. It’s the query on the tip of many a tongue right now. Actually, it really is, more so than you might think. Rather improbably, New York’s roulette wheel garage-indie kids (and then some), Vampire Weekend, have become a cause célèbre for 2008, going so far as to intrigue the curious end of the mainstream and become a pin badge for experimentalism. There is certainly an aspect of ‘well, it’s a harebrained illogical Continue Reading

You can pretty much gage from the fact that about 9 out of 10 Radiohead fans* don’t even know that the modern virtuoso guitar-hero with the awkward fringe, Jonny Greenwood, has a life outside the band, that what he does do must surely be credible to his own indulgences and counter to mainstream logic (even the mainstream that his own band belongs to), if nothing else. And you’d of course be right. His first solo release was the soundtrack to Continue Reading

It’s nice, at least, to hear her voice. Ever the contrary one, rather than properly following up ‘The Greatest’ and buoying her now slowly but steadily rising star, she chooses to put out her second full record of cover versions. This is not as a straight cop out as one might think though, rest assured we’re not even in the same hemisphere as that recent Radio 1 anniversary abomination; bands going through the motions, sapping life out of standards without Continue Reading

Let’s face it; if Amy Winehouse hadn’t been able to enlist the slinky Midas touch of marvellous man-of-the-moment Mark Robson, it’s entirely likely she would have disappeared into the ether of the pleasant yet awkwardly underwhelming ‘Frank’ album, such was the dangerously fragile nature of the ‘Chavette/Billie Holliday’ binary. She had the voice, no doubt about it, but she had only one decent song to her credit, and though she might be limping along her street of dreams like the Continue Reading

Some days you wake up and it’s raining. Some days you wake up on the right side of the bed. Sometimes in the middle. And sometimes you wake up and find that another album has been released by Frank Black in any one of his many, and increasingly unnecessary, disguises. In fact we are more likely to wake up and start rifling through the particulars of why Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV adopts one particular alias over another than we Continue Reading

Take British Sea Power’s second album, 2005’s ‘Open Season’, in isolation and it remains a sure-footed accomplishment from a never less than able-bodied group ruling indie’s fringes with an immaculate sense of creativity. With its clean lines, careful delivery, crisp licks pealing from Noble’s guitar like sheerings from an ironmonger’s lathe and unusual yet uncomplicated themes spoken with breathless wonder by Yan it was an easy record to get caught in a gentle spin with; palatable, dreamy, conscientious, waxed and Continue Reading