Month: June 2008

You can’t pronounce her name properly and, aptly, neither does her music trip off the tongue in any kind of conventional sense. Well, not your tongue. It lilts off hers, but then she, like her music, is a mystery, an enchanting whip of fantasy and fleeting reality, petite, dainty, unobtrusive. While Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li Zachrisson has her roots variously in glistening folk music, ambient electronica and cloud-hopping vocal pop, this is not an album that cries out to be Continue Reading

Asleep at heaven’s gate? That’s funny, because this sounds anything but snoozy to us. The heaven bit we get, there’s more than enough abounding gracefully in colourful stereo here to drown Rogue Wave in adjectives like ethereal, chimingly-angelic, halo-shaking and the like. And if we visualise them there’s an overwhelming white light gleaming out from behind them, that sort of thing, you know. Are they the wrong side of said gates? Possibly. Rattling their chains, scaling them perhaps, breaking into Continue Reading

Location, location, location. Location is key, everything in its right place and all that. From one of the most obvious examples – Sigur Ros’ affinity with the lunar landscapes of their Icelandic homeland – through to The Strokes’ allegiance with New York and The Libertines to London and, perhaps most appropriate in this instance, Brightblack Morning Light’s tipi-dwelling, wilderness psychedelia. Bands that have no sense of setting or context tend to lack identity and thus reason, with a few notable Continue Reading