Sometimes the shoe fits, but due to unforeseen swelling of the feet or to the flood and drain of fashion, it doesn’t seem fit for wearing, and so for much of the time it sits alone at the back of the wardrobe, tossed none too kindly between an old Christmas sweater and a pair of leather trousers. And it’s much the same with Iain Archer: for the most part he doesn’t fit. He sometimes pokes out of his hole in Continue Reading
For a band who were able to fill out clubs like the Koko and Scala without so much as breaking a sweat, and were still attracting the kindest of words from the UK’s critical masses, finding themselves without a label must have been like one of those occasions when fate seems squarely against you. Was it the unnecessary American drawl? The sneaky musical pilfering? The cheese as grating as a pound of gorgonzola? The incurable misanthropy of vocalist Stuart Adams? Continue Reading
The press train arrived well ahead of us, citing everyone from Syd Barrett, Beck, Robert Wyatt, Smog, Hood, Pram, Animal Collective and early wire wizards like Raymond Scott as influences. Naturally we are talking bedroom recordings; self-played, self-produced, self-mutilated and self-absorbed. That’s not a bad thing, of course, but there is a point at which scratchy, hand-to-mouth performances brought about by banging away on instruments that rarely see the light of day outside of museums and children’s nurseries, collapses into self-indulgence. Continue Reading
When an album carries 17 tracks, a prelude and interlude, one song in four parts, and another reprised in the concluding minutes, you know you’re not exactly dealing with gobby punk rock. But then it is arch-prog folk-pop opus crafters The Decemberists that are responsible in this case, and such extravagance is becoming somewhat of a base expectation. But even by their already established opulent standards (last album ‘The Crane Wife’ was hardly a shrinking violet in the meadow of Continue Reading
Ignoring the obvious pretensions of adopting a different pseudonym every time he feels so much a change of wind direction in his underpants, the fresh Prince of hot air augments his customary spit and sawdust melancholy with the sweetest of fiddles, glockenspiels and pedal steels for a handful of belly laughs, camp-fire choruses and high and lonesome romance courtesy of new album, ‘Beware’. Whilst no less gritty and honest than previous efforts, Will Oldham embraces a richer and broader musical Continue Reading
Thesedays a girl only has to be using words of more than two syllables to warrant a comparison to Kate Bush. And if she also happens to be within spitting distanceof a piano her career is as good as finished. And whilst it would be misleadingto suggest that the likes of Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan might have fairedbetter in life had they been turning tricks on Boogie Street for the last twentyyears, you can’t help but feel the comparison Continue Reading
In the days when the 1980s was some 30 years prior to the time it is now and when hairstyles the size and shape of a paddle of ducks were something to beridiculed rather than revered, the world was facing a crisis much greater thanthe global economic one we are grappling with today. Some forty years afterthe Suez Crisis threatened to destabilise the entire Middle East and some twentyyears after the Cuban Missile Crisis had literally blown up in Kennedy’s Continue Reading
You’ll have probably read 28 reviews already comparing London’s raw-power blues explosion Joe Gideon & The Shark to The White Stripes , and ever the pack animal, we’ll have some of that too. Hell, they’re brother and sister. They are a whole load more Detroit than they are Dalston. And their music is an enthralling meld of the theatrical and poetic, the gritty, rhythmical and impulsive. You’ll also notice, if you skim to the end of the review, that we Continue Reading
Howling Bells arrived back in 2005/06 like a psychedelic rock lozenge. Had you ever heard a more delicious dusty strum, melodies that melted like a sunset and about the most delectable female lead vocal since Hope Sandoval drizzled magic over Mazzy Star in the early 90s? No, of course you hadn’t. And you’d have been delighted with more of the same, and in a way you’ve got it too because it’s all still in there; the distinct, hopelessly lush vocal Continue Reading
They say instant familiarity is often the sign of a good tune. But just occasionally, it’s also a sign of a good tune that’s been written before. But before we start pulling this thing apart without paying due respect to Brown’s indisputable gift with a melody (or anybody else’s melody for that matter), let’s make one thing very clear: the average music fan couldn’t give an earth, wind or fire if it has all been done before. Even if the Continue Reading