Month: May 2009

Reviews

Blood ~ Franz Ferdinand

Whichever way you look at remix albums, reworks, dubs, jigs, tweaks and tighteners, it always sounds like something painful. Like violent games played in sports changing rooms or terms more at home in botched plastic surgery. It also insinuates that the original wasn’t all that in the first place; that it needs an extra, removed pair of ears, hands, and the kind of electro glitchery Kieran Hebdon carries in his travel bag for that all important, generally unnecessary, second opinion. Continue Reading

Reviews

Tommy Tokyo (or Tommy Lorange Ottosen as he is known in his native Norway) has the kind of unruly and angry beard that a prospector from the great American Gold Rush would have killed for, so naturally he and his moribund band of misfits and Norwegian émigrés pan for only the crabbiest, melancholy nuggets to be found in ‘dem der hills. As you can imagine from the title alone, ‘Smear Your Smiles Back On’ is a wordy and curiously baroque Continue Reading

Reviews

Any singer who can land a blow on their lyrical rival by calling them a ‘doughtnut’ has to be worthy of further investigation. It’s not right, it’s not nice, use your brain. Cut back on the booze and the drugs, especially cocaine. It’s not what you expect from a street-wise boy from Camden to say, but that’s what makes it so great. It subverts every expectation you could possibly throw at it. It’s not grime, it’s not rap, it’s not Continue Reading

Reviews

Art Brut Vs Satan – Art Brut

In some ways this reminds of the rather foppish and verbose Blue Aeroplanes. Smart-arse lead singer slashing through all manner of small-town domestic absurdities with his threshing rapier wit, a swirl of electric guitars swirling around in its wake and a misanthropy as smug and self-satisfying as a raw chocolate face pack. Throw in a bit of Elastica, some mid-nineties Britpop, a handful of movie references, various outtakes from Blur’s ‘Park Life’, shitloads of pub banter and the rambling poetics Continue Reading