With the exception of the totally unremarkable, ‘What Do I Have To Do?’, the gently alternative and Eels-like ‘The Exorcist’ (which would have been one of the few real ‘gems’ on the album had it actually broken out of some kind of orbit) and ‘Pretty One’ The Kicks ‘new’ album ‘Hello Hong Kong’ is actually a re-vamped and re-issued version of an album the band released in 2000 under the name ‘Ashtray Babyhead’. The album’s wilful, even, flag-waving derivativeness divided Continue Reading

We’ll often catch ourselves concluding that Band A has gone and made the same album all over again. But more often than not we don’t mean that, we’re only making excuses on their behalf. What we mean to say is that Band A has rehashed Album Z without the X Factor, become a flaky imitation of themselves, the songs aren’t a fraction of what they were and we won’t be listening to Album Z when Album Y will do just Continue Reading

Released through Southern Fried records on 28th June, A Man Called Adam’s eagerly awaited retrospective ‘All My Favourite’ through sees eight new tracks deliciously interwoven with a dozen or so tracks from the old memory cards. Why no formal new release? Who knows? Those of cynical enough might suggest that Sally and Steve just didn’t have enough material to warrant it. Those of us with kinder hearts may just be satisfied in having the best of both worlds – old Continue Reading

At the back of this story lies another more tragic story, a story made more tragic by the often wilful ease with which many young black rappers meet their untimely deaths. Big Pun was not only the first Latin solo rapper to go platinum he was known to those who knew him as an extremely generous man with a great sense of humour and an even greater family man.  Being Big though has its downside and Big Punisher died of Continue Reading

With song titles as impossibly surreal and abstract as ‘Vietcaterpillar’, ‘From The See’, ‘I Am The Alphabet’, ‘I Think It Is Beautiful That You Are 256 Colors Too’, ‘Early 70’s Gymnastics’, and ‘Folks with Magik Toes’ it’s doubtful whether we were ever going get an easy ride. And sure enough a few bleeps into ‘Raspberry Dawn’ and we’re cowering under a fizzy electric blanket of pure, buguiling noise. A far from unpleasant electro kind of noise, fair enough, but also Continue Reading

They were always going to have to pull something sizable, nay startlingly immense, out of the laundry basket to make this still-preposterous proposition plausible, as far down the line as a second full-length album. ‘White robes, a roll-call as long as Gulliver’s left leg and pompous multi-instrumental pop’ observed we over the past couple of years. “Novelty!” shrieked some of the world, failing to see past the end of its stubby nose. Of course such a fate often befalls anything Continue Reading

We tend to automatically chart a bold line from age to maturity, accepting the latter as some kind of veiled vindication for recycled ideas, thinning ideals, an inevitable middle-aged penchant for jazz and an overnight appreciation for all things easy on the ear. The Cure though, they never really grew up. Not exactly in a Peter Pan way (Christ, have you seen the bloke lately?!), but Robert Smith still yearns, wallows and self-depreciates in much the same way he has Continue Reading

Coming across a soundtrack album can sometimes be like listening to a friend’s compilation tape – intimate and affecting, with songs linked by spirit rather than theme, band or label. On the other hand, it can simply be a sprinkling of tracks too diverse to involve or cohere and making no sense without the film or series that it supports. The L Word, a U.S. series “about a group of young women in Los Angeles, their lives, careers and romantic Continue Reading

‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’, as my gran used to say. And she wasn’t wrong, god bless her. Not that she’d have approached this flagrantly controversial and quintessentially gratuitous sex-romp with the same candour. I dare say she would spent the greater part of the series in the kitchen stirring a cup of tea and cracking faintly nervous jokes to the dog. But I digress. Whilst the UK version of the mini-series emphasised the gritty, realistic and necessarily furtive Continue Reading