Well if you haven’t or you didn’t click on the Amnesty banner we ran, you deserve to be shot – and to hell with your human rights. There may be those who argue (quite legitimately) that ‘human rights’ privileges only those who have no regard for human rights (murderers, thieves, terrorists, incarcerated former dictators, game show hosts) and that in doing so disqualifies a true and wider definition of freedom (the freedom to enforce a lawful and safe environment so Continue Reading

Soaring and stumbling like a drunken Jeff Buckley, uncompromising but ‘friendly’ New Yorker Hamilton Leithhauser bleeds into the microphone and an emphatically new sound is born. Recorded at Marcata Recording studio in Manhattan, with a sound that is held together with little more than plaster tape and glue, ‘Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone’ is something of a revelation. Press darlings Hot Hot Heat have listed them amongst their own favourite listens of the moment, and Crud is Continue Reading

Spike Jonze is a slightly different prospect to his DVD series colleagues Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry, though in his own way no less valuable. He doesn’t dig deep into the tune and excavate, he doesn’t manipulate imagery with technology to any fantabulous degree, he doesn’t turn a concept upside down and shake it beyond normality. He’s more likely to just turn the camera upside down if he thinks it’d be, like, cool. His own gift is his angle on situations, the Continue Reading

As perfectly affable as Chris Cunningham probably is down the pub with a bitter and a cigarette on a Sunday afternoon, as far as character scans go, this doesn’t conjure a pretty picture. If he lives as he works you can bet he’s not at the top of many Christmas card lists. He has the freedom of the city of your darkermost thoughts, and he goes there all the time. Although this collection does paint (pixellate?) him out as a broader artist Continue Reading

The debut album, The Magic Land of Radio by London band Obi grew up to be just nine tracks in length and came to little over 30 minutes in duration. Nothing wrong with that. Even The Strokes albums are no more generous. The difference is their similarly minimal approach to arrangements. Coming somewhere between The Lilac Time, Goldrush, Garlic and Pavement, vocalist Damian Katkhuda and chums trade in the kind of heart-warming, googly, blissed-out eccentricity of a thousand and one Continue Reading

For a band often singled out for their ‘dark, synthetic beats’ it’s curious to find the Octane soundtrack a fairly ‘organic’ sounding affair by today’s laptop heavy standards, but ‘dark’ it certainly is, sinister, in fact. So sinister that my three year old legged it out of the room at the first discordant strikes of ‘Through The Night’. Not that she’ll be able to hide for long. Not when I’ve supplanted the ‘Disney Princesses’ CD she’s currently got rotating on Continue Reading

‘Net innovator, cutting-edge musician, icon, entrepreneur, fashion guru, fashion victim, writer, actor, man with bad teeth, bad dancer, misguided Placebo champion, faux-cockney alien-hybrid from Mars – you name it and David Bowie is it. We might bandy the term ‘chameleon’ around like it blends into the background of just about everything this man does, but no other entertainer past or present has successfully managed to sustain by turns both genius and such inspired and outrageous daftness over such an imponderable Continue Reading

These guys are in not for the good of their health. They’re not in it to bag a few Grammys and bed a few beauties. They didn’t even get in it to try and sell something. They’re in it (they say) to ‘connect’ with people on a different level’. Yup, I’m a cynical old goat and the glowing endorsement from self-proclaimed spokesman for a generation, Bono hardly helps matters – but charity is where they’re at. And it’s more likely Continue Reading

If you can tell your Norahs from your Noras, I can guarantee you’re going to like this. Seductive, smoky and as wilfully vulnerable as bending over for a bar of soap in Borstal’s Reformatory Home For Boys, Rachael Yamagata’s debut EP shows just what might have happened had the late great Jeff Buckley have found himself with an altogether different kind of mojo. The sweet but capable voice swinging smoothly from a whisper to a scream? It’s all there in Continue Reading