Accompanied by a fairly generous DVD on the making of the album, and an extra CD of remixes, alternate versions and oddities, David Bowies’ 1993 ‘Black Tie, White Noise’ is now reissued as a strictly limited edition CD boxed set. True to his word, Bowie is again seen questioning all established values, all taboos – and searching only for that dislocate sense of self that a true visionary could trace and then expand. Only this time those values are his Continue Reading

Frank Black limbers up for the release of new ‘Catholics’ album ‘Show Me Your Tears’ due for release on 8th September on Cooking Vinyl. Including two previously unreleased tracks – cover versions of Reid Paley’s “Take What You Want“ and The Rolling Stones “Down In The Hole“ – the single is full of the same tinkling saloon bar pianos and country messages that made ‘Black Letter Days’ so black. Who knows, what with the election of the first openly gay Continue Reading

If this were UK tabloid material the headline might read ‘At The Drive In Crash In On Prog-Rock-Suicide-Benz’. Steeped in a dense lyrical labyrinth of myth and speculation, the album cites the death of artist friend and collaborator, Julio Venegas in 1996 as it’s broad and brutally skewed conceptual basis. The alleged free spirit and free-thinker, bearing the scabby welts and scars of a radically tortured soul attempts suicide with a morphine overdose and lapses into a coma from which Continue Reading

That the irreverent trans-stylist Jarvis Cocker and the delightfully bonkers Fat Truckers have yet to concede defeat with their loose and eccentric DJ collective, the Desperate Sound System perhaps shows the sheer tenacity of character these daft Sheffield folk have in pursuing the fantastic and the bizarre in the most brutal of everyday places. Pulp charted this territory better than anyone with their priceless and eerie narratives on psychotic suburbia, but it’s apparent also in the volatile, monster-pop of Baby Continue Reading

You could speculate that it’s something in the water up there, but surely not? Everyone in Oxford would then insist on walking sideways in odd time signatures, frowning and taking a frantic unmapped stroll around the suburbs at midnight in order to just get round the corner before midday. No, but there’s no denying the influence of that town’s most notable musical sons on Psychid. But like geographical neighbours The Young Knives are a rowdy step along from Supergrass’ solid Continue Reading

It’s almost a little churlish to have to compare and contrast new Super Furry releases with the old, not to mention being a pointless waste of energy. Inevitably we’ll end up doing so before the end of this review, but here they are, six proper albums on, nearly a decade down the line, tinkering with the boundaries of possibility like they’ve got the whole room to themselves, like they always have had. Like they’ve been hitching aboard the Weird Train Continue Reading

Eponymous? It’s a lovely word, isn’t it? And so seldom used. But this is what you have here Duran’s Duran’s first album, Duran Duran. An album by Duran Duran, called Duran Duran. Neat eh? And not at all unimaginative. Perhaps pressing home their neo-romantic faithfulness to their sci-fi roots, Duran Duran released the shiny, bright and nimble wristed Duran Duran to a faintly suspecting public in 1981. Bouffed up nicely by pirate-shirts, jodphurs, cravats, bandanas and wonderfully silly haircuts, it Continue Reading

Classy, modest, subtle and persistently engaging. So it may come as some surprise that ‘Fleshwounds’ is the debut album from former Skunk Anansie vocalist, Skin. More renowned for the hapless run-around the volatile Brit-Pop market gave them in ’97 and ’98 than for their icy (if manicured) peculiarity, Skunk Anansie unleashed their wiry political tracts to a soft-rock favouring audience to a fair degree of acclaim. However, any longevity was most certainly going to be scuppered by their awkward lack Continue Reading

“Ghostly swirling pop“. That what it says on the box. And that’s just about what you get. If you like Interpol and Radio 4 and the whole current crop of fertile new wavers then as sure as eggs is eggs you’re going to like this. Currently in an undisclosed Montreal studio recording their debut album for a October 7, 2003 release with a full U.S. tour to follow. The extended remix of ‘Still In Love Song’ might demonstrate just how Continue Reading