Short history lesson, coming up, so loosen your ties, tilt back your chair and wait for the wind rush. It’s June 22, 1948, and the SS Empire Windrush is docking at Tilbury in Essex. It’s an important moment in the history of modern England. The steamship has stopped in Jamaica to pick up some of the thousands of servicemen who had been recruited to serve in the armed forces during the Second World War. Also on board are some 500 Continue Reading
It would be unforgivably churlish and conceited of me to dismiss ‘Irish Jazz-a-Billy Sensation’ Imelda May simply on account of her being lauded by the terminally bland and increasingly irrelevant ivory tickler, Jools Holland – but that’s the kind of stock she comes from: those with one ear to the ground and one hand on their Starbucks Macchiato. It’s as if this slurring, sultry chanteuse with the fifties hair-do and the leopard skin vest has practically been invoked by sweaty Continue Reading
Don’t even begin to f**cking mention ‘You’re Gorgeous’, screams the joyfully impoverished lo-fi of Death of the Neighbourhood’s unruly buzzing title-track. Even the cheeky, free form scatting of lead-up up single, ‘Cokeholes’ offers a typically arsy thumb in your eye to all that mid-nineties crooning. Not that there was anything wrong with it, of course. In fact I don’t know why Mr Jones ever took so much offence to it. Me and the wife even had the swelling orchestral intro Continue Reading
It must be exhausting being so brilliant, really. Marc Bianchi has been recording as Her Space Holiday for the past 10 years, wearing reliable electronic impressions into indie rock’s veneer, a la Postal Service, and seasoning with tongue in cheek lyrical content, making him a Magnetic Fields or Mountain Goats driven by Daft Punk. Modern music with a real heart and an organic cotton shirt, basically. Which makes his sudden and unexpected hand break twist into the rough a bit Continue Reading
Unlike Beth Gibbons or Amy Winehouse, who continue to apply a skewed approach to their not unconsiderable talents, Nell Bryden lends her smoky and competent tonsils to a fairly under whelming anthology of tracks that cheerfully approximate the best and worst characteristics of blues, country and western and traditional Dixieland jazz. It’s not unpleasant by any means, but the intent seems squarely more focused on arousing the interest of record companies and moguls that it does the affections and curiosity of Continue Reading
Sawhey is one of those figures who straddle more boundaries and cross more divides than even the UN Secretary-General. So when we learn that his new album, ‘London Underground’ channels the anxious messages of a post 7/7 Britain into one united voice it shouldn’t come as any surprise. In some way the experience is rather like turning the dial on your old transistor radio and negotiating your way through a wave of jostling voices. Of course, they’re more smoothly segued Continue Reading
One minute they were here. The next they were gone, withdrawing in the same lamentable fashion as a used condom after an explosive one-stand. Strangely it seems much longer than five years since The Datsuns erupted onto the less than vital garage-rock scene, a scene that had by this point suffered the ignominy of The Stroke’s second album, the rise and fall of Andrew W.K, the continued pruning of The Vines and the superfluous entry of fellow cut-throat New Zealanders, Continue Reading
It’s a tale of shaving cream and make up, swimming around and break-ups in an ultra-self conscious stylee. Most people balk at the first sign of self-reflexivity in music and I’m no different, so the clever clever winks and nods to organ fades, carousel stops, made-up screaming babies and notes and dots and rhymes pretty gets fairly tiresome and ingratiating by track five. The downside of shooting off one smirky and smarmy meta-strike after another is that the listener never Continue Reading
Whether it’s because it recalls the lush and feathery melancholics of Harriet Wheeler and the Sundays (as on ‘Your Shoes’) or the erotic lower labyrinths of PJ Harvey (as on ‘Body Sighs’) the new and gloriously belated album from Dorset sweethearts, Shelleyan Orphan, ‘We Have Everything We Needs’ evokes those far-off bookish days of 4AD and This Mortal Coil in a way that not even a Lisa Gerrard-Elizabeth Fraser takeaway could deliver. New age, ambient wave, ethereal wave, third-wave – Continue Reading
On paper, the 34-year old Kelli Dayton has fairly enviable track record. Lead vocalist with the deliciously sneaky and trippy Sneaker Pimps (remember ‘Post Modern Sleaze’?), collaborated with self-styled satanic-twonk, Marilyn Manson, fetish-twonk, Marc Almond and funk’s all-time twonk, Bootsy Collins. In fact had the Pimps heralded from Bristol and not Hartleppol they’d probably still be mentioned in the same breath as Massive and Portishead. This time, however, she’d doing it solo. And has been for several years if truth Continue Reading