It’s like stage hypnotism. Those first few swings of the pendulum seeming about as threatening as a damp kitten under general anaesthetic, you confident in your unshiftable immunity against attempts by entertainment ‘professionals’ (read ‘charlatans’) to take control of your senses, and so on. You are rocksteady, you are cynical, you are above it all. Until BANG! Your body betrays you, your sensibility breaks for the shadows and falls flat on its face and what remains is submerged into a Continue Reading

To question Bright Eyes for returning with a country album is somewhat akin to dissing Girls Aloud for deploying suggestive choreography, or Arctic Monkeys for coming from Sheffield and playing with the gain turned up. And yet when the first single, ‘Four Winds’, and eventually ‘Cassadaga’ showed up, that was exactly what we did. And it’s not that his electronic ‘Digital Ash…’ distractions led to distorted expectations – with distance, while adding to the richness of his body of work, Continue Reading

It’s all speculation really. An atom of inspiration comes hurtling through our galaxy at nearly a million miles per hour, a microscopic mite rocketing through a solid ice-sheet of apathy and indolence and twenty-seconds later on the lateral side of our brain, the speeding atom explodes and a lightning spread of nerve-activity sees it spin-off into another dimension – and sometimes bearing the germ of an idea, a tune, perhaps. It’s pollination at a cerebral level. One minute you’re heading Continue Reading

There’s a sense of comfortable dislocation that comes from listening to Serenaide’s ‘The Other End of the Receiver’. Over a decade ago my cold Sheffield bedsit would be filled with the thin white jangle of indie pop, and now here it comes again, only this time from a bunch of kids half a world away in the steam of Singapore and Indonesia, simultaneously incongruous and yet completely right. And it connects, and it makes sense, and I could be listening Continue Reading

Fair enough, it may be tongue in cheek, but it really doesn’t justify the kind of french-kissing enjoyed by the needlessly self-prolific ram-jam rap intro that comes courtesy of ‘Curriculum Vitae’. Perhaps it’s just Swedish humour, I don’t know, but whilst it caricatures the customary rap arrival, the hype and the usual fanfare – it just doesn’t really serve a point. First we have a black man barking at us to ‘turn it the fuck up’ and then he just Continue Reading

Heavens above, just look at the plaudits already: ‘if there’s anyone who honestly believes that there’s nothing new under the musical sun, this album might just blow your mind’ (Observer), ‘There is an undeniable musical hunger and a pioneering spirit at work here’ (Mojo), ‘utterley mesmeric’ (Q). It seems to my mind at least that the less clued-up you are or the less able you are to really connect with it then the general incidence of wild exaggeration and undisciplined Continue Reading

I have never once lain on my back in a field of corn, avec lover, hand in hand, the tall golden stalks distorting the piercing afternoon sunlight, a warm breeze bringing slow life to everything around me, the world beyond unfolding like a cinefilm movie, just out of reach. But it would be lush, that, wouldn’t it. That’s what the track ‘It’s Close Up, Far Away’ from Denmark’s The Kissaway Trail feels like, or at least what we imagine it Continue Reading

How to approach Fields? On horseback? In a pincer movement? Of course we don’t mean that literally, though it’s not as ridiculous as it might seem. There is a lot going on here you see, and it’s progressive to the extreme. There is no drought of ideas, you can define it by its movement, its constant rolling evolution, its resourcefulness, but what is there of material value? Is there anywhere to get a foothold? What is there that is so Continue Reading

Although the liner notes add a bit of spin to the proposition that Ziggy Stardust morphing into Blue (and Green) Eyed Soulboy was as wrong footing and unpredictable as Radiohead doing reggae, the comparison is not as crass as it looks. Anyone who remembers Radiohead mailing out the first promos of Kid A are likely to recall just how bloody inflexible the vast majority of us were at the proposition of the world’s finest guitar band downing their picks and Continue Reading

Look, we could pontificate about this release till the cows come home, and let’s face it, lest there’s a sudden culling of bovines everywhere, I damned suspect we might do. How important is Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army? Very. Very very important. Way ahead of their time in a time before time and the same is naturally true of that charming old miserablist, John Peel – both of whom feature here, courtesy of Cooking Vinyl’s brand spanking new Maida Continue Reading