Reviews

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

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

I have to confess that I skipped Disc 1. I’m a philistine, I know, but even with my Beatles pedigree I couldn’t even try to pretend that 70 or so minutes of Anoushka Shankar was going to please me in any way. Maybe twenty years ago when my virtually every purchase was informed by fab four mop-top shenanigans and post-fab spin-off shenanigans, but not now. Christ, I bought the ‘Concert For Bangladesh’. I even bought John and Yoko’s ‘Wedding Album’. Continue Reading

It seems to be the consensus of opinion that whilst this is a mighty fine collection of soul, funk and disco what actually set the landmark series of Another Late Night/Late Night Tales albums apart from the rest was the fact they culled together some of the most varied and eclectic music straight from the four points of the heart itself. You take an artist and you ask them to compile an album of music that inspired them most. And Continue Reading

Matt Harding’s debut album, 2001’s ‘Tomorrow’ was an eclectic relaxant, unhurried visions, comfortable electronica and easily obtained victories in variety abounded. Nothing that he needed seemed too far out of reach, everything was a simple matter of fact, it was a haven of sloth with an active mind. And everything that applied then applies now. Only he seems even more chilled these days, time in-between albums could no doubt be plotted on a descending graph. The commitment he talks of Continue Reading

Carl Faure, one half of the ‘worlds-colliding’, Black Grass attests: “The relations between genres and between underground and the mass-market is actually really fluid. You can’t separate out music. The album that we’ve made is an embodiment of that idea.“ Both the press release that accompanies this self-titled debut album, and the music itself hypothesize about the fluid melding of cultures and styles. And yes, it’s a fairly cosmopolitan palette: hip hop, jazz, soul, chill out, reggae, house, funk, R Continue Reading

What we liked about Nick Dresti’s take on ‘I Would Die For U was its ludicrous, big, shiny intergalactic approach to a classic Prince song. By way of a contraction though, what makes this album suck is exactly the same thing. Well almost. Coming about as close to George Michael and Prince as you could possibly get outside of a lavatory cubicle, ‘Always and Forever’ is little more than the eager delusions of a slick fantasist. ‘Crazy Talk’ is to Continue Reading

As intensely as she screams like she’s ruptured a spleen and is strapped down in a dirty back-street surgery without anaesthetic getting a new one fitted, as many of rock’s male fraternity that she picks off and spits out in a bloody heap and as many people as she continues to knock out of the way without a drop of respect like Neanderthal woman with a club and a guitar on her back, The Distillers will always just be nu-rock’s Continue Reading

Therapy. Some people take to the couch, the chair, go shopping, try jogging whilst others, like Peter Gabriel, shave their heads, experiment with the diceman philosophy, hang upside down from gravity boots, immerse themselves in Samadhi floatation tanks and spend the best part of 25 years exploring the elusive terrorscapes of their own fantastic imaginations through music. The greater burden of life is never that which goes into it – it’s that which comes out. And the same could be Continue Reading