Reviews

If you’re willing to ignore the ever so slightly grating irony and the less than subtle political tracts, you might enjoy it. Just don’t be brave enough to venture beyond the first four or five tracks on the album. With everyone from Peaches, Miss Kittin (also featuring on the excellent new release from T. Raumschmiere), Le Tigre, Nicola from Adult, and Talking Head’s Tina Weymouth, you’d expect this to be a good album and short of the regrettable subtitles for Continue Reading

In 1996, Arthur Lee was convicted of possession of a firearm by an ex-felon and grossly negligent discharge of a firearm for allegedly shooting a gun in the air during a dispute with a neighbour. The previous year, Lee was arrested after an altercation with a former girlfriend. The possession charge stuck, but a federal appeals court in California reversed the negligence charge. Lee served 6 years of a 12-year sentence. Since 1968 – when this album was first released Continue Reading

His first for Brighton’s Skint Records, Mr Nasty has timed his zombie flesh-eating breakbeat just nicely to coincide with the monster-mashing assault of the Jaxx’s hamma-house release, ‘Kish Kash’. And with Halloween just around the corner grabbing hold of a copy of the eerie and futuroid ‘Bring Me The Head Of…’ release at least makes a lot more sense than ducking for apples ever did. Whereas the Jaxx have anchored their own brand of horror within a faintly gothic and Germanic Continue Reading

There’s been so many pre-emptive strikes from this release, that listening to it is a little like listening to a compilation of all your favourite well lubricated chill-outs of the last two or three years: ‘Harry The Guitar’, ‘Latin Prayer’, ‘Step On It’, ‘Bossa For The Devil’ – they’re all there. Husky, dusky and finger-twiddling sharp, it’s a veritable funky fest of quim-quivering Latin and five-finger fidgeting flamenco. Jazzy, bluesy, soulful and as comfortable as a bathful of jelly, tracks Continue Reading

There are a few things I simply can’t get my head round when listening to this. First up is that Liz Phair has been touring the US in recent months with clown princes of alternative rock, the Flaming Lips – and try though I might, I just can’t equate this kind of bright, infectious pop with anything resembling bunny-suits and bloody-curdling puppet-shows. Ther’s bananas that are banana shaped and there’s bananas that are straight, and this is one perfectly straight Continue Reading

Another month and another naturally creative and prodigious talent is primed for the margins of mainstream success. Last month it was Clarkesville, this month is the turn of Butterfly Boucher. But what makes this a little different is that Butterfly not only writes her own music, she also performs it, produces it and mixes it. What also makes it a little different, is that recent single release, ‘I Can’t Make Me’ showed mucho promise in its audacious melding of Badly Continue Reading

Carina Round has to be the most vital, stimulating, fluent and inevitable singer in the country right now. Bar none. PJ Harvey, with whom Carina elicits a worthy likeness, may still be regularly whipping up our interest (most recently in association with Josh Holme and a heated stretch in the desert of course), but it wouldn’t be unfair to say that she doesn’t tear the floorboards from under your feet like she used to. You know Polly’s traits and can Continue Reading

“ We thought we were really punky. Even The Adverts had learned one chord. We didn’t even do that. We just got a machine and tuned it on till it sounded nice.” Such is the candour and refreshing honesty of Phil Oakey interviewed for this DVD compilation of hits from 1980 to 1995, that he has no qualms in announcing that the Human League were little more than a ‘consumer version of Kraftwerk’. They didn’t make their synths, they bought Continue Reading

With the amount of time it took to find all the hidden extras on this disc I could have developed a tumour, died and had most of entrails removed against my will and passed on to sad, tragic and alchoholic former footballing geniuses; but find them I did. Eventually. And what did I get for all my hard work? A bored Nick and Simon discussing the recording and production of Seven & The Ragged Tiger, a tortuous and similarly bored Continue Reading

Based on the evidence of this album, Cale’s preceding release, the ‘Five Tracks’ earlier in the year, was merely the peeling away of old skin to reveal the first itchy flakes of regeneration. And whilst similar in terms of sounds, ‘HoboSapiens’ is a much meatier body of work; more consistent, more direct and less dependent upon the multifarious layering of samples and sketchpad ideas. Cale would be the first to admit that he was testing out new materials and working Continue Reading