Reviews

The Junior Boy’s previous efforts, ‘Last Exit’ (2004) and ‘So This Is Goodbye’ (2006) tore up the rulebook (albeit in a gentle and evironmentally friendly fashion). On the one hand you had the crazy stuttering influence of Timbaland and UK garage and on the other you had a super-soft, 2-ply layer of nerdy eighties synth-music. It was dreamy hypnotic vapour pop for a generation comfortable with its feminine-side and equally as comfortable in its pair of lounge-room slippers. It was Continue Reading

‘Houston, we have a problem. We have some seriously psyched-out slacker dude shoegazing a trail of goofball psychedelia. There’s surf guitars in it, drums, something the kids are calling ‘synthesizers’ and he’s shoved the whole thing bally lot through a meteor cloud of echo and reverb units. I’m afraid that it’s another main B bus undervolt. And the crew are really bummed because it ain’t entirely rock and ain’t entirely electronic.’ Not that’s we’ve got anything to worry about though. Continue Reading

Any singer who can land a blow on their lyrical rival by calling them a ‘doughtnut’ has to be worthy of further investigation. It’s not right, it’s not nice, use your brain. Cut back on the booze and the drugs, especially cocaine. It’s not what you expect from a street-wise boy from Camden to say, but that’s what makes it so great. It subverts every expectation you could possibly throw at it. It’s not grime, it’s not rap, it’s not Continue Reading

Tommy Tokyo (or Tommy Lorange Ottosen as he is known in his native Norway) has the kind of unruly and angry beard that a prospector from the great American Gold Rush would have killed for, so naturally he and his moribund band of misfits and Norwegian émigrés pan for only the crabbiest, melancholy nuggets to be found in ‘dem der hills. As you can imagine from the title alone, ‘Smear Your Smiles Back On’ is a wordy and curiously baroque Continue Reading

So, this album has its problems, as did its predecessor, 2007’s ‘Narcissus Road’, which slid from view with its arm extended but going largely unnoticed, like the indie world’s homeless man. It’s stock indie – melodramatic, comfortable, warm indie – played comfortably by competent men. Even if there is any pain in there, any attempt at poetic communication, and most probably there is a little, it’s hard to recognise with a surface so buffed and standard. Veterans of Britpop in Continue Reading

Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian commented that having Paul Weller as a patron was no guarantee of quality given that he backed London’s similarly non-specific Rifles with much the same passion. And she might also have added that those equally flattering sponsors, Oasis said exactly the same thing about Northern Uproar before they went to Spain and came back taxi-drivers. But we are not backing horses here. We could bang on all day about another punter’s form but if we Continue Reading

The man dreams of Dave Grohl tied up in chains and laughs like Vincent Price. Not the most promising of introductions but what it looks like on the surface is a poor indication of the lop-sided beauty of North Dakota’s Tom Brosseau and his new album, ‘Posthumous Success’. It might look wonky, it might sound wonky and it may be suffering from the kind of anxiety disorders more commonly associated with people handing out copies of ‘Big Issue’ but it Continue Reading