Reviews

Lets make no bones about it, if bands are going to wear their influences on their sleeves it’s only right, quite frankly, that folks like me should point them out at every god given opportunity. Lazy journalism? Praps. But it’s an idleness more than equally matched by many of the bands themselves and their own sluggish reluctance to pursue something original. British Sea Power on the otherhand, manage to stir up the dream of a thousand past masters whilst simultaneously Continue Reading

What is it with US punk bands and puns.  In fact what is it with US punkbands and humour full stop?  I’m not saying I want po-faced emointrospection but for god’s sake stop lightening up just so much. OK. You’ve never heard of Flashlight Brown.  Sorry. Maybe you have.  If it’s the later then you are most likely a ‘duuuude who like seriouslylikes a good time’ and live in a US mid-west backwater, or are Canadian(that’s where FLB hail from).  Continue Reading

Royksopp, Metro Arena certainly, but what about The Avalanches? Picking up where the monstrously fine summer single of 2001, ‘Since I Left You’ left off comes ‘Hangin Around 03’ – the punchy, spicey equivalent of a glassful of sunshine. Hot and hazy with the ever imminent threat of thunder, International Pony – with the helping hand of Stepchild (of Tribe Called Quest fame) have chipped away at the cold marble of loungecore to reveal a sizzling slab of party funk. Continue Reading

La Musica Negra marks the first album without former guitarist and vocalist Anne Marie Griffin and although dedicated to her, it’s something of a departure from the Dave Grohl produced ‘In The Pink’. Scott Bondy and his Birmingham, Alabama gang dish up some trashy and sleazy riffs for colossal railroading track, ‘Way Out West’ and AC/DC thumping,’It’s Alright, It’s Okay’ (Jesus Told Me So) but elsewhere it all gets a bit sticky. ‘All The Saints’ bleeds the indie bandwagon dry Continue Reading

It’s almost always the case that those records you love the most often yield the least words. What makes it even worse is when you have such celebrated alternatives as Grandaddy offer up an album that seems every bit as good as their previous without it ever really challenging the fragile – and often magical – base upon which that album stands. At a point where any other band thesedays would flout the standard set by their previous release by Continue Reading

We’re this time trawling the megahertz of the global village groove that is dub. But what is Dub? We all use it, we all abuse it and one or more popular artists at one time allege to have forged some deep, quasi-religious connection with it. Gorillaz even managed to score a number of hits claiming they were Dub’s original pop vagrants. They weren’t of course. It was often the people whose faces and names can’t be remembered for want of Continue Reading

A little after a month of the release of their Still & Raw EP, Front 242’s first full-length studio recording for Metropolis, Pulse, will be available on May 6th. Like the EP, Pulse is a departure from hard-core industrial as the band adopts an ambient house sound. The first 5 tracks blend together into one mind bending journey of synthesized chaos and trip-hop beats. The mood of Pulse is ghostly unnerving as Jean-Luc De Meyer’s vocals draw on the eerie Continue Reading

A ‘talking book’ may not be the smartest attention grabber ever. Air and Italian novelist, Allessandro Baricco certainly didn’t to hit the spot with their book-come- performance art-come-record release, ‘City Reading’ in April – if only because nobody understood it. And whilst the addition of an English translation of the Italian novel from whence it came might have come in handy for some, it surely contradicted the very idea of pure narrative and pure sound that one supposes was its Continue Reading

What with the ubiquity of VU related noises going on at the moment and the unfaltering attention of garage-rock, it seems oddly fitting that May should see the release of John Cale’s new EP ‘JOHN CALE 5 TRACKS’ on EMI on May 26th. The prelude to a new album released this autumn; Cale proves that old dogs can not only new tricks but they can juggle deliriously fragile trip-hop and dub bass to boot. From his celebrated work with The Continue Reading

Iceland – the new France. Gus Gus – the new Jimi Tenor. So inspired were the band by former Warp ‘artiste’ and ultra morphic polycrooner, Jimi Tenor that they provided him with a remix of his own song ‘Call Of The Wild for public consumption. As it is, Tenor was dropped before it could hit the shelves and the band just kept holding on to it. Re-recorded with new vocals by Earth, the track finally made it onto the Underwater released Continue Reading