Reviews

Just think of all the cool stuff you get, as children and now, in kit form. Cars, Meccano sets, chemistry sets, model aeroplanes that you always used to run out of patience with before you’d super-glued on every last fiddly detail and, erm, nowadays flat-pick furniture? Well, it’s cheap, we are in an end-of-days recession you know. Anyway, it’s more hands on and it’s fun to use your hands. Red Light Company are about the most realised embodiment of that Continue Reading

See pictures of Micachu – which you may well have done repeatedly over recent months – all tightly wound and intense of expression, acoustic guitar clutched intently to her chest, making an Oxfam mannequin look like the main draw at London Fashion Week, you accept that she’s clearly counter-mainstream, maybe pigeonhole her as a punk minstrel, an English Kimya Dawson, that kind of thing. The truth is actually far more disparate and frenetic than you might care to imagine. Her Continue Reading

Sometimes the shoe fits, but due to unforeseen swelling of the feet or to the flood and drain of fashion, it doesn’t seem fit for wearing, and so for much of the time it sits alone at the back of the wardrobe, tossed none too kindly between an old Christmas sweater and a pair of leather trousers. And it’s much the same with Iain Archer: for the most part he doesn’t fit. He sometimes pokes out of his hole in Continue Reading

The press train arrived well ahead of us, citing everyone from Syd Barrett, Beck, Robert Wyatt, Smog, Hood, Pram, Animal Collective and early wire wizards like Raymond Scott as influences. Naturally we are talking bedroom recordings; self-played, self-produced, self-mutilated and self-absorbed. That’s not a bad thing, of course, but there is a point at which scratchy, hand-to-mouth performances brought about by banging away on instruments that rarely see the light of day outside of museums and children’s nurseries, collapses into self-indulgence. Continue Reading

For a band who were able to fill out clubs like the Koko and Scala without so much as breaking a sweat, and were still attracting the kindest of words from the UK’s critical masses, finding themselves without a label must have been like one of those occasions when fate seems squarely against you. Was it the unnecessary American drawl? The sneaky musical pilfering? The cheese as grating as a pound of gorgonzola? The incurable misanthropy of vocalist Stuart Adams? Continue Reading

Ignoring the obvious pretensions of adopting a different pseudonym every time he feels so much a change of wind direction in his underpants, the fresh Prince of hot air augments his customary spit and sawdust melancholy with the sweetest of fiddles, glockenspiels and pedal steels for a handful of belly laughs, camp-fire choruses and high and lonesome romance courtesy of new album, ‘Beware’. Whilst no less gritty and honest than previous efforts, Will Oldham embraces a richer and broader musical Continue Reading

Howling Bells arrived back in 2005/06 like a psychedelic rock lozenge. Had you ever heard a more delicious dusty strum, melodies that melted like a sunset and about the most delectable female lead vocal since Hope Sandoval drizzled magic over Mazzy Star in the early 90s? No, of course you hadn’t. And you’d have been delighted with more of the same, and in a way you’ve got it too because it’s all still in there; the distinct, hopelessly lush vocal Continue Reading