Reviews

Sawhey is one of those figures who straddle more boundaries and cross more divides than even the UN Secretary-General. So when we learn that his new album, ‘London Underground’ channels the anxious messages of a post 7/7 Britain into one united voice it shouldn’t come as any surprise. In some way the experience is rather like turning the dial on your old transistor radio and negotiating your way through a wave of jostling voices. Of course, they’re more smoothly segued Continue Reading

Whether it’s because it recalls the lush and feathery melancholics of Harriet Wheeler and the Sundays (as on ‘Your Shoes’) or the erotic lower labyrinths of PJ Harvey (as on ‘Body Sighs’) the new and gloriously belated album from Dorset sweethearts, Shelleyan Orphan, ‘We Have Everything We Needs’ evokes those far-off bookish days of 4AD and This Mortal Coil in a way that not even a Lisa Gerrard-Elizabeth Fraser takeaway could deliver. New age, ambient wave, ethereal wave, third-wave – Continue Reading

Whether or not its because I can’t sit back, close my eyes, and imagine myself on a beach over looking the Pacific Ocean or whether because at a whopping 90 minutes in length this 2-CD release from the New Zealand outfit suffers the kind of lag more commonly associated with international flights and baggage retrieval systems, I can’t quite connect with the album’s cross-boundary, pan-European, trans-international approach to genre-hopping. Whilst tracks like ‘Earth’ whilst vibrate with all manner of giddy Continue Reading

On paper, the 34-year old Kelli Dayton has fairly enviable track record. Lead vocalist with the deliciously sneaky and trippy Sneaker Pimps (remember ‘Post Modern Sleaze’?), collaborated with self-styled satanic-twonk, Marilyn Manson, fetish-twonk, Marc Almond and funk’s all-time twonk, Bootsy Collins. In fact had the Pimps heralded from Bristol and not Hartleppol they’d probably still be mentioned in the same breath as Massive and Portishead. This time, however, she’d doing it solo. And has been for several years if truth Continue Reading

It’s been around roughly a month now, but ‘Wlib AM: King of the Wigflip’ is the latest tongue-twisting, rhyme-spitting, atom-splitting release by the maverick, prolific and indefatigable Californian multi-instrumentalist, Madlib The Beat Konducta, who trades in his more recent forays into world rhythms and returns to his roots in hip-hop and R&B. Guests on his 24-track cruise amongst the stars are J-Rocc, Frank N’ Dank, Kanye West sideman, Karriem Riggins and veteran Prince Po on the fat and rubbery, ‘The Continue Reading

You know those stubbornly anti-CGI and strangely-anchored-to-an-unmoving-retro-image-of-the-future graphics that still come bundled with Windows Media Player and that tumble in random, garishly psychedelic loops endlessly and tastelessly in default to whatever CD you play? Department of Eagles are one of a select breed of bands that make sense of those visuals. And surprisingly that is no criticism. It’s not because they are garish, or tasteless, or even at all nauseatingly overegged themselves, but because they are unquestionably far out, come Continue Reading

The last set of Londoners we came across that sounded this out of place in urban English surroundings and whose coordinates, surely intended for just south of Nashville, TN, were obviously keyed in error by whoever deals with band distribution in the big control room upstairs (celestial mistakes, we ascertain, must happen from time to time), were Absentee and their 2006 mini album ‘Donkey Stock’. Of course they actually turned out to be delightfully confused, light-headed post-Britpop kids wandering off-course, Continue Reading

It’s not that Bradford Cox’s celebrated but challenging avant-garde side project Atlas Sound doesn’t solidify into something palpable and make a connection from time to time, because it does. Especially with hypnotically repetitive repeat listens.  And it’s not that his band Deerhunter’s last entirely-lauded-by-everyone release, ‘Cryptograms’, didn’t have its flourishing moments of relatively palatable pop tunefulness, because it did elevate from the drone on occasion to distinguish itself. It’s just that ‘Microcastle’ is such an easily understood, gargantuan triumph without Continue Reading

Are ABBA still hogging the sash for Swedish pop excellence? Might be time to slip the threadbare old thing off while they’re snoozing and let five flighty girls with heartbeats you could probably dance to (if they’d only let you close enough) take it out for a spin. Those Dancing Days may not be on a direct course to have a West End musical or cheesy chick-flick commercialise their legend in 25 years time, they don’t even have the top Continue Reading