Reviews

Difficult to imagine that The Vines began their career in the dancey, fruity, stripey enclaves of cult rave independent, XL Recordings when their ‘Factory’ seven-incher became NME’s ‘Single of the Week’. Since then, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag, the band pioneering 2002’s garage-rock revival with the massively influential, ‘Highly Evolved’ and then shooting off into a slipstream of the press’s own relentless hype. Next was the band’s foray into psychedelic, Paisley pop – ‘Winning Days’ – a Continue Reading

Jennings is no Willy, Mason that is. The singer-songwriter oeuvre is rarely all that esoteric and fine though the proponents it offers up and celebrates every year or two may be, you tend to get the idea very quickly. A ripple in the flavouring and a couple of memorable choruses is really the best you can hope for and all they often aspire to. But Jennings, already well established in the US over 10 years of working his way up Continue Reading

If our obsession with simulation has taught us anything, it’s that good old-fashioned mimicry is a cause of and a cause perpetuating its own existence. The simulacrum, whether it be a faithful reproduction of Saint Paul’s Catherdral made out of kippers or a waxwork scale model of Elvis Presley testicles, exudes a joy that extends well beyond the original, making it more vital, more meaningful, more entertaining and more authentic than had previously been thought possible. We don’t care that Continue Reading

It’s not an unremarkable history, I’ll say that. Born in Fife, Scotland and kickstarting his career in the late 60s under the pseudonym, John St Field, Leven staggered through the 70s and 80s, compromised by a heroin addiction, an inability to speak for two years, a protracted stint with a psychedelic/celtic punk band called Doll By Doll and a collaboration with Glen Matclock of the Sex Pistols. The years have however been kind and Leven has thus far released 12 Continue Reading

The mistake Oasis made with ‘Be Here Now’ was that in their haste to create one huge, big, fuck-off wall of sound, they forget to clue-in some tunes. So in this respect, ‘Forth’ is arguably Oasis’s finest moment to date. And I don’t draw the parallel lightly. Here we have two bands who’s terrifically eccentric claims of being the best band in the worlds were, for a short while at least, not the simply the result of having too many Continue Reading

Most of us have seen the sea, a constant coastal reminder predictably wedged somewhere between the land and the sky and most of us will have experienced sand, whether it’s the toe-curling, skin-grafting shingle variety found on beaches around England’s North-East coastline or the white, fiery dusty variety found in Devon and Cornwall. And there may even be those amongst us who have been brave enough to wade a hundred yards out at Fistral Bay and balance precariously on some Continue Reading

You know your tone deaf mate, those X-Factor contestants that make the thing watchable, Ian Brown at festivals? It’s not their fault, not really. It’s life’s big see-saw, ying ‘n’ yang (or ying and nnnnnnnnng) you see. Because they have none, sorts like The Little Ones have to wear life-jackets so as not to drown in their allocation. Their place is figuratively like an 80s children’s hospice the morning after Challenge Anneka choppered off into the distance leaving rooms rammed Continue Reading

The moment of truth. Or at least that’s what you might be expecting. But truth seldom arrives in such a timely, predictable fashion, delayed as it often is by inspiration, copyright clearance or its complete reluctance to offer closure, both on a musical and intellectual level. An artist is only ever as good as the last album he made or as predictable as anything he completes subsequently. So if this is the moment of truth, it could only ever be Continue Reading

Talk about hitting the ground running – like something between roadrunner and Pete Townsend’s windmill arms, only as legs. Add a cloud of dust and crackles of electricity and you near the impact of the opening double of ‘Highways Of Gold’ and the impossibly catchy Breeders-on-sherbet-and-diesel alt-pop helium bomb “Bats Over The Pacific Ocean”. Our recent memory can’t recall anything quite as immediate. This is the work of former members of ballistic emo sorts Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Continue Reading

If Gene Hunt and ‘Ashes To Ashes’ proved one thing (with the exception of redefining pilot show, ‘Life On Mars’ as a prodigious one-off) it’s that history repeats itself. You might not ‘need that fascist groove thang’ but that ‘fascist groove thang’ nevertheless has a habit of coming screaming back at you like a fired-up Audi Quattro all the same. So where do Heaven 17 fit in this time-travelling sequence of events? Well somewhere between the loopy, industrial bleep-scape of Continue Reading