Reviews

By all accounts the Los Angeles based ‘Living Legends’ member, The Grouch has been spending his time on the West Coast’s independent scene, pushing, amassing, springing, devoting, birthing and guesting all manner of sh*t in his twenty plus years with the underground supergroup. In fact, such has been his output (7 solo projects and 5 collaborative efforts, 10 ‘Legend’ full-lengths) one might forgive him the occasional lapse on this variously smooth and peaceful fifteen-track collection. Raking leaves up, pulling out Continue Reading

It’s an admirable and noble enough intention; the extraordinary journey of the Children at the Agape orphanage in South Arfica, who form a choir and use their not inconsiderable talent and music to help them overcome personal tragedy. Having lost their parents to AIDS at an early age, the children discover that they can use their collective voices to strengthen their spirit and inspire and engage others – travelling from the Orphanage to New York to raise awareness of the Continue Reading

We put on ‘Bluebeard’s Room’, press play, make ourselves a brew over which to consider its ebbs and flows for all you good people and then almost immediately get distracted by a phone call. We return to it a number of minutes later to be confronted head-on by the following gristly lyrical diatribe: “a vaginal swab on a murder-rape victim / a man decapitated by a samurai sword / a baby suffocated by a crazy nurse on children’s ward” (‘Harry Continue Reading

Regularly taking place at roof-top, terrace locations like Canvas in London, this well loved club event may no longer be the closely guarded secret it was, but it’s still a fiercely independent and innovative night packed to the beams with all manner of crazy and obstreperous techno and house heads. No not the kind of floor filling, club friendly crap you’re likely to find down your end of pier discos, but the more sparse, adventurous, trans-international fare traditionally dished up Continue Reading

It’s probably a testament to the input of the then virtually unknown singer, Martina Topley Bird that the belligerent and handsomely wayward Tricky has had to employ the services of not one replacement but five for his eagerly-awaited follow-up to 1995’s, ‘Maxinquaye’ album. Yeah, I know it’s not a follow-up in the strictest sense of the word. There was the interesting, but vaguely short-changing collection of demos that made-up the ‘Nearly God’ album in 1996 (more notable for its collaborations Continue Reading

It seems it is the burden of every acoustic carrying youth to have their strumming hand branded with a hot-iron inscribed with the two most inevitable words in the English musical lexicon: Nick Drake. Of course, the name has long since carried any direct resonance or weight of its own, to the extent of now representing anything ‘not plugged in’. The name has become a byword for ‘folky, an epithet for introversion and a convenient sandwich ‘wrap’ for anything remotely Continue Reading

He arrived in our imaginations a posturing glam-punk hybrid, high on amphetamines and squeezed into a pair of leopard skin trousers – and that’s kind of where he stays. The misty-eyed affection for Marc Bolan and John Lennon are patently still there in heaps, not least in the glittery kick-beats of unruly album opener, ‘Wannamama’, the faux electric orchestra of ‘You Don’t Gonna Run’ and the shameless sugar melt of ‘Semi-Babe’ and ‘Fountain of Lies’ but replacing the bluesy, rock Continue Reading

You can’t pronounce her name properly and, aptly, neither does her music trip off the tongue in any kind of conventional sense. Well, not your tongue. It lilts off hers, but then she, like her music, is a mystery, an enchanting whip of fantasy and fleeting reality, petite, dainty, unobtrusive. While Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li Zachrisson has her roots variously in glistening folk music, ambient electronica and cloud-hopping vocal pop, this is not an album that cries out to be Continue Reading

Asleep at heaven’s gate? That’s funny, because this sounds anything but snoozy to us. The heaven bit we get, there’s more than enough abounding gracefully in colourful stereo here to drown Rogue Wave in adjectives like ethereal, chimingly-angelic, halo-shaking and the like. And if we visualise them there’s an overwhelming white light gleaming out from behind them, that sort of thing, you know. Are they the wrong side of said gates? Possibly. Rattling their chains, scaling them perhaps, breaking into Continue Reading