Reviews

It always seemed a flawed argument, but childhood still tended to come crowded with advice nuggets such as “you can have too much fun you know!”. That particular line seemed at direct loggerheads with the very essence of fun as it had been taught up to that point and was presumed (reasonably correctly) to be an outright lie and part of some larger adult conspiracy. But perhaps here, with Peter Moran’s debut solo album, away from the carefree flippancy of Continue Reading

They’re really the archetypal cult band, dEUS – talk of breakthrough with each passing release, since their mid-90s post-grunge inception, has always been and will always be far-fetched. They do just enough, actually they do plenty, to stay interesting, but only ever skirt unassumingly around the cusp of general accessibility. And if they have a problem, that is it. Always mid-way between interesting and accessible, rarely letting one or the other go the distance, they’re both reassuringly and frustratingly consistent. Continue Reading

Thankfully, this is one of those rare moments when it all makes perfect sense. Most days it’s really just a case of working through a steady stack of discs all purporting to be ‘eclectic’ or ‘unique’ but rarely amounting to much more than entertaining in parts and as original and inspiring as a fridge magnet souvenir. So when the archly surreal and transgressive, Magazine and Nick Cave collaborator, Barry Adamson starts high-kicking it like some acid-dropping Frankie Lane on the Continue Reading

Well, I’ve read through the press release and I’m still none the wiser. Why? Well I think it’s largely due to the tumultuous fanfare it provides in lieu of any real facts; the bugles blast, the trumpets blow and a shaft of heavenly sunlight tears through the clouds by way of announcement. But do we know anything about them? Do we ‘eck. The obvious trouble with this kind of approach is that you raise expectations to such a towering, colossal Continue Reading

Just to prove how aggressively this sumptuous downtempo posse is approaching the live circuit the band have released not one live release this year but two. First up was the strictly limited edition (1500 copies), ‘Ma Fleur Live At The Barbican’ and secondly there’s this, the Orchestra’s attempts to extend the boundaries of their richly elastic material still further at the Royal Albert Hall. For those of you who don’t know, The Cinematic Orchestra is the brainchild of British-based jazz Continue Reading

Sometimes you just want to hear things arranged in such a way that nothing about them sounds familiar. In fact, it’s bit like booking a holiday where you only know where you are going upon arrival: a world without signposts, translation manuals, traffic signals or tourist advice centres. Someplace you can drive on the wrong side of the road, wear outrageous combinations of clothes and generally go about life in a random, and desultory manner. It’s not about being isolated, Continue Reading

What we have here then is a husky-voiced wisp of an alt-country chanteuse from the United States who sings like each word drifting out from between her lips is released like a dove, and who apparently obsesses over Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan. So what we have is essentially Cat Power, right? In many ways yes, almost. Just try and file a brunette hair between them at points. And the bits that she borrows from Chan are the best bits Continue Reading

It starts off with something that sounds like it came straight out of the Doctor’s Tardis – a combination of wave signal and noise generators, filters and square- and sine-wave oscillators backed up by pulses and beats falling cheerfully through time, relativity, dimensions and space. Fourtet is back. Back from his bonkers jazz experiments with Steve Reid, back with a big fat grin on his face and back indeed with the goods. The Ringer mini album is a 32 minute, Continue Reading

They say that the typical greetings card tells you more about sender of the greeting than it does about those for whom it is intended. Most folks will know what I mean. You choose a card that’s kind of arty or kind of stylish and it’s little more than a demand to be taken seriously by the best part of the thinking world. You send a card that’s a little risqué or dirty or more than a little silly and Continue Reading

Jerky, vigorous, eclectic yes, but not very good at the end of the day, which is a shame as the cheeky lyrical peculiarities and rambling greenery of tracks like ‘You Can Hear The World From Menwith Hill’ suggests there’s more to O Fracas than the now staple British diet of bouncy beats, jerky guitars and vacant expressions of  ‘just another post-punk’ band in the mould of Franz Ferdinand. Personally I got rather tired of all this by the time I’d Continue Reading