Reviews

A funk-soul Irish band that dress down their sweet and often saccharine polished power-pop midget-gems with no end of expletives and references to coming. And on the other side of the pond , the Scissor Scissors – a funk-soul American band that dress down their sweet and often saccharine polished power-pop midget-gems with no end of expletives and references to coming. Ever seen the two of these together or am I just paranoid in thinking that Mick and Dave Pyro, Continue Reading

Without knowing exactly what I mean, I’d say that ‘abc123’ is an album for headphones and art installations; it’s a Japan CD sticking in the machine and sounding great for it; an angular and insistent set of  eight instrumentals on an album just shy of twenty minutes long. Stefan Schneider of the Berlin trio has claimed that the impulse behind the songwriting was to construct pieces ‘in an alphabetical sense’ by arranging midi files on the computer in a graphical Continue Reading

Was “Keep Reachin’ Up” by Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators one of the great word-of mouth successes of 2006? Haven’t got a clue. But it says that here. The ‘word’ never slipped out of my mouth, I know that. Lilly Allen, Arctic Monkeys and Youtube surely had more ears burning. Having said that I do recall something rolling off my tongue to the effect that lead-off single, ‘If This Ain’t Love’ (Don’t Know What Is) – remixed here by Mr Scruff – Continue Reading

Am I the only one that found Metric’s breakthrough single ‘Monster Hospital’ to be infuriatingly average, deficient of a punch-line and somewhat akin to No Doubt trying to reclaim The Clash’s iconographic ‘I Fought The Law’ for a generation that can’t dance very well? And not in any post-ironic clever-clever come-out-the-other-side-cool kind of way. I hope not. It was a shame considering much of the album from whence it came grinded by as clean as a club lit in neon Continue Reading

If Film School’s eponymously titled debut album, released back at the start of 2006, was considered to be operating somewhat under the looming grip of Interpol’s vast shadow – and to a point, although not exclusively, it was – then turning up a few months after the strikingly morose New Yorkers’ latest and bravest release (though perhaps not hippest) they’ve got the same battle to pull the shapes that will distinguish them as a unique enough proposition to give a Continue Reading

If ‘Paper Monsters’, former Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan’s 2003 debut solo album, served any useful purpose it was a simple confirmation that its author still had a steady pulse – he of course infamously died for a couple of minutes in 1996 after a heroin overdose, the culmination of years of somewhat losing the plot. But beyond that it just really met Depeche Mode’s fans halfway and gave them something physical to hold, a photocopy of a heyday now Continue Reading

On Prince Paul and Handsome Boy Modelling School’s ‘White People’ (2004) we laughed our socks off at the extended ‘so naff, we’re cool’ handsome boy modelling motif. Trouble is, they extended, stretched and drew it out like a last dying breath over the 60 minute duration. And we didn’t like it. And then there was the fact that it was too much like a Royal Variety performance. The 25 or so cameos from folks like Del The Funky Homosapien, De Continue Reading

Talk about finding a diamond in the rough, a winning scratchcard you don’t recall buying in your back pocket, or the love of your life at a Hard-Fi gig (ok, possibly we have gone too far). Scout Niblett has proved herself over the course of four albums, even with the best will in the world on the part of the listener, to be an experience somewhat akin to conducting dentistry with a plastic ‘spork’. Her art has at points consisted Continue Reading

One cannot be too ambitious, can they? No, of course not, you’ve heard the sayings; the world’s yer oyster, the sky’s the limit, no sleep till Brooklyn, etc. Advice that Oceansize clearly ingested whole prior to recording their debut album, 2003’s swelling ‘Effloresce’, which soared through a metaphorical stratosphere or two, at least, on a journey towards the event horizon. You might have called it titanium reinforced progressive rock, or a post-rock space odyssey, but whatever it was it felt Continue Reading

It’s few people who can actually boast that their collapsing disaffection for the vicissitudes of modern British life can be best defined by refusing to sing in their native vernacular and resorting to Spanish and Italian to complete an album. But that’s Robert Wyatt – the man with the impossibly poignant voice, a five octave vocal range challenged only by a rather unassuming and unpretentious Home Counties accent and wheelchair bound purveyor of all lusty absurdities of war and peace Continue Reading