Reviews

If Gogol Bordello’s goggle-eyed cameo during Madonna’s thus spectacular Live Earth headline the other month served any real purpose – other than possibly selling a few more energy saving light bulbs and making people consider using less carrier bags at Tesco, of course – it was to highlight (yes, admittedly to about 6 people watching at home) that not all folk music is hand-knitted and cross-legged, and that the east European gypsy variety in particular is fairly off its nut. Continue Reading

Occasionally, just occasionally, a band is outshone by the rays of sparkling trivia that emanate from their own sprawling history: and Fountains of Wayne just happen to be one of them. So what do we have? Well you’ll love this one; remember that sticky, catchy pop tune from Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore flick ‘Music and Lyrics’? The one that kickstarts the movie? ‘Pop Goes My Heart’? That affectionate and hugely enjoyable eighties parody? Well that was written by the band’s bass Continue Reading

We’re living through interesting times right now, or sometimes we are. The past 10 years have been a colourful era for UK indie music, for music with character, made by characters. From the masked psychosis of Clinic, through Super Furry Animals’ adventurous skirmishes, the Beta Band’s Mormon psychedelia, 80s Matchbox’s early distorted eccentricities, British Sea Power’s uniformed, textured vim, Mystery Jets’ bric-a-brac prog blend to The Horrors’ noisy theatricality. Bands linked not in an immediate or apparent sense, but by Continue Reading

Some bands – well, most bands – as good as they are or have been, still have an uncanny ability to make you wince with apprehension, adopting the listening equivalent of the crash position in case of impact, fingers over eyes, elbows over ears, when spinning any new album. There’s always that strong possibility that the stack of expectation amassed since their last acclaimed release will collapse in on itself leaving a pathetic pile of dust, debris and dead hope Continue Reading

Errmmm. Don’t really know what to say. On the one hand it’s a remarkably accomplished and well realised album full of joyous, cloud-bursting sunshine and perfectly poised intentions and on the other it’s a wordy, slightly irritating slice of militant miracle-love served up by a posh bird with aspirations pertaining to poetry and jazz. Lyrically it shuffles awkwardly amidst a hailstorm of polysyllables and extended metaphors, crawling bravely toward the profound but without ever seriously challenging it’s defences. In fact, Continue Reading

Following up the gentle, woozy ramble through the fishing ports and tavern trails around Edinburgh that was 2006’s, ‘The Year of The Leopard’, the athletic James Yorkston returns with yet another album, ‘Roaring The Gospel’. And whilst not ‘roaring’ exactly (more ‘yawning’) it is significantly more playful and dissolute than it’s perfectly balanced predecessor, packed to it’s fusty wooden rafters with all manner of tales regaled in his usual unsteady drawl to the languorous hum of his jugband army of Continue Reading

That Samson-esque voice, that gravely tone that stands firm like granite – not groaning under the weight of the dusky woe that it carries on its shoulders at all, but hunched pensively nonetheless – leaving a epic silhouetted impression as the backdrop to every song, is impossible to deny. It’s a genuine force of nature, an ace with which he can win every hand he plays. Its purpose is to be marvelled at and to communicate great scales of emotion. Continue Reading

You thought you had Interpol pegged, didn’t you. Yeah, us too. They probably weren’t far off the mark either, the way they’d nailed themselves up on the post-punk crucifix (still well-dressed, mind – always well dressed), wherein they thrashed through the motions of toil and regret for all to see. They sat behind the blacked-out windows of a cruising juggernaut of emotional turmoil and introverted tension, every bold manoeuvre or sudden swerve so very clear to see, especially when we’re Continue Reading

Well at least they had both the foresight and the hindsight not to call this a ‘Greatest Hits’ package, a package that would in all probability consist of little more than a picture of tubby little bald fella with a cuppeth not exactly overflowing with sales and an I.O.U slipped in with the liner notes. But sales don’t mean anything and Blackie doesn’t seem to give a s**t either way anyway, so there’s little point in heckling the man. After Continue Reading

Joy Denalane was born in Berlin-Schoeneberg as the third of six children to a German Mother and a South African Father. At the age of six the family moved on to Berlin-Kreuzberg, a more racially diverse part of the city, where Joy entered school and spent the greater part of her adolescence. At sixteen, she left home and began focusing on music. The name Denalane is South African and means shining star (in Pedi); it is as if the young Continue Reading