Reviews

The initial and dominating impression you take away from this album, their eighth, is how very comfortable they sound. You’ll already be filling in the blanks there yourself, won’t you. But comfortable needn’t be a negative, it needn’t stand for all the things you presume it to. Granted, go back 15 years and the concept of the Manics being anything so sedate as ‘comfortable’ would have seemed an anomaly – they practically sold their whole shtick as an act of Continue Reading

Hardest game in the world, this male singer-songwriter lark. Well, it’s not, perhaps, but right at the moment in a genre saturated with man-and-his-guitar mediocrity, where the that bloody boy Blunt has both energised the market (well, the supermarket at least) sales wise and sapped any impression of innovation from it like a dehydrated vampire with his bewildering omnipresence, it can be hard to achieve any height above the mainstream parapet of inoffensive soft focus. The same mainstream that now Continue Reading

This is fun. But good it isn’t, and clean it ain’t. I mean, it’s good – audaciously so at points – but it’s not good. It’s really quite bad, if you know what we mean? It’s steal a milk float and churn up your neighbour’s rose garden in glorious slow motion fun, drink your grandma’s best rum and surf up and down the stairs on her Stanna-lift wearing a tea cosy on your head kind of larks. Proper “ooooph, you Continue Reading

The expectations on second albums are hardly what they were now, are they? An end-to-end schedule of ‘Sam’s Towns’,  ‘Winning Days’ and ‘Room On Fires’ have somewhat subdued our giddy abandon, our impossible hopes and dreams traded (perhaps quite understandably) for ‘more of the same’ or an album ‘with a few good tracks on it’; the risk of musical triumph falling in direct relation to the potential for disappointment. It’s a post ‘Be Here Now’ thing, a post ‘Kid A’ Continue Reading

Joining a growing pack of young experimental and occasionally psychedelic folksters and crust-makers that includes the magnificent Thirty Pounds Of Bone and The R.G Morrison (as well as mining a rich, canonical seam that features fellow Scot’s like Arab Strab, The Delgados and Mogmai as well as widescreen specialists like The Triffids) Glasgow’s accordion playing, tom-thumping, The Twilight Sad develop on the promise of last year’s critically acclaimed US-only EP by offering up the fiery, feisty and utterly compelling ‘Fourteen Continue Reading

A shaft of light arriving onto the darkness is always likely to tender the advent of a brand new world. It’s there at our birth and it’s rumoured to be there in the blinding flash of light at the end of a tunnel when we take our terminal breath. It’s there at the edge of salvation and it’s there at the first strike of inspiration. Written and conceived by Cowboy Junkies guitarist, Michael Timmins at the band’s Toronto studio, ‘At Continue Reading

There’s an awful lot of noise being made around this album’s release about a return to form. We’re not so sure about that. A return perhaps to life before acoustic breakdowns (2005’s ‘Howl’, a not too unsuccessful foray off track into desert-baked Dylanisms), to club-sized riffs, tension, groaning, lump beats, sounding a little like the Jesus and Mary Chain from time to time and to the sense that leather-jackets are worn like uniform at all times, zipped at least the Continue Reading

There’s nothing wrong with a touch of nostalgia – hell, we don’t know where we’re going unless we know where we’ve been. Or some such. So go visit those old haunts, pull on that old t-shirt that really must have been less ripped-stretch-fit at some point, by all means, if it makes you feel better about yourself. Do what they do on the telly and call that girl who gave you her number 23 years ago. She’s happy and married Continue Reading

Savagely minimal stuff from the rephrasing, repitching, redrafting and realigning hands of Matt Edwards aka Radio Slave. Not the first Misch Masch collection, of course, first we had a bunch of stuff reheated by Tiefschwarz and then we had something reserved by the Freeform Five. Oh, and DJ Hell got in on the act too. But strangely enough, this might just be the most eclectic and surprising mixcake of them all. First coming to prominence for his unpredictable and absorbing Continue Reading