Reviews

Save Your Face: hyperventilating country songs sucked into the vortex of a tornado then spewed across a sprawling Oxford landscape, mangling traditional country and western mythologies with their twisted, elliptical word-play, their misshapen chords and laying deliberate tripwires for the listener. And then they’re off screaming down alleyways and shimmying up drainpipes like wildcats. An album that could quite easily have been sub-titled ‘fear, loathing and getting out of tight scrapes in overcrowded bars’. It’s the kind of thing Supergrass Continue Reading

Strange one this. Difficult to pin it down exactly. Here we have a dose of luscious lounge, gently unfolding latin-beats, prickly blues-guitar and a delicate salsa spiciness. Featuring cameos and contributions from guitarists and writers like Ryan Scott, trumpet-man Kevin Louis, bas-player Andy Cotton, accordionist Nico Davis, percussionist David Martinez, Alex Huberty, David Brandt, the West Coast’s Luz Fleming (pronounced ‘Loose’) dishes up an unsually soft-focus menagerie of latin, jazz and roots reggae; part-sampled, part-live, part-programmed, part-played. My only gripe is Continue Reading

You can’t criticise a chap for naming himself Faris Rotter (or Joshua Von Grimm or Spider Webb) when just about everybody else making music is called something like Tom Chaplin (or  Chris Martin or Gary ‘Bloody’ Lightbody). You just can’t. And you can’t just have a pop at rock band for having abstract-goth vaudeville creations atop their heads when the most glamorous haircuts in British rock for the past decade could almost universally achieved with the aid of a medium Continue Reading

Excuse me if it sounds dismissive in any way, but rather than squeeze The Cat Empire within the fashionably cynical straight-jacket of shamelessly British artists like The Streets, Braintax and that inscrutably naff ska-pop-reggae-grime-anything-that’s-going pop princess, Lily Allen, Cat Empire’s press peeps ought to concentrating on the rich seam of roots based acoustic surf rock being mined from a faultline that includes San Francisco’s Bag Of Toys and Philly’s G. Love and Special Sauce. Yes the truth is really that Continue Reading

‘Can you vision this place?Where music defines our every move. A place where music is a sanctuary. A place where music is a winding road that leads to the most beautiful rainbow. A place where music is more important than the DJ, the promoter, the venue, the producer’. Aye, I can ‘vision’ it all right. This is the ‘vision’ we call Tescos – and we go there every Saturday morning right after swimming to see which CDs can be grabbed Continue Reading

The Kaisers’ sophomore album has us questioning our sanity somewhat, which is a reaction, but surely way down the list of preferable impressions. This is undeniably the Kaiser Chiefs, doing what the Kaiser Chiefs undeniably do. It “na na na”s and it “la la la”s and it almost inevitably “ooo-eee-ooo-oo”s. It has beats that could spur the most statuesque to pogo with unconscious glee. There are fun-size guitar riffs jostling playfully with one another. There are lyrics that require little Continue Reading

Crud got married last year. No, not to another website, they’re all sworn enemies of ours of course – though we have been making eyes at The Hype Machine quite a lot of late. This writer, specifically, got wed (gifts still gratefully received by the way – safe passage through the Glasto application process on April 1st, anyone?). And knocking together the ents for our evening bash we came to discover that while you might not always get what you Continue Reading

Too Rye Aye! Oh bollocks. That was someone else. But that’s the whole damn point, I suppose. The average Joe in the street usually arrives at Mr Morrison via everything but his actual records. Dexy’s Midnight Runners or gut-wrenchingly awful Julia Robert flick, the port may be different but the destination remains the same, Van Morrison surely remains the most ubiquitous cameo and namechecked figure in popular culture since Alfred Hitchcock tried to get in on the guestlist at Gatecrasher. Continue Reading

Back when your humble reviewer was taking his first muddy steps into the grubby world of boisterous indie music at Reading Festival ’94, as some sort of self-prescribed induction into its sordid workings, there seemed much to learn, there were new experiences and there were many questions. But the one thing, above all other things that I took away that day (apart from perhaps wondering how I could get hold of one of those massive light bulbs the Chilli Peppers Continue Reading

First up you had Domino’s timely reissue of ‘Born Sandy Devotional’, now you have two former glories released together on the same day: ‘In The Pines’ and ‘’Calenture’. More than this though, you have the opportunity to pour over the release’s expansive 42 page booklet and extra tracks, conceived in the same manner as the label’s recent ‘perfect bound’ Pavement release and similarly detailing the ideas and inspirations behind the creation and recording of this classic 80s indie album including Continue Reading