Reviews

Breakout single ‘Opening Doors’ was a pretty little spider’s web of tinkling, pizzicato synth sequences, soft, spongy bass dabs and layers of dewdrop honey vocals. It was hopeful, eager, bright and unfathomably breezy – the sound of someone leaping out of bed, ripping open the curtains and joining a jostling throng of merry woodland creatures in a chorus of eternal sunshine. But even those enjoying the fruits of fairytale endings seldom have the excuse of being this happy, much less Continue Reading

The longevity of any decade tends to be determined by two things: as few gorky fashion disasters as humanly possible and a non-negotiable preset of just 10 years. Anything after 10 years is another decade entirely. The 90s were not the 80s plus a few years extra, in the same way the 1960s were not the 1950s 12” extended play. Not that Bearcraft seems to have noticed. For Bearcraft, the world is still driving around in red Audi Quattros, boffins Continue Reading

There’s an icy and squally haar that descends on the thoroughly downbeat sea-town, Hull every winter; usually after Christmas when everything there was ever to look forward to has jumped on a ferry to Zeebrugge and the last of the post offices in Hessle has been robbed. The south is not only beautiful, it’s a darn sight warmer too, which is likely to be why Heaton, always cruelly torn away from one Northern sea-port or another, took the least injured Continue Reading

If your own trumpet is lying around then why not blow it, that’s what I say? For Ninja Tune that trumpet time is now. Not content with releasing the mammoth, the marvellous and the mighty 4 CD Box Set ’20 Years of Beats and Pieces’ last month, the label that has the edgiest, elegant roster in Britain today serves up another celebration, this time re-visited, re-whittled, re-vised and re-served by King Cannibal, aka Dylan Richards. 74 minutes of all the Continue Reading

Here’s a perky enough proposition: born in Oklahoma, raised in New Orleans and currently making a home in the City of Angels (that’s a really cool way of describing Los Angeles, between you and me). Let’s face it, most folks are unlikely to have heard of the band but ‘Future Sons and Daughters’ is their third album and what’s on offer is this: a sultry, wandering, roadworthy collection of tunes as soft and engaging as a lover’s whisper and as Continue Reading

Whether or not its because life support has finally been withdrawn from the time-travelling 80s franchise, Ashes To Ashes, or whether it is because our own contemporary artists are doing the eighties so much better this time around, I find myself quietly disappointed by the latest offering from the ordinarily tremendous ‘New Wave To New Beat’ series. It’s all a bit one-dimensional, if anything. Volume 1 and Volume 2 were a reminder that actual tunes were the glue that held the Continue Reading

Most of the band studied music and one went to clown school. The significance of this escapes me until the first tumbling bars of ‘Well Done, Josef’ alert me to the band’s rather cheerful, carnivalesque approach to folk – at once psychedelic, studious and almost entirely made up of rippling, cyclic guitar riffs and thumping percussive interludes. It’s an Elliott Smith/Sufjan Stevens vibe that lends a languid, almost murmuring slant to brass parping, party-poppers like ‘Air Filter’, with its crazy Continue Reading

Modern Rituals: the tale of two coasts, one east, one west, and the story of two brothers, one called Danny and one called Michael. Complicating Chief’s story, however, are the usual gaps, omissions, lapses and contradictions. Raised in Los Angeles but relocating to New York City for university, the two brothers are supported by able-bodied songwriter, Evan Koga and Mike Moonves arriving on bass. A return trip to Los Angeles also sees them shift the focus of the story back west. Continue Reading