The debut album, The Magic Land of Radio by London band Obi grew up to be just nine tracks in length and came to little over 30 minutes in duration. Nothing wrong with that. Even The Strokes albums are no more generous. The difference is their similarly minimal approach to arrangements. Coming somewhere between The Lilac Time, Goldrush, Garlic and Pavement, vocalist Damian Katkhuda and chums trade in the kind of heart-warming, googly, blissed-out eccentricity of a thousand and one Continue Reading

For a band often singled out for their ‘dark, synthetic beats’ it’s curious to find the Octane soundtrack a fairly ‘organic’ sounding affair by today’s laptop heavy standards, but ‘dark’ it certainly is, sinister, in fact. So sinister that my three year old legged it out of the room at the first discordant strikes of ‘Through The Night’. Not that she’ll be able to hide for long. Not when I’ve supplanted the ‘Disney Princesses’ CD she’s currently got rotating on Continue Reading

‘Net innovator, cutting-edge musician, icon, entrepreneur, fashion guru, fashion victim, writer, actor, man with bad teeth, bad dancer, misguided Placebo champion, faux-cockney alien-hybrid from Mars – you name it and David Bowie is it. We might bandy the term ‘chameleon’ around like it blends into the background of just about everything this man does, but no other entertainer past or present has successfully managed to sustain by turns both genius and such inspired and outrageous daftness over such an imponderable Continue Reading

These guys are in not for the good of their health. They’re not in it to bag a few Grammys and bed a few beauties. They didn’t even get in it to try and sell something. They’re in it (they say) to ‘connect’ with people on a different level’. Yup, I’m a cynical old goat and the glowing endorsement from self-proclaimed spokesman for a generation, Bono hardly helps matters – but charity is where they’re at. And it’s more likely Continue Reading

If you can tell your Norahs from your Noras, I can guarantee you’re going to like this. Seductive, smoky and as wilfully vulnerable as bending over for a bar of soap in Borstal’s Reformatory Home For Boys, Rachael Yamagata’s debut EP shows just what might have happened had the late great Jeff Buckley have found himself with an altogether different kind of mojo. The sweet but capable voice swinging smoothly from a whisper to a scream? It’s all there in Continue Reading

Matt Harding’s debut album, 2001’s ‘Tomorrow’ was an eclectic relaxant, unhurried visions, comfortable electronica and easily obtained victories in variety abounded. Nothing that he needed seemed too far out of reach, everything was a simple matter of fact, it was a haven of sloth with an active mind. And everything that applied then applies now. Only he seems even more chilled these days, time in-between albums could no doubt be plotted on a descending graph. The commitment he talks of Continue Reading

It seems to be the consensus of opinion that whilst this is a mighty fine collection of soul, funk and disco what actually set the landmark series of Another Late Night/Late Night Tales albums apart from the rest was the fact they culled together some of the most varied and eclectic music straight from the four points of the heart itself. You take an artist and you ask them to compile an album of music that inspired them most. And Continue Reading

I have to confess that I skipped Disc 1. I’m a philistine, I know, but even with my Beatles pedigree I couldn’t even try to pretend that 70 or so minutes of Anoushka Shankar was going to please me in any way. Maybe twenty years ago when my virtually every purchase was informed by fab four mop-top shenanigans and post-fab spin-off shenanigans, but not now. Christ, I bought the ‘Concert For Bangladesh’. I even bought John and Yoko’s ‘Wedding Album’. Continue Reading

Carl Faure, one half of the ‘worlds-colliding’, Black Grass attests: “The relations between genres and between underground and the mass-market is actually really fluid. You can’t separate out music. The album that we’ve made is an embodiment of that idea.“ Both the press release that accompanies this self-titled debut album, and the music itself hypothesize about the fluid melding of cultures and styles. And yes, it’s a fairly cosmopolitan palette: hip hop, jazz, soul, chill out, reggae, house, funk, R Continue Reading