Singer-Songwriter, Darren Berry (aka Mankato) is a canny master of the press, is he not? Name dropping everyone from Afrobeat icon Femi Kuti to Brooklyn hip-hop pioneer Roxanne Shante, Carlos Castenada to none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Flaming Lips, Mr Berry strives to create an air of enviable credibility and complexity. The reality is far less interesting, as debut album ‘Safe As Houses’ reveals. Quoting the sublime achievements of marked, visceral talents like Wayne Coyne and Femi Continue Reading

An album of revelation both musically and personally. That’s what it says on the tin, but as we all know from the packers at Netto, when you buy a tin of beans, beans are not always what you get. That architects of new musical success, the NME tip the album to knock Coldplay from their carefully crafted pedestal is even more remarkable. Far from being the unscheduled flight into fresh territories, ‘Silence Is Easy’ is pretty much more of the Continue Reading

There are two sides to the damning indictment of music criticism that ensues whenever someone raises the inevitable spectre of Spinal Tap. The first in the perfectly legitimate claim that any critic brandishing a tired and worn out ‘amp turned up to 11’ quote lacks any imagination and has failed to judge to the album on it’s own merits. In their defence though, this is the failure of semiotics, the science of signs. Take one iconic moment in time that Continue Reading

Radiohead have done a similar thing already this year. The circumstances are different admittedly, the reactions each individually informed, but the effect remains the same. On both occasions the question ‘what next?’ has been met with a resounding tap on the nose. That’s for us to find out another day, and we probably will. But for the time being it’s more of the best, if that’ll do you? Which of course is fine, though the sense of disappointment felt by Continue Reading

It’s been a long held suspicion of mine that dance music is the only musical genre that is truly extending rather rehashing previously explored boundaries. And Dr Rubberfunk represents the case in point. It’s Bossa but it’s not bossa, it’s jazz, but it’s not jazz, it’s funk but it’s not funk, it’s big beat – but it’s not Fatboy Slim. As a follow up to the already tantalising ‘Step On It’ and ‘Latin Player’, this heady little cocktail of solid Continue Reading

Imagine Jeff Buckley pursuing his hormone fuelled obsession with Heavy Metal and crazy time signatures rather than the gentle and amorphous heritage of 4AD and his father, Tim Buckley and you’re half-way toward understanding the tortuous, heavy riffing complexity of the RX Bandits. With the exact coordinates existing somewhere between Muse, the Mars Volta, Finch, Bob Marley and The Beat (of all people), the RX Bandits latest album, ‘The Resignation’, currently out on the venomous and consistent ‘Drive Thru’ label, melds Continue Reading

Awww, bless. It’s an instinctive trigger reaction, a product of evolution, you can’t help yourself. You just want to ruffle his hair, pinch his cheeks and knit him a thick jumper. A bit like you did with uber-earnest Andrew WK, only without the pity, regret and grease left between your fingers. Because Tim Burgess has never been a proper frontman. Like The Charlatans have always been derided for existing on the fringes of this and that, Tim’s never shaken off Continue Reading

He’s opened for the likes of the Strokes and Ben Folds and wrote a song for the Spiderman soundtrack called ‘Somebody Else’? So why haven’t we heard of Bleu? Because for all his blissed out power chords, his cheeky, boyish charm and his grizzled mutton-chops, he’s just too darn pop. Bleu brainchild James McAuley III did however manage to pull reclusive Jellyfish frontman Andy Sturmer out of the house to co-write and sing backup on “Could Be Worse“ but really Continue Reading

The fact that I found many of Roxy Music’s album covers curiously satisfying when coming into my teens, now seems little more than a wet sheet in a universe of used tissues. And however mildly misogynistic they now appear – woman on bed in lingerie grimacing at camera (1972’s Roxy Music), woman in heels with Jaguar on a leash (1973’s For Your Pleasure), woman marooned and looking submissive on beach with tits hanging out (Stranded), women with barely concealed beavers Continue Reading

It’s already been lamented by other able bodied commentators that whilst the likes of Robbie Williams, Coldplay and S Club 7 have grown fat on the milk of undue human kindness and curious market hysteria, true pop-visionaries like the Cardigans and the Wannadies have had to make do with the dregs of past and temporary triumphs; the Cardigans with ‘Love Fool’ and the Wannadies with the splenglorious ‘You and Me Song’. Brit-Pop was kind to our Scandinavian cousins. The present Continue Reading