Personally I am not so sure that every successful songwriter and consummate session player is able to make the transition from accomplished hired-hand to accomplished man-of-the-match, and whilst Fin Greenall, aka Fink may have played alongside such soulful, melancholic thoroughbreds as Zero 7, Massive Attack, Camille and the Fratellis (to name just a few) there’s little here to suggest he can justify transferring his considerable talents as prodigious supporting cast member to leading man. Bluesy, introspective and creeping around your earphones Continue Reading

Ooh eck, best keep this brief as it’s an album that combines the frustrating time-signatures and stop start malarkey of old progressive dinosaurs like Yes and King Crimson with the bonkers-pop antics of serial fruitcakes like Bjork. And frankly it’s all rather messy. For heaven’s sakes, it has song titles like ‘Temecula Sunrise’ and ‘Fluorescent Half Dome’, so what did you expect?  And if you thought the Polyphonic Spree were a pain in the arse, just check out ‘Cannibal Resource’ Continue Reading

He came out with an album a few years ago under his own name, Michael Johnson and inevitably nothing really happened. This time, however, he’s gone to the trouble of putting a bit of a primates concept together, which is great, because without such concepts we’d have gone through our whole lives without the likes of Simian, Cornelius and the Arctic Monkeys to soothe our aching hominoid souls. How the whole idea works in the context of the music though, Continue Reading

She might bang on to the likes of The Guardian about how ‘ard it’s been living on the fringes of society after a brutally middle-class Jamaican upbringing but hard-luck stories aside this has to be one of the best debut albums from a magically complex talent in a long time. Dripping with smart and sexy poetry and showcasing one of the finest oboe riffs on record, tracks like ‘The Key’ pack an emotional punch in an increasingly crude and superficial Continue Reading

I suppose Emily Eavis must be something of an old hippy at heart for personally inviting Nottingham’s ‘Swimming’ to perform at Glastonbury last year – not that the band’s debut album, ‘The Fireflow Trade’ is all deeply progressive dreamscapes and strung-out psychedelia – but much of it is. In fact, the whole mix sounds like it’s been squeezed through a wormhole into some future dimension on colonial Mars. And squeezed through no shortage of digital effects processors too. So cue Continue Reading

The Junior Boy’s previous efforts, ‘Last Exit’ (2004) and ‘So This Is Goodbye’ (2006) tore up the rulebook (albeit in a gentle and evironmentally friendly fashion). On the one hand you had the crazy stuttering influence of Timbaland and UK garage and on the other you had a super-soft, 2-ply layer of nerdy eighties synth-music. It was dreamy hypnotic vapour pop for a generation comfortable with its feminine-side and equally as comfortable in its pair of lounge-room slippers. It was Continue Reading

‘Houston, we have a problem. We have some seriously psyched-out slacker dude shoegazing a trail of goofball psychedelia. There’s surf guitars in it, drums, something the kids are calling ‘synthesizers’ and he’s shoved the whole thing bally lot through a meteor cloud of echo and reverb units. I’m afraid that it’s another main B bus undervolt. And the crew are really bummed because it ain’t entirely rock and ain’t entirely electronic.’ Not that’s we’ve got anything to worry about though. Continue Reading

Tommy Tokyo (or Tommy Lorange Ottosen as he is known in his native Norway) has the kind of unruly and angry beard that a prospector from the great American Gold Rush would have killed for, so naturally he and his moribund band of misfits and Norwegian émigrés pan for only the crabbiest, melancholy nuggets to be found in ‘dem der hills. As you can imagine from the title alone, ‘Smear Your Smiles Back On’ is a wordy and curiously baroque Continue Reading

Any singer who can land a blow on their lyrical rival by calling them a ‘doughtnut’ has to be worthy of further investigation. It’s not right, it’s not nice, use your brain. Cut back on the booze and the drugs, especially cocaine. It’s not what you expect from a street-wise boy from Camden to say, but that’s what makes it so great. It subverts every expectation you could possibly throw at it. It’s not grime, it’s not rap, it’s not Continue Reading