The songwriting nucleus behind New York indie band, Madder Rose (they of 1993’s well received ‘Bring It Down’ album) Mary Lorson and Billy Cote have just released the largely (and bravely) instrumental ‘Piano Creeps’. They may have ended their formal arrangement with the release of ‘Tragic Magic’ in 1997 but the two have been virtually inseparable ever since, collaborating in part on Lorson’s Saint Low project. An innocent and pretty collection of musical vignettes, the album portrays the same sparkling innocence Continue Reading

With both hair follicles and riffs cranked up to the nines, these four pesky New Zealanders are presently shaking things up in the UK, and if the US release of their debut album, The Datsuns is anything to go by, then their hellfire brand of super-charged rock is going to doodle those damn Yankees quite squarely too. Alice Cooper riffs and a stoned out blues approach to simplicity make The Datsuns perhaps the coolest kick-ass exponents of plug-in-and-play rock n’ Continue Reading

Want a more legitimate alternative to Avril Lavigne? Heck, who doesn’t? The industry is certainly trying to come up with the goods and just when you thought The Donnas looked likely to be a one-off success up pop the scruffy little alt-pop unit, Damone. Comprising of the barely legal 17 year old, Noelle – blind in one eye and suitably obscured by a tress of nut-brown hair – Damone are the skilfully crafted peripheral to motherboard and writer, Dave Pino. Continue Reading

Those all-important vital stats first then, with this being a debut album and all. This is yet another of those supergroups, of sorts, and a very indie one at that, the fruits of 3 men working together in spare time that you wouldn’t imagine they had, but do, somehow. There’s Jim O’Rourke, he of various bands and solo encounters on the fringes of the American alternative and now full time guitar botherer in Sonic Youth. And Wilco’s front and back Continue Reading

Of all the New York bands that have been swept up by the straggling wisps of this hegemonic cultural zeitgeist, Longwave seem the most like the geeky college kid on work placement. Normal, boggle-eyed, earnest, eager and endearingly incompatible with their surroundings. That’s not to say that their end product is riddled with gaping holes (though they may well have taken twice as long and enjoyed a higher coffee-break/work ratio), but that where the accepted benchmark-makers of the movement propagate, Continue Reading

New York City’s Grand Mal currently number, to the best of our available knowledge, Bill Whitton, Aaron Romanello, Chris Isom (who should be complimented on a good surname if nothing else), Parker Kindred and Nathan Brown amongst their ranks. Admittedly that could all have changed by the time you read this. Aside from mainstay, songwriting boss-man Bill Whitton, the rest of the band has been a swiftly revolving chain-saw conveyor belt of around 30-40 members since its inception in the Continue Reading

Not one for naming albums then, Richard Warren. His first appearance under the Echoboy moniker (a solid, satisfying and adequately representative tag if ever we’ve seen one), ‘Volume One’, was followed a while after by ‘Volume Two’. Which was consistent, if nothing else. And now, with no respect for configuration or form, he plumps for ‘Giraffe’ like a listless foreigner on a Learn English By Post course with the wrong photocopied worksheet. Which is random, if nothing else. But it Continue Reading

When people usually announce an album as being ‘like Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson’ they usually only mean one of two things: a) it’s taken an imponderably long time to create or b) it’s played by already semi-skilled musicians not playing their primary instrument and having less than a measure of success with it. If the truth were known they seldom mean it’s an album of such soaring melodic genius that you could hang a pair of trousers on it Continue Reading