Whether or not its because I can’t sit back, close my eyes, and imagine myself on a beach over looking the Pacific Ocean or whether because at a whopping 90 minutes in length this 2-CD release from the New Zealand outfit suffers the kind of lag more commonly associated with international flights and baggage retrieval systems, I can’t quite connect with the album’s cross-boundary, pan-European, trans-international approach to genre-hopping. Whilst tracks like ‘Earth’ whilst vibrate with all manner of giddy Continue Reading

You know those stubbornly anti-CGI and strangely-anchored-to-an-unmoving-retro-image-of-the-future graphics that still come bundled with Windows Media Player and that tumble in random, garishly psychedelic loops endlessly and tastelessly in default to whatever CD you play? Department of Eagles are one of a select breed of bands that make sense of those visuals. And surprisingly that is no criticism. It’s not because they are garish, or tasteless, or even at all nauseatingly overegged themselves, but because they are unquestionably far out, come Continue Reading

It’s been around roughly a month now, but ‘Wlib AM: King of the Wigflip’ is the latest tongue-twisting, rhyme-spitting, atom-splitting release by the maverick, prolific and indefatigable Californian multi-instrumentalist, Madlib The Beat Konducta, who trades in his more recent forays into world rhythms and returns to his roots in hip-hop and R&B. Guests on his 24-track cruise amongst the stars are J-Rocc, Frank N’ Dank, Kanye West sideman, Karriem Riggins and veteran Prince Po on the fat and rubbery, ‘The Continue Reading

The last set of Londoners we came across that sounded this out of place in urban English surroundings and whose coordinates, surely intended for just south of Nashville, TN, were obviously keyed in error by whoever deals with band distribution in the big control room upstairs (celestial mistakes, we ascertain, must happen from time to time), were Absentee and their 2006 mini album ‘Donkey Stock’. Of course they actually turned out to be delightfully confused, light-headed post-Britpop kids wandering off-course, Continue Reading

It’s not that Bradford Cox’s celebrated but challenging avant-garde side project Atlas Sound doesn’t solidify into something palpable and make a connection from time to time, because it does. Especially with hypnotically repetitive repeat listens.  And it’s not that his band Deerhunter’s last entirely-lauded-by-everyone release, ‘Cryptograms’, didn’t have its flourishing moments of relatively palatable pop tunefulness, because it did elevate from the drone on occasion to distinguish itself. It’s just that ‘Microcastle’ is such an easily understood, gargantuan triumph without Continue Reading

Are ABBA still hogging the sash for Swedish pop excellence? Might be time to slip the threadbare old thing off while they’re snoozing and let five flighty girls with heartbeats you could probably dance to (if they’d only let you close enough) take it out for a spin. Those Dancing Days may not be on a direct course to have a West End musical or cheesy chick-flick commercialise their legend in 25 years time, they don’t even have the top Continue Reading

‘I like to take you in the morning, when the day is fresh. When I can’t remember who you are, or what you’ve done to deserve my flesh’. And thus it begins. 50 minutes of broadly gothic, broadly neurotic, tomb–raiding agit-folk from Bristol’s crusty old sea-harpy, Rose Kemp, who in spite of her amusingly theatrical caterwauling occasionally dishes up a ballad or two of prodigious (if elusive) worth (‘Flawless’, ‘Nature’s Hymn’). Of course, as the daughter of Maddy Prior and Continue Reading

If Theresa Andersson’s new album, ‘Hummingbird, Go!’ album is anything to go by it’s a pity she didn’t discover her kitchen ten years earlier.  Mixed by Linus Larsson (Peter Bjorn and John, Mercury Rev) and played and produced almost entirely by the New Orleans based-Swede herself, the album effortlessly surpasses Andersson’s bland and uninspiring debut and it’s two subsequent straw clutching releases. Clearly this songbird never lacked ability, her five years as violinist for fellow Swede Anders Osborne was testament Continue Reading

So, where’s the old guy then?  Ben Folds is in his forties now and, hell, he was barely a day younger when he started banging out his AOR piano brouhahas 15 years ago. You’d have forgiven him a slide into sub-Elton mawkishness by now, it probably would have even suited him. And who knows, had his love life not suffered a spinal collapse recently that is what we could be reviewing here. But it did, and he’s hardly been off Continue Reading