Why stew in your own juices when you can invite the whole weary world to stew in them also? Liam’s previous band, The Havenots has clearly not left the sweetest of tastes in his mouth even though the Leicester band’s sophomore release cooked up the dreamiest of whisper-soft Americana and the most heartbreaking boy-girl harmonies in 2005. It was like Joy Zipper but with rollerblades instead of razorblades; sun kissed sugar melodies blowing around in the surly pouting ether of Continue Reading

Legal wrangling ended successfully as the publishers of 1950s standard, ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’ allowed the band not only to include a sizeable portion of the song’s lyric’s on the band’s debut album, ‘Palace’ but to clue it in as a long overdue single in 2011 – almost two full years after ‘Surfacing’ was first recorded by the band for East City Records. And the delay might prove to their advantage, the interim years having seen the band Continue Reading

Crud has already exhausted the ‘tumultuous, rain-soaked orchestral pop’ plaudits, so we’ll make this as brief and on target as possible: Manchester’s multi-manned and multi-dimensional Spokes do for the overcast British North West what Arcade Fire did for Quebec and what the Polyphonic Spree and David Koresh did for Texas (no obvious parallels drawn). Not even Brisbane or Queensland have been threatened on this scale, tracks like ‘345’ and ‘Peace Racket’ building from quiet, desultory showers to thrashing, stormy climaxes Continue Reading

Agit-lounge. An impossible proposition one might think, but not for Washington DC based DJs Rob Garrza and Eric Hilton whose slinky, smoky and curvaceous blend of dub, acid-jazz and variously Middle Eastern and Asian music collides in a challenging political hotpot. Whilst the band have enjoyed no shortage of support in their sixteen years together (from Wayne Coyne to David Byrne) the pair have drawn just as much attention from their opposition to the crazy antics of George W Bush Continue Reading

Since moving to the Highlands five years ago, I’ve been quietly seduced not only by the region’s generous supply of single-malt whiskies and its proficiency in coping with more than three-inches of snow, I’ve also grown more than a little fond of its music. Sure, the likes of Capercaille and Moray Youth Brass won’t win any prizes for transgressing any traditional boundaries or risk a custodial sentence for exposing themselves on stage or engaging in any similarly lewd acts (with Continue Reading

Body, money, power; that’s how this feisty Brooklyn collective described the band’s upcoming album, ‘Talk About Body’ in a recent interview with Amelia Magazine, and it’s as good as place as any to start. Taking its cue from the clipped, deliberate beats of post-punk revivalists like The Rapture and its wordy, boundary bashing, bra-snapping, tampax-trashing ethos from 80s New Wavers the Tom Tom Club, tunes like ‘Credit Card Babies’ bristle and fix with all manner of funk and reggae chops, Continue Reading

The well-carbonated spirit of acid-house, the slinky, well-oiled rubric of classic boogie-cop jazzsters like the James Taylor Quartet and the punchy brass lungs of disco – it’s all brewed up and served with the most vibrant of cocktail umbrellas by the funky George Fortadis as ‘Something Freaky’.  The titles themselves should give the game away: ‘Spot On Phunk’, ‘Disco Life’, ‘Get Down Boogie’ and ‘Makes Me Wanna Scream’. It’s no pastiche by any means, but record’s affection for the flair-flapping, Continue Reading

Don’t really know much about the band and a quick look on their Twitter page yields few clues. They’re feeling ‘totally absorbed’, working on new material that sounds a little ‘heavy’, have just been to the gym and like seeing a little bit of snow from time to time. It’s not Lennon’s ‘In His Own Write’ or Nikki Sixx’s ‘Heroin Diaries’ by any means but then what else do you expect from Kings Cliffe? Technically Fenech-Soler have yet to bother the Continue Reading

Instead of the complacent vanity of a band insisting they can’t be pigeonholed, I’d like to imagine Robert Wyatt, on being asked where to place the type of music he has helped produce for ‘Ghosts’, simply shrugging and saying ‘Oh, anywhere you’d like really.’ His work is so often stylish and technically polished yet suffused with an aura of absent minded beauty. At once mainstream, jazz and outsider art, he continues to plough a happy furrow through the music scene Continue Reading