Imagine Rough Trade, Domino and 679 Recordings getting together to round up some of the best the year had to offer. Let’s face it, it’s likely you’d have bands like The Futureheads, Mystery Jets, Arcade Fire, Jarvis Cocker, Sufjan Stevens and Brakes rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, James Yorkston, Four Tet, Franz Ferdinand and Clinic. Pretty impressive, yeah? Well, to a large extent this is pretty much what you have with Top Of The Class 2006; a top-notch Continue Reading

Alvin Nathaniel Joiner IV suspends his holiday on colossal MTV hit, ‘Pimp My Ride’ to indulge his love of the underground with new album ‘Full Circle’ – a solid and fairly audacious addition to his catalogue of crime that whilst not specialising in exhausts, is fairly exhausting nevertheless, covering as it does the many evils and absurdities of living in the 21st Century. Politics, police-brutality, the Taliban, afternoon talk shows, paternity testing, cars, sex and more than a smidgen of Continue Reading

Although I am not sure I can run with all that ‘it’s an enigma inside a riddle wrapped in a copy of yesterdays Sun’ malarkey the DVD Concert film that accompanies the recent ‘Okonokos’ release from Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket certainly defies the odds. Let’s face it, most things that exceed 30 minutes thesedays tend to lose our attention (the TV, the new Strokes album, the President’s address to the nation, sex etc) so when I looked at the cover Continue Reading

The album slams wide open, no fuss; 6 straight seconds of ribcage-raking feedback, about the same of unblinking ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ drums and then a bass-line that drags you in by your hair and sullies you deliciously. It’s that irresistible moment the pub door swings open and you’re swallowed by a blast of hot air, that textured amalgamated mash of sound and smell, a first taste of everything that inevitably lies ahead; Friday night, Saturday evening, a lost Tuesday afternoon, whenever Continue Reading

Damien Rice is in the business of pissing people off. It’s kind of become his thing. Not to mention being pissed off himself – somewhat of a by-product. He even had a comedic yarn about being “pissed off“, during which he stressed the term repeatedly, and which was regularly unfurled before live readings of ‘Amie’, if you’re looking for exhibits. But if anything has characterised his live shows over the past 4 years, since the release of the slow-burning-then-snowballing classic ‘O’, Continue Reading

Have you ever just sat and watched a spider spin its web? Until very recently, no, us neither. But sit we did, and we’re as arachnophobic as they come (we figured it would be busy enough with the task in hand). And it’s fascinating, absolutely fascinating viewing. And it takes forever. It’s meticulous, drawn out, unforgiving work, though it has natural momentum, involving such intuitive skill. And when it’s done, though fragile in appearance it takes all that nature can Continue Reading

It’s nice to know that no matter how much you’re letting the human race down yourself, whether you look like Pete Doherty before a bath and communicate like lotto lout Michael Carroll with a mouthful of cabbage, there is always going to be somebody out there with the bona fide style to cancel you right out put the universe back in balance. And take heart that for all the Keanes of the world who think after 2 choruses ‘no, wait, Continue Reading

Vice-president, Al Gore once described postmodernism as a ‘combination of narcissism and nihilism’. Umberto Eco went one further, describing it as the sense that the ‘past is restricting, smothering, blackmailing us’. So when you consider Blair’s zero-point agenda for change in Iraq please bear a little of this in mind, for that too was narcissistic, nihilistic and it too applied no small amount of cultural blackmail. The first strike in the first war of the first Post-modern century? You bet. Continue Reading

There was a couple of things I was reluctant to mention, knowing how both age and location can be the deciding factors in the intractable UK fashion-market, so when I say that Afterhours has been around since 1986 when British journalist John McCarthy was kidnapped in Beirut, Argentina defeated West Germany 3-2 in the FIFA World Cup and Paul Simon released Graceland and that they, along with Pizza, Umberto Eco, Garibaldi, Olive Oil, Parmesan cheese and Roberto Baggio, are from Continue Reading