No ‘Show Me Heaven’ or ‘If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)’ and some frightfully uncomfortable moments in which Ms Mckee makes some none-too-successful attempts to warm and cajole a fairly square and unresponsive crowd. Not what you deserve. Not what she deserves. We do have a version of that sexy ‘Lone Justice’ number ‘Shelter’ but apart from this one fair-to-middling example, ‘ Acoustic Tour 2006 Live’ is by no means a ‘hits’ album. Not that it Continue Reading

Kieran Hebden’s trademark is cheekily crafting the kinds of skewed-jazzy beats you simply have no way of second-guessing or remembering. He also has a rather tidy knack for creating sparkling, web-like musical threads of such magical peculiarity you could easily mistake them for the work of beat-boxing pixies. So just how long has he been sprinkling his fairy-dust over wares other than his own? Well, too long to remember. In his various and varied roles as artist, musician, live performer, Continue Reading

It’s already been said that even the average Kool Keith album is peppered with bizarre, disjointed, delusional or disassociated themes, concepts, and references. So imagine an album where Keith Mathew Thornton is well and truly hyping up his hugely ironical claims of being a former mental patient of Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, where he was treated for depression. Multiple personalities doesn’t even come into it. Have you any idea how many alter-egos this man has had? Keith Turbo, Keith Torg, Dr. Continue Reading

Guess which decade of pop we’re looting today, kids? Alright, so the prize cupboard’s bare, there is no reward – but we had high hopes for this particular project. Though they’ve been kicking around over the pond for a few years now, we first became aware of Austin, Texas 6-piece Sound Team with their excellent ‘Work EP’ when it was given a UK release earlier this year. There was a synthetic mould holding the 4 tracks in place, but within Continue Reading

The trouble with ripping up the rulebook on your first release is that it leaves you with bugger all things to tear up and scrap with your second. Or so you’d think. Whilst the band’s blogger endorsed debut album, ‘Last Exit’ featured the crazy stuttering influence of Timbaland and UK garage pushed up against a wall of nerdy eighties synth-music, new album ‘So This Is Goodbye’ wrestles free of its urban grip and slips down an adjacent alleyway of dreamy, Continue Reading

I only ask that there was at least one electronica record out there that didn’t make me feel like I was in an episode of Tomorrow’s World or locked inside a great-glass elevator with only Joe Meek, Buzz Lightyear and R2D2 for company. Not that I’m averse to a bit of the old Telstar Satellites any, just that the space-race is better suited to the likes of NASA than it is to two-thirds of the record producing public, who may Continue Reading

Having emerged at the fag end of the 90s as an off-kilter production duo – all junk shop samples, wonky tracks and an infectious bonhomie – the Nottingham-based duo Bent are no strangers to stumbling out on the same breath as those jolly old spangly Jelly headz and those garlic-munching, ether producing chillsters, Air. In fact we’re now four albums into Bent’s career and we’re still drawing the same comparisons. Not because we’re lazy, but because these are da boyz Continue Reading

What’s the new folk music these days then? Hip hop? Blogging? Whatever it is and however enduring it will be, old(e) folk still very much endures in its original state, having remained largely unchanged for centuries. In fact right now we’re midway through a bit of a resurgence, a few tweaks here, a shuffle there, a cheeky cross-pollination over that way, festivals springing up to cope with the growth, but still relying largely on the standard of singular men with Continue Reading

Last year’s ‘Prisoners Of Love’ best-of/rarities 3-disc set was as satisfying a final word as anyone could have wished for. A tumbling tribute through 20 years and 11 albums of dizzying eclecticism, bohemian creativity and lo-fi self-sufficiency. It was a patchwork of gentle peaks with a surprising fluidity. If it were an obituary, and it is beautifully articulated, it would probably win the Pulitzer Prize or something. But this band didn’t die – au contraire. This band maybe never will. Continue Reading

We might be as defined by our ignorance as much as anything else, but that’s probably no reason to be all that proud of our historically unending snubbery of the French. Look, they’re just there, over the water. Stand on your tip-toes, you can very almost see them! Their food’s alright. They invented the restaurant for god’s sake! And stood up to the imperialist Yanks on their bloody march across the globe! But what more do you know of their Continue Reading