When an album comes along and truly takes your breath away – side-steps you, flits around in your peripheral vision, pulls the ground from under your feet and leaves you convulsing amid a galaxy of stars – it’s generally unexpected, something for which you never prepared, a yet unconquered combination, a snapshot from outside your comfort zone. But with Bat For Lashes it’s not quite like that. Bat For Lashes is, though also an intoxicatingly capable band, the realisation of Continue Reading

Wait up a minute. Something has to be wrong. This is the band’s FIFTH album in the US, they’ve hosted their own weekly TV show, “Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Puffy“, featuring guests like Lenny Kravitz, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, and rock band Garbage and they even have their very own animated cartoon show, ‘Hi Hi PuffyAmiYumi’ which sees these gorgeous, pop-savvy J-Girls join a top-rated animated gang that includes the Osmonds, the Jacksons and the Beatles. So why haven’t we heard of them in Continue Reading

Tomorrow’s headlines could read either way: ‘outrageous, cross-dressing, many voiced Cher & Marilyn Monroe impersonator, Jimmy James shocks celebrity world with capable crock of club gold’ or ‘talented yet sadly deluded impersonator trashes reputation made on Edinburgh’s fringe with outrageously average disco record’. Like I say, it could go either way, but on the evidence of tracks like gentle ‘Freindsreunited’ synth-pop tracks like, ‘Old School Disco’ and shocking zoomy, zoom burlesques like ‘Be Bobo Body’ my money is on the Continue Reading

So, as far as band HR has been concerned over the past few years, seems the magic number has settled up at either around 19 members, or 2. Unless Sergeant Pepper’s entire Lonely Hearts Club Band joined the fray, or the less useful core 50% were swiftly booted aside, The Beatles would have been out on their ear these days. A four-piece, sir? Pfffft! At the lower end of the scale this century, duos such as The Kills, Joy Zipper, Continue Reading

We seem to have a sudden burst of activity on the Air-Spin Offs front this month. Not content with pitching in with most of the music for deliciously downtempo Parisian flick-chick, Carlotte Gainsbourg’s new ‘5:55’ record (with Jarvis Cocker) and providing Jean-Benoit Dunckel a little timely R&R for his ‘Darkel’ solo project next month, those kindly night owls at Azuli Records have locked the lounge-loving duo in a room with all their favourite records and forced them to come up Continue Reading

After an acrimonious split from Dinosaur Jr, bassist Lou Barlow teamed up with ‘musical terrorist’ Eric Gaffney and formed Sebadoh, one of the defining forces of the early 90’s lo-fi scene. Jason Loewenstein was later incorporated into the line up and Sebadoh then went on to release an album, III, that contained both the homemade feel of their earlier albums and the bigger studio sound they were lazily gravitating towards. III is a sonic rough and tumble with frenetic mini-instrumentals, Continue Reading

The press-sheet finds Yorkston and his people needlessly repelling the listener’s natural tendency to categorise his music, which is, for want of a better word, an intimate menagerie of old fashioned folk, hushed Northern irony and delicate acoustic strumming, curled up and woozy in the warm, trusty bosom of violins, clarinets, concertinas and drum brushes and sparse yet cosy arrangements. In all honesty, it’s a bit like finding yourself marooned in a fish-boat off Skye with a crate of rum, Continue Reading

The follow up to a debut that grabbed critics by the heart and shredded it before them with such genre-ripping abandon that we stood breathless and unable to speak for days, Brighton’s Blackgrass return with ‘A Hundred Days In One’. Having already have drawn the blood of a good word from the likes of Groove Armada, X-Press 2, Mr Scruff and Quantic, Black Grass (aka Mex) are all set to perform open-heart surgery again with an album that morphs shamelessly Continue Reading

‘Dub, soul, west-coast hip-hop, minimal techno and freaked-out post-disco are all thrown into the eclectic mix that is uniquely ‘deepchild’.’ Or so the story goes. And what a piss-awful expression to end on: ‘an eclectic mix that is uniquely ‘deepchild’. That it sounds like a Milk Tray ad is besides the point, what matters here is that things are seldom ‘uniquely’ anything and the Australian producer and acclaimed DJ, Rick Bull’s fourth album under the deeply girlie, ‘Deepchild’ moniker is Continue Reading

‘As The Crow Flows’ was an oddly folksy proposition, filled with all manner of violins, harmoniums and guest musicians, often intimating at greatness, but marred by too many overstuffed ideas from too many hands at the wheel. What should have been a quietly stated departure from fashion and expression of depth, was lost in detours and distractions, which though absorbing, was an arduous experience for any listener. It was also upset by the fact that it was a contradiction in Continue Reading