Prior to the UK’s outrageously well received, time-travelling cop drama, ‘Life On Mars’ us Brits were already a hapless enough bunch of retro addicts as it was. Since then, everyone over the age of 25 has been busy cracking open their cans of Party Seven and pledging to auction their paisley patterned souls on Ebay. For some the 70s ended somewhere near the end of production on Shoot League Ladders, the removal of the BBC test card, the dismissal of Continue Reading

Hou does funky house grab you? It doesn’t? Well you’re likely to hate this big fat 2 disc selection of silky, slinky, heavenly house-music, 100% guaranteed to kick off your weekend more wickedly than having a pink Max Factor Stay Put Lipstick cartridge stuck up your arse last thing Friday afternoon, leaving you as high as a kite. Three albums in, and with no sign of a let up in the quality department, the sexy, grandiose and delinquent Housexy crew Continue Reading

Sometimes a little mystery can be nice, and mystery is something that El Perro Del Mar and her sound lend themselves to very well. See, we can’t translate her name by ourselves – we are linguistically inarticulate Brits after all – though it does give an impression of grace and elegance; aesthetically sleek, an exotic utterance in a soft foreign tongue. If also sounding a little like a Mediterranean beach resort. But we like it. Which makes it a slight Continue Reading

I don’t know which I love more, the album itself or writer who describes the album as ‘a must for anybody that likes their experimentalism with a touch of poignancy and introspection’. Now I don’t know about you, but when somebody asks how you like your experimentalism, I rarely have the either the nerve or strength of conviction to offer, ‘with a touch of poignancy and introspection’. Same thing with toast. If someone asks me how I prefer my toast, Continue Reading

Every so often a label comes along that taps into, however accidentally, the record buying habits of spotty, cola-quaffing teenagers and student-sorts everywhere. I’d quote one off hand, but for the life of me I can’t think of one just now, which only goes to show just how transient such fads can be. Domino, on the otherhand, has built its success on following its own peculiar instincts. Fair enough, they released an absolute bag of shite in the days immediately Continue Reading

It’s funny. Well not quite, not like that, that’s the thing. We never found Adam Green’s anti-folk that laugh-out-loud, not even when he was with the Moldy Peaches. He was a sweet rascal, meticulous and creative, a wiseass with a guitar capable of levering a cracked smile from your cold, straight face if you’d give him 3 minutes, but his songs didn’t often feel consistent enough. But here’s the thing; all of a sudden, with the arrival of his fourth Continue Reading

Pretty Girls Make Graves are a straight-up emo band, with saccharine quirks, or at least that always was the case. But they’re becoming less emo by the year. Concurrently, and contrarily, they’re sounding more like themselves with every step. There have been great records from them already – ‘Good Health’ was spirited and urgent, if scrappy, and ‘The New Romance’ was the original idea made muscular, justified with armour-plated songs that lodged in your head like hot shrapnel. Take the Continue Reading

To my mind at least, K.D Lang will always be best remembered, not for that heaving crock of melodrama that was ‘Constant Craving’ but as that testy lesbian bint of whom Madonna once declared ‘Elvis is alive….and she’s beautiful’ – which is probably why Kathryn Dawn Lang has decided to set the record straight with ‘Reintarnation’ – a roots-oriented package that focuses on the early years of Lang’s career when the little ‘cowpunk’ gal with the mighty Patsy Cline voice Continue Reading

Look. We don’t really have a problem with Craig Nicholls, never did, so there’s really nothing here to apologise for. It was just that there were some bands who came along who were better than The Vines, quite simply. It was good while it lasted. We were both consenting adults and we chose to move on. Who knows, if The Strokes or The Libertines or the Kings Of Leon hadn’t come along we may still be together. We don’t need Continue Reading

A Bluffer’s Guide to the New Romantics would probably have Japan down as the thinking person’s Duran Duran. For a dizzyingly short spell in the eighties their dark disco, 21st century cheekbones and bemusing song titles (‘Taking Islands in Africa’ anyone?) helped make them, simultaneously, darlings of both the electronic art-house scene and the readers of Smash Hits. A band who always felt uncomfortable with the pop-svengali tactics of manager Simon Napier-Bell (who tried to promote singer David Sylvian as Continue Reading