It’s hard to take against this, Tony Paglia’s fourth album, as it feels so much a labour of love. Recorded over a two year period in a ‘house by the highway’ (more specifically, a nineteenth century farmhouse in north-east Georgia, USA) ‘Summer Won’t Last’ is a collection of gentle pop songs tinged with folk and hints of psychedelica that, cumulatively, feel like a Polyphonic Spree album recorded with only a fraction of the personnel or budget but with all the Continue Reading

What an incredibly beautiful thing, for a package so very garish. The CD cover, slipcase particularly, is a primary school style teaching exercise in primary colours and how to induce a piercing headache thereof. But this disguises, quite surprisingly, an all too brief collection of eccentric classical pop songwriting, its ambition transcribed across blanket constellations of twinkling stars and atmospheric shimmering images daubed by a firm hand. You are eventually left with the feeling that perhaps this won’t be the Continue Reading

Must be, as those across the pond so cheerily refer to it, the holiday season again. As if the Christmas lights already going up on my high street wasn’t enough (hey, welcome to October!), the arrival of repackaged and mildly reheated former glories on our shelves should finally give it away. You both expect and accept this, of course you do. You made it happen! What else are you going to buy your little brother come 4.30pm on 24th December? Continue Reading

If The Darkness had relied on the Sex Pistols or the Beastie Boys rather than Queen for their gently amusing brand of irony-heavy rock, this is what it might have sounded like. Odds are though, you wouldn’t have got any of the three clearly demented individuals here squeezing into spandex or releasing cover-songs of dubious critical merit by way of extending their waning popularity. On the otherhand, on this unpredictable evidence, they might. True enough, the London trio have that Continue Reading

Offspring to classical pianists of Reading origin, who favoured holidaying on the continent to mucking in with everybody else down Blackpool Pleasure Beach, British- born Stuart Price is said to have turned on to the lofty gatemasters of electro Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa at a very early age before dabbling in the unearthly delights of French proto-electronica figures like Pierre Henry and Jean-Jacques Perreyas at the onset of puberty; experimenting with synthesizers in much the same way other boys were Continue Reading

Even with the exception of its poorly judged drum loops, lo-fi affectations and preponderance of grating styles, there was something fundamentally wrong with Gray’s last album ‘A New Day At Midnight’ in that it didn’t have any real tunes and the awkward, scrambled arrangements had a habit of rendering all his lyrical weariness cranky and unanchored. With the death of his father both Gray’s muse and his clarity seemed to have deserted him. And whilst understandable, it was ultimately disappointing. Continue Reading

It’s not difficult to see how The Fiery Furnaces could be considered the pretentious apex of stateside art-rock. This, their third full length offering in the last couple of years, is testimony to that suspicion. And by the time its 11 often uncomfortably-extended tracks have jerked by pulling pompous shapes, confirmation. They are an adventurous band to the core, of that there has been little doubt. It’s what made them so magnetic in the first place, their sense of adventure, Continue Reading

Pull up a stool, here come the first fruits of the post-split Mclusky fallout. Or, erm, at least there they went. Did you catch a glimpse before the reasonably ripe casing disintegrated chaotically and wastefully with a comic book “SPEEERLAT!” up against that wall, back across the ceiling and dripped into your hair? Now, who’s going to clean that up? Jon Chapple, you might recall, was the apparently lunatic bassist nutjob from Cardiff’s noisiest, most literate, funniest, most lightsabre cock-sucking Continue Reading

This would be a hansom release whatever the circumstances. One album of funk, pop and jazz afrobeat curios from the 60s and 70s plus a mirror album of slinky remixes from the likes of Paul Oakenfold, Adam Freeland, Way Out West, Quantic, The Jinks, Radio Slave, Fink, Bonobo and Zero P:M; a blast from the past and a free funky poke at the future. Collated and sourced by three of the UK’s leading afrobeat labels: Kona, Sound Way and Eckostar, the ten Continue Reading

It breaks my heart that this may be the only Blondie I get to review because for all its occasional flashes of magic it is a pale, pale imitation of their studio albums. For any of you unfamiliar with the group, suffice to say Blondie were the best of every indie band making to today. They had the spike and swagger of Razorlight, the humour and detached amusement of Franz Ferdinand, and the sheer, utter gorgeousness of Goldfrapp – times Continue Reading