Most European bands would have us believe that their lives consist of pixie-like escapades involving bears, rabbits and the occasional talking book. Take Bjork for instance, charmingly silly, marvellously surreal, frighteningly innocent and as cute as a button in a bewildering Brothers Grimm meets Salvidor Dali meets Dora The Explorer fashion. Fantastic nature. That’s what she says to me. Same thing with The Concretes. Something nice, but something strange. Something freaky. Read the band’s biography on the Shout Out Loud Continue Reading

Alright. Pass the sauce. Throw our words under a medium grill for a minute or two, if you don’t mind. We’re prepared to give them a nibble at the very least. We had made suggestions you see, since their debut hit the streets in a haze of smut, smokes and Argos catalogue chic (pay no attention to Richard E ‘Bloody’ Grant), that GLC were living on nicked time – like someone had left a window on the latch, they’d booted Continue Reading

Slinky and moist. Just how I like it. Worthy soul collective Si*Sé (pronounced see*say) release the follow up to their 2003 self-titled release on David Byrne’s wonderfully screwball Luaka Bop, home to everything Afropea, Indian, and traditional and pathfinder for all the progressive music of Central and South America. This time though they’ve upped house and relocated to Fuerte Records. And whilst there’s nothing quite as breezily hypnotic as the Funky Lowlives mix of Si*Se’s ‘The Rain’ (available on the Continue Reading

They might insist on keeping that awful name of theirs, but thankfully they have the pedigree to continue overcoming that particular handicap (though we call it a handicap, it is really just a very bad decision). Assorted drugs hells, rolling band membership, fighting, illness, a constant warped backdrop of desert-mirage psychedelia, accents that whether singing or talking clamber out of their mouths sluggishly like a man taken down by a tranquilizer dart after a bottle a cheap malt in the Continue Reading

Elbow lack certain qualities You tend to when you’re out on your own, or perhaps because you’re on your own. Which they are. Seldom are bands so alone in fact, devoid of ties to any noticeable trend, and with a clear absence of competitive trailblazing, generic identification markings or noticeably erect egos. They’re intrinsically affixed to their home city of Manchester, sure, it defines them on this album more than ever before, but behavioral colloquialisms and a blunt but expressive Continue Reading

As soon as the sweet and meditative solo piano intro winds up on dramatic album opener, ‘Lost In Time’ it’s abundantly clear that Brooklyn’s most savagely overlooked New Wavers, Stellastarr* are dismissing the flash and brash thrash of their curly hyper-pop in favour of something a little more enduring, more personal. What ever happened to the maxim ‘if it’s not broke, why fix it?’ It got fixed, I guess, along with a half-dozen other impractical and insensitive suggestions that usually Continue Reading

Saying that ‘Takk…’ is the Icelandic band’s most ‘accessible’ album is a little like saying that Einstein’s theory of relativity is the former patent clerk’s catchiest big idea. You see, some things were just not meant to be ‘instant’. Take the slow metamorphoses of rocks or the incremental scoring of a landscape by glaciers – it doesn’t just take a minute, girl, it takes time. Time and whole lot more time. Listening to Sigur Rós has always been a little Continue Reading

There’s been much noise of late about Supergrass maturing, shedding that youthful skin, forgetting to clean their teeth, that sort of thing. Like playtime’s over or something. But is it not the truth that they’ve already achieved that, notably, as their career ploughed on through four consistently received albums? If the archetypal collective recollection of the band is a giddy, mutton-chopped teen rampage through tracks like ‘Alright’, ‘Caught By the Fuzz’ and ‘Mansize Rooster’, then have moments like the muscular Continue Reading

You never really believed that patience was a virtue, did you. That’s just a stalling feature rolled out by people who can’t make things happen. And what’s wrong with the right now, anyway? Well, sorry kid, turns out you were wrong, they were right. Live with it. As proof I offer you dinky little Oxfam-shop urban-folk rag dolls Alfie and this, their fourth album. Only they aren’t exactly dinky little Oxfam-shop urban-folk rag dolls any longer. Not quite.  They gave Continue Reading