“The most fun that I ever had was the night the gypsies came to town!”. Eamon Hamilton has clearly lead a much more interesting life than I. But then that’s a given, it’s his job, he’s in a band, I’m writing about it. I know my place. But even by those standards, considering his previously established eccentricities, this record is extreme, showcasing a lunatic unleashed amid music. As keyboard-tinkler/beat-buffoon/general-spare-part in British Sea Power he established himself as a sturdy subsidiary, Continue Reading

Singer-songwriters, eh. As if it wasn’t hard enough to tell some of them apart, they’ve begun using the same names now too, which is one inventive way to invigorate record sales we suppose. In what could provide problems similar to those experienced by casual followers of Ryan and Bryan Adams, Damien and Jonathan Rice are bound to momentarily suffer/benefit either from mistaken identity or the presumption that they’re blood relatives. Which they’re not, metaphorically or actually. They do co-exist under Continue Reading

What with falling off stages left and acquiring ear infections right, Ryan Adams could be doing with an understudy. Step forward Steven and Sherilyn Collins, two for the price of one husband and wife duo from Texas, and ten dusty tracks of coasting-on-the-breeze sunset soundtracking beauty. It’s music very much rooted in the formalities of the genre, strings played almost as if they didn’t want to disturb them, a touch of the twinkling old Joanna, slide guitar to these songs Continue Reading

The word “Nirvana” has been tossed around near North-West’s bratty noisemakers Nine Black Alps so much recently that, like a young child with an embryonic grasp of language, they may well be under the misapprehension that the name belongs to them. Their vocabulary past that point must be fairly limited. But it’ll all just end in heartache later, surely. All sorts of “I am not your father” type shenanigans, time wasted in the courts, DNA testing, the lot. Because that Continue Reading

You know when someone says they’ve got a really good joke and you have to then tolerate five or so minutes of excruciating boredom whilst they pursue it with an insistence and an abandon bordering on cruelty, then you’ll know how it feels when someone says they’ve got a concept album they want to play you. First off, you have to be interested. Second, you have to be interested. And thirdly you have to be interested enough not to collapse Continue Reading

Presuming that you were born, Hed Kandi remind you what you were doing in 1989 with a brimful of feelgood club classics from the year just prior to everything going wild when house was still credible and rave hadn’t yet thrown its upsizing scatter bomb into fields and warehouses everywhere. CD 1 has all the dancefloor friendly piano-house anthems from Ceybil Jeffries, Pamela Fernandez, Li’l Louis & The Fog whilst CD 2 plots a course through rare and inspirational kick-ass Continue Reading

In truth, Keren Ann wouldn’t be out of place on more low-key, high intensity labels like Nova Mute or Warp or sitting alongside such swarthy, melancholy eccentrics as Juana Molina on Domino Records. So when you learn that she shares a label with Norah Jones the whole thing becomes a misleading proposition and one fraught with uncertainties. Whilst there’s no doubting the continuation of Jones’s cool and nonchalant lounge menagerie, the tinkling of cocktail glasses is buried beneath a canopy Continue Reading

The thing about instant ‘classics’ is that they often feel like you’ve been carrying them around with you forever. Ultimately, however, the same could also be said of warts, eczema and a dozen or so STDs like chlamydia. You see, familiarity is not always the first requisite for that which is memorable or terrific, it’s also the first requisite for contempt – and Royskopp’s follow-up to their gently seismic debut album, Melody AM falls unevenly between the two. ’49 Percent’ Continue Reading

It would appear that ‘New Fellas’ is The Cribs second album, they’re not all as new then as they suggest. Meaning that the first record must have passed us by somewhat. Though from the brief mp3 snippets of on their official site we’ll label it, possibly unfairly, the sound of early-ish Idlewild covering The Libertines, averagely. For us though, and we’d imagine many more, it all started with the persistent rabble-rousing single ‘Hey Scensters!’, the sound of Art Brut reaching Continue Reading

Now and again you make the unwise decision to ask the guy with the scowl and the merciless way of brushing you aside what the problem is. But rarely do you expect such an eloquent, well-structured and relentless riposte. The ultra esoteric and leftfield hip-hop producer FBC Fabric joins Sarf London social oberservationist, Reindeer for the kind of non-dysfunctional, grammatically correct cultural reform project you’re more likely to glimpse in the pages of the Daily Mail than in the flow Continue Reading