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16 Jul 2007
SINGLES & DOWNLOADS (Image: The Heavy) I declare it the Summer of Dross! Kicking off the half-arsed festival-promoting releases is Mika ’s ‘Big Girl’ (Casablanca, 1 STAR), which flaps along like Scissor Sisters devoid of the camp charm and…
ROCK DEAN OWENS Whisky Hearts (Vermillion Road Records) Dean Owens is a genuine one-off. His exploration of songwriting has taken him through the heart of Americana, where he has found many opportunities to show his skills as a songwriter…
ALSO RELEASED Sam Baker - Pretty World (An Independent Release) Baker’s dense lyrics reflect life and near loss, and the artist is clearly determined to make sure every single moment counts. Vocals are country-nasal and a little limited, yet the…
EUPHORIC INDIE MIRACLE FORTRESS Five Roses (Rough Trade) Miracle Fortress is really just one man, the sickeningly talented 23-year-old Graham Van Pelt. Actually, ‘miracle fortress’ is a good way of describing what debut album Five Roses…
RETRO POP THE THRILLS Teenager (Virgin) It must be lovely being The Thrills. They seem to exist in an alternate universe to the rest of us, a hazy, sun-dappled version of the past that never happened, as though in perpetual audition for…
INDIE/FOLK WOODEN WAND James and the Quiet (Institute) Toning down from the eccentricities of his previous work, James Jackson Toth endeavoured to follow his muse and create something altogether different. Yet a style comparable to…
Electronica CHUNGKING Stay up Forever (Ecstatic Peace, Kill Rock Stars, -5RC, Three Lobed) Sean and Jessie have produced a slick, chic, dirty and danceable reason to stay up all night. It makes you think of Goldfrapp but with that…
FOLK MEGSON Smoke of Home (EDJ Records) Megson are the duo of Stu Hanna and Debbie Palmer. They hail originally from Teesside, and have been picking up a fair bit of favourable notice on the acoustic folk/roots circuit over the past couple…
JAZZ BOBBY HUTCHERSON For Sentimental Reasons (Kind of Blue) Vibes maestro Bobby Hutcherson was one of the key innovators in the post-bop experiments of the mid-60s for the Blue Note label, but he focuses on a more conventionally…
JAZZ MIROSLAV VITOUS Universal Syncopations II (ECM Records) Miroslav Vitous’ Universal Syncopations marked his return to the ECM label, and was widely praised on its release in 2003. The bassist has chosen to extend and develop the…
AMERICANA RYAN ADAMS Easy Tiger (Lost Highway) After three albums in 2005 (two were doubles) and a batch of nonsense online ‘releases’, Americana’s poster boy has put his energies into one album. And it’s easily his most consistent work to…
FOLK MARTIN SIMPSON Prodigal Son (Topic) Simpson may be an enthusiast - he includes notes on his guitar tunings - but he is no purist. His enquiring ears have kept him at the interesting edge of the folk scene since he was a genuine…
SINGER-SONGWRITER RANDAN DISCOTHEQUE I Am the Singer, You Are the Song (Fife Kills) Snaking from Johnny Cash train stomp rhythms to delicate love stung paeans to departed muses, Randan Discotheque throws up an occasionally disconcerting…
GRIME LETHAL BIZZLE Back to Bizznizz (V2) The ailing Grime scene too often forgets that it was spawned from dance music, not hip hop, with many MCs eschewing potential club hits in favour of brainless trigger talk. Lethal Bizzle, on the…
18 Jun 2007
ROCK The White stripes are keen proof that there is a god. Or at least a benevolent force in the universe that occasionally, just occasionally allows a little bit of magic into this cruel, cruel world. Who else would have permitted this pair of…
JAZZ Alto saxophonist Paul Towndrow and his new Sextet recorded this album in adverse circumstances, but there is nothing here that would give away the fact that it was made under unusual time constraints. Towndrow’s brand of inventive contemporary…
ELECTRONIC Music has previously always struggled to keep pace with Paul Haig. His 80s angular Edinburgh post-punk outfit Josef K were way ahead of their time, influencing numerous contemporary bands (most notably Franz Ferdinand). His last few solo…
ELECTRONICA For those wondering what Paul Hartnoll has been up to since Orbital split in 2004, he has been hard at it in his Brighton studio, figuring out how to produce something far removed from his past output: ‘It just took time to discover what…
ROCK Editors have grown up since debut, The Back Room. There’s new confidence to Smith’s vocals, and anthemic ‘Weight of the World’ has a gravity that ‘Open Your Arms’ never quite attains. The sound has the urgency of shouts in the dark, and Smith’s…
ELECTRO Have you forgotten how exciting electronic music can be? Well you’re about to be reminded as two albums released this year are set to totally revitalise the genre. One comes in the form of † by Justice, the other is this impressive offering…
INDIE POP Problem page pop from a bunch of self-confessed puny losers from Motherwell? It shouldn’t work - hearing them sniff and sigh through bleak, downbeat stories about getting chucked in Strathclyde Park, or feeling they’ve missed their prime…
INDIE FOLK As a collaborator with everyone from Arab Strap to Idlewild and Malcolm Middleton, Jenny Reeve’s myriad musical talents have graced many a record to fine effect over the last few years. Now at last stepping into the limelight herself with…
JAZZ When clarinettist Tony Scott spent some time in Edinburgh one summer in the late 80s, his role as an important contributor to the emergence of both bebop and an early proto-version of free jazz in New York had all but been forgotten. His…
ELECTRONICA When a creative force is raised in a boring little armpit such as Kiel, it’s perhaps inevitable that the only reaction is to try and make something gorgeous from the tedium. With his third album, both the banal and the beautiful are…
AIRY POP Some may remember Donaghy as the one who quit the Sugababes, burnt her bridges, then suffered a flop album. Fear not, she’s back with So You Say, which has taken radio friendly pop and added a pinch of sophistication. Her vocals are…
7 May 2007
ROCK With their last two albums Wilco rewrote the book on what rock bands could do, so where next? The answer is they’ve reined in the experimentalism a tad and are indulging in exquisitely crafted, plaintive country-soul which manages to be…
ELECTRONIC ROCK The hassle with being pioneers - which this Swiss trio are, having invented the kind of theatrical but mechanical electro rock parents and families that are just taken for granted nowadays - is that you rarely get the credit you…
COUNTRY ROCK With two ex-punks, one indie-boy and a drummer who plays in jazz bands at a tennis club, it was an obvious career move to form an alt.country band together. Not only that, but a really quite good one - the Glaswegian God-Fearing Atheists…
FOLK Ever since she won the prestigious New Horizon award for 2006 at the BBC Folk Awards, Julie Fowlis has been landed with the unenviable expectation that she might succeed in taking Gaelic singing to a wider audience than it currently reaches…
INDIE Rarely can a band have managed to sum themselves up so well just within their own name. Glasgow’s Twilight Sad are, let’s not beat about the bush, a band who make sad music - yet it’s that particular Scottish sadness which finds itself couched…
INDIE You won’t read about them in hype-hungry magazines or find them bombarding Myspace profiles with friend requests, and as a result Butcher Boy may well be one of the most exciting discoveries you’ll make this year. This debut album from the…
JAZZ Pianist Kenny Werner forsakes the comfort and familiarity of his customary trio setting for a more ambitious conceptual approach to his music on this recording, his first for Blue Note. A row of lawn chairs upturned by the wind near his home…
ROCK You know what you’re getting when it comes to BRMC. Straight ahead, no frills rock’n’roll delivered with a degree of calculated nonchalance. Loops, samples or a ten-minute long jazz jam are not concepts these guys are familiar with. But…
HIP HOP REVISITED Love or loathe them, it looks like the blend trend that combusted spontaneously in both indie and hip hop scenes two or three years ago is set to burn on unabated. Here, Edinburgh’s own Nasty P casts in his own tuppence worth. The…
INDIE ELECTRONICA This first-time collaboration between The Fall’s mouthy frontman, Mark E Smith and German electronic maestros, Mouse on Mars sounds like the imaginary soundtrack to an after-party for the 1990s. Andi Toma and Jan St Werner do a good…
HOUSE Apparently a reference to an old Dutch proverb rather than Pete Doherty’s breakfast, Kraak and Smaak serve up a double remix CD of jazzy house vibes and percussive, break-beat rhythms. Groove-led basslines are reminiscent of the US West Coast…
26 Apr 2007
The weight of expectation hasn’t affected the Arctic Monkeys one iota. They’ve hardly broken their stride and have tossed off a second album of casual brilliance. It almost feels unfair how off the cuff Favourite Worst Nightmare feels; the lyrics are as…
INDIE After years of ferreting away with his former band, John McKeown’s brilliantly quirky songwriting is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Of course Cookies is an altogether different offering from anything The Yummy Fur ever released…
ERM . . . BJORK? Heralding an album as ‘the most commercial thing Björk has ever done’ is really a bit like declaring the new David Lynch movie ‘his most coherent narrative ever’. For the last decade she has been making the most unashamedly artful…
FOLK/ROCK Music from beyond the grave is always kind of spooky, especially when it is from an artist whose demise life was cut short like Smith’s. This is even more so given the bare nature of his songs, often little more than a couple of guitar…
POP Skye boys Leighton Jones (keyboard and vocals) and Hector MacInnes (drums) and the four other Injuns lads know their stuff and aren’t afraid to prove it. This debut is a densely influenced, multi-genre-encapsulating smorgasbord swerving from the…
ROCK Those who have been hanging about the venues of Edinburgh for a few years now might know this lot as ‘the band formerly known as Desc and Khaya’. Every vague shift in musical direction from long-time collaborators Dan Mutch, Pete Harvey and Alun…
CONTEMPORARY JAZZ The Edinburgh-based label is doing its fair share to support contemporary Scottish composition. The Edinburgh Quartet’s fine recent disc of new Scottish string quartets, The Cold Dancer, is followed by this solo outing from the BBC…
9 Apr 2007
FOLK Fiddler Lauren MacColl first came to wider notice when she won the BBC2 Young Folk Award in 2004. She is highly accomplished technically, but also has a genuine feel for the expressive nuances of the music, a quality entirely evident in this…
MIX A big, fat, 29-track mix album by Spank Rock, last year’s boys most likely to. Featuring tracks by Miss Kittin, Hot Chip, Daft Punk and this year’s girls most likely to, CSS. It screams hip electro party album brilliance from the tracklisting…
27 Mar 2007
JAZZ Scottish singer Alison Burns concentrates on a programme of familiar standards for her debut album, including pleasing versions of ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’, ‘But Not For Me’, ‘Shadow of Your Smile’ and ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, as…
FOLK ROCK Is there anything Conor Oberst can’t do? Side-projects and record label exec duties aside, this is the talented troubadour’s seventh studio album, under the guise of Bright Eyes, released at the tender age of 27. It’s an utterly lovely…
TWEE Lord, deliver us from hen-toed girls wearing glittering plastic jewelry and wielding Bontempi’s. Have they gone yet? No - Coco Rosie return with another archly twee album entitled The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, a record that…
JAZZ Pianist and keyboard player Tom Cawley is joined by Sam Burgess on bass and Joshua Blackmore on drums in an exemplary exhibition of contemporary piano trio that sounds a lot fresher and more imaginative than EST on their recent Glasgow outing.
ACOUSTIC POP For all its wild weather and curious inhabitants, you probably couldn’t help but make resplendently weird music if you grew up strumming a guitar on Orkney. Half Cousin’s 2004 album The Function Room provided some proof of that; main man…
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16 Jul 2007
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