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3 Jul 2008
SPOKEN ELECTRO (Beanstalk Records) At first, I took this to be a spoof. Why else would anyone rhyme ‘expressionism’ with ‘jism’? What possible other reason could there be for someone to warble ‘a word is a picture/made out of sound/a sound you can…
13 Mar 2008
ROCK POP (Urtovox) Written rule in music number 14: Europeans of the continental type make horrible, horrible pop music. Of course, there are a few examples which dilute this tenet (ABBA and, um, A-ha?). And when it comes to Italians and pop, you can…
FOLK (Butterfly Recordings) Following up Butterfly’s acoustic-only debut compilation of 2006, 15 funky folksters set about proving that it’s not just musty fiddling men and wizened warbling dames who can cut the folky mustard. At times, the jumpers…
28 Feb 2008
INDIE (Full Time Hobby) On the public face of it, ex-Arab Strapper Malcolm Middleton may not be getting any happier, but it’s difficult to come away from one of his collections without wiping a grin off your face while the inevitable tear dampens your…
FOLK POP (4AD) While it might be cruel to say that John Darnielle and his Mountain Goats might be trying for a kind of Sufjan Stevens vibe but end up a bit too Jasper Carrott for comfort, that’s still the overriding impression given by Heretic Pride.
POP (One Little Indian) Surrounded, we are told, are ‘Sweden’s answer to The Flaming Lips.’ It’s a distinct possible that never a truer statement has been typed onto a music press release and while this is fine up to a point, that point arrives rather…
14 Feb 2008
ELECTRONICA (Fortune & Glory) You know that when a band are trying to create a ‘coherent mix of both digital and analogue without ever sounding disjointed’ that we may well all be in trouble. Whatever happened to writing a song from the heart rather…
4 Jan 2008
ROCK (Spinney) Being big in France with his former band Jack may have kept him warm at nights, but it seems that Anthony Reynolds could now care less about having anything remotely like a hit. Creating records that smell of ‘abandoned cathedrals…
POP Wise to the Fade (Spinney) Having been in the biz since the early 80s and witnessed the inexorable rise of the corporate mindset, you’d think Scots muso Kevin McDermott would have shot his bolt long ago. But no, he’s still making his mark whether…
13 Dec 2007
CHARITY COMPILATION (Oxfam Ireland) It is, of course, the very nature of compilation CDs that they are a mix of the good, the bad and the pointless. While The Cake Sale is a perfectly laudable charity collection, that doesn’t make it exempt from…
29 Nov 2007
ROCK Good Bad Not Evil (Vice) OK, so it’s patently obvious that Black Lips forgot to bone up on any of the many thousands of records which came along after the day ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ was released. That’s probably unfair; they’ve obviously listened…
15 Nov 2007
HIP HOP The Sound Catcher Extras (BBE) When The Sound Catcher came out last year, some reviewers believed that DJ Vadim, the original White Russian, was not interested in inventing sub-genres, but simply putting his stamp on the music he was in…
ROCK In Return (Rock Action) More terrifying than Cradle of Filth coming to your house to do trick or treat and heavier than a sack of Ozzy’s spuds, Torche at least have the common decency not to take up much of anyone’s time, clocking this…
4 Oct 2007
The Devendra Banhart live experience is akin to watching over-excitable teenagers being left in charge for a bank holiday weekend. Listening to him in your home is like being left out of someone else’s joke. While his folkiosyncratic ways have given…
Already this man deserves a medal having worked with Björk in the engineer’s capsule for almost a decade and staying patient with Lars von Trier on the soundtrack for Dancer in the Dark, a project which must have felt ten years long. Now he’s branched…
3 Jul 2007
ROCK Apparently, Clinic’s motto is ‘ignoring the tenets and trends of the music industry’. Admirable sentiments, but not really enough when your brand of stomping voodoo surf punk sounds as old as the hills, and feels just as mucky. This b-side…
26 Apr 2007
FOLK POP Wee Willy Mason launches his second tasty platter, with a voice that still sounds way beyond his tender early 20s. This new set of songs makes his acclaimed debut, Where the Humans Eat, seem like a slab of raw meat, with lush production…
9 Apr 2007
POP ROCK As soon as the hallucino-vocals kick in, your ears will transport you a pair of decades back in time. The almost bored tones of little Linda Reid signal this first leg of The Jesus and Mary Chain reunion-of-sorts to be cemented when the…
13 Mar 2007
ELECTRO POP With a background in futuristic theatre productions and distant cinematic electronica, Pomegranate (duo Stef McGlinchey and Vanessa Rigg) certainly know how to put a layered, nocturnal soundscape or two together (not for nowt is the…
ROCK POP After two songs of the Aliens’ debut long player (an outdated description, but at 72 minutes, a justified one), you might be praying for invasion by some little green ones to take you away from it all. The hackneyed and tuneless 60s funk…
13 Feb 2007
POP ROCK (Hypertension) Wearing your heart on your sleeve has always sounded like a painful and messy sacrifice to me, while displaying your musical influences like a big clanging medal round the neck is nothing short of a grave mistake. So…
29 Jan 2007
CHEERY SCOTTISH ECLECTICA If this is the future of Scottish music, then it has a big broad smile on its face. Often it may be a broken one (such as in Jock Scot’s barroom brogue of ‘Barcelona’), sometimes it’s the scary kind with the thousand yard…
KIDS COMPILATION Nostalgia might not be what it once was, but in the Staples and Boulter households, the past is far from imperfect. Stuart and Dave, the guys from the Tindersticks, have lovingly recreated the songs they remembered from their radios…
3 Jan 2007
FOLK It must be fun down the Fence Collective way with all those pseudonyms being hidden behind. And so following in the footsteps of the label’s mentor King Creosote (Kenny Anderson) here we have James Mathe aka Red Beard (‘barbarossa’ in Italian)…
11 Dec 2006
MUSIC COMEDY The people at Videosyncratic are so painfully desperate to prove their really cool independent credentials that they remind us of them in this DVD’s accompanying brochure and at the beginning of this ‘film’. But the definition of…
27 Nov 2006
UNCLASSIFIABLE When the BBC were planning their resurrection of Jackanory, Tom Waits may well have been on the longlist of proposed readers. But maybe they got wind of his disturbing night-time terror ‘Children’s Story’ and revoked the invite. Like…
17 Oct 2006
POP FOLK Snow Patrol lead guy Gary Lightbody loves them. The List readers had them down as the 46th best Scottish band of all time. So, why are they still recording albums from home? Well, maybe they just like it that way. And there is indeed a lot…
2 Oct 2006
ELECTROPOP The so far unannounced Depeche Mode revival gets sharply booted into action by these sprightly lads from Canada who claim to be on a cutting edge of ‘Modernist MOR’ which aims to destroy the point of Blunt and co. It still just sounds like…
COMPILATION My admittedly limited reading of the biblical plagues suggest some pretty nasty and brutal business. Which makes me wonder why this collection allows King Creosote to be so jaunty about swathes of frogs and gives Stephin Merritt the OK to…
18 Sep 2006
FOLK The reasons you loved a live show don’t always match the reasons you went along in the first place. Those who dropped by to sample the artful folk of this Texan troubadour and his band (considering their bank of guitars and that woodland of…
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