Month: June 2003

Royksopp, Metro Arena certainly, but what about The Avalanches? Picking up where the monstrously fine summer single of 2001, ‘Since I Left You’ left off comes ‘Hangin Around 03’ – the punchy, spicey equivalent of a glassful of sunshine. Hot and hazy with the ever imminent threat of thunder, International Pony – with the helping hand of Stepchild (of Tribe Called Quest fame) have chipped away at the cold marble of loungecore to reveal a sizzling slab of party funk. Continue Reading

It’s almost always the case that those records you love the most often yield the least words. What makes it even worse is when you have such celebrated alternatives as Grandaddy offer up an album that seems every bit as good as their previous without it ever really challenging the fragile – and often magical – base upon which that album stands. At a point where any other band thesedays would flout the standard set by their previous release by Continue Reading

La Musica Negra marks the first album without former guitarist and vocalist Anne Marie Griffin and although dedicated to her, it’s something of a departure from the Dave Grohl produced ‘In The Pink’. Scott Bondy and his Birmingham, Alabama gang dish up some trashy and sleazy riffs for colossal railroading track, ‘Way Out West’ and AC/DC thumping,’It’s Alright, It’s Okay’ (Jesus Told Me So) but elsewhere it all gets a bit sticky. ‘All The Saints’ bleeds the indie bandwagon dry Continue Reading

A little after a month of the release of their Still & Raw EP, Front 242’s first full-length studio recording for Metropolis, Pulse, will be available on May 6th. Like the EP, Pulse is a departure from hard-core industrial as the band adopts an ambient house sound. The first 5 tracks blend together into one mind bending journey of synthesized chaos and trip-hop beats. The mood of Pulse is ghostly unnerving as Jean-Luc De Meyer’s vocals draw on the eerie Continue Reading

We’re this time trawling the megahertz of the global village groove that is dub. But what is Dub? We all use it, we all abuse it and one or more popular artists at one time allege to have forged some deep, quasi-religious connection with it. Gorillaz even managed to score a number of hits claiming they were Dub’s original pop vagrants. They weren’t of course. It was often the people whose faces and names can’t be remembered for want of Continue Reading

A ‘talking book’ may not be the smartest attention grabber ever. Air and Italian novelist, Allessandro Baricco certainly didn’t to hit the spot with their book-come- performance art-come-record release, ‘City Reading’ in April – if only because nobody understood it. And whilst the addition of an English translation of the Italian novel from whence it came might have come in handy for some, it surely contradicted the very idea of pure narrative and pure sound that one supposes was its Continue Reading