Month: August 2003

That’s a name of some grandeur they’ve given themselves. Quite something to live up to too. And we know little of the monarchic qualities and customs in previous royal Spanish hierarchies, but we’re sure such erratic changes of tack can do little to endear you to a nation. You can have your face on a stamp but there’s something to be said for leadership. So maybe they’re just hitching a ride on the cloak tails of previous established institutions, which Continue Reading

Turning the guitars down. Against all rational thought indeed. But this is the daft idea the band had way back in 1996, when the Mendoza Line were holed up in downtown Athens, Ga – home of the fabulously jangly REM, Apples In Stereo, Elf Power and the so-called ‘Elephant Six’. You will be glad to know that the idea was a temporary aneurysm in an otherwise healthy brain and The Mendoza Line prepared a series of tracks that twinkle and Continue Reading

Accompanied by a fairly generous DVD on the making of the album, and an extra CD of remixes, alternate versions and oddities, David Bowies’ 1993 ‘Black Tie, White Noise’ is now reissued as a strictly limited edition CD boxed set. True to his word, Bowie is again seen questioning all established values, all taboos – and searching only for that dislocate sense of self that a true visionary could trace and then expand. Only this time those values are his Continue Reading

Frank Black limbers up for the release of new ‘Catholics’ album ‘Show Me Your Tears’ due for release on 8th September on Cooking Vinyl. Including two previously unreleased tracks – cover versions of Reid Paley’s “Take What You Want“ and The Rolling Stones “Down In The Hole“ – the single is full of the same tinkling saloon bar pianos and country messages that made ‘Black Letter Days’ so black. Who knows, what with the election of the first openly gay Continue Reading

If this were UK tabloid material the headline might read ‘At The Drive In Crash In On Prog-Rock-Suicide-Benz’. Steeped in a dense lyrical labyrinth of myth and speculation, the album cites the death of artist friend and collaborator, Julio Venegas in 1996 as it’s broad and brutally skewed conceptual basis. The alleged free spirit and free-thinker, bearing the scabby welts and scars of a radically tortured soul attempts suicide with a morphine overdose and lapses into a coma from which Continue Reading

That the irreverent trans-stylist Jarvis Cocker and the delightfully bonkers Fat Truckers have yet to concede defeat with their loose and eccentric DJ collective, the Desperate Sound System perhaps shows the sheer tenacity of character these daft Sheffield folk have in pursuing the fantastic and the bizarre in the most brutal of everyday places. Pulp charted this territory better than anyone with their priceless and eerie narratives on psychotic suburbia, but it’s apparent also in the volatile, monster-pop of Baby Continue Reading