Month: March 2004

There’s a problem with Placebo. You know that. The problem is that they offer little to distract you from Brian Molko’s desperate vanity and creepy weasel-esque anti-grace, sending most reasonable people scrambling for the shower, tub of Ajax and scouring pad in hand. Their effectiveness has waned over the years, repetition and lifeless precision increasingly replacing the reactionary abrasiveness and burgeoning sexuality of their classic debut. They always had the capacity to grate, but they give you too much to Continue Reading

A decade or so before the likes of Aswad, Musical Youth and UB40 ran a smooth but ultimately disastrous coating of syrup down it, reggae was, can you believe, quite fashionable in the United Kingdom. In fact, in the late 1970s everyone from The Clash to the Police reconciled their own tart phlegm of anarchy and resistance with the spiritual drive and roar of reggae music and it’s sweet and tangible gods: Bob Marley, U-Roy and Sly Dunbar. If you Continue Reading

Just how much imponderably skittish and offbeat nonsense from Iceland can a man take? Having names like Gunnar Örn Tynes, Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason and Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir seems to give folks the right thesedays to make wobbly, unpredictable and melancholy tracks like new single ‘Nightly Cares’ and bonus track ‘Once A Shiny Morning’. At one time only Liz Frazer and the Cocteau Twins were given the remit to proffer such wildly eccentric and ingenuous pearly dew drops drops. Continue Reading

There are a number of things we have to forgive The Waterboys for. The first was their misleading yet durable Irishness (Mike Scott was a native of Scotland – only relocating to Ireland when he re-formed the band for the album ‘Fisherman’s Blues’). The second has to be for spawning the wilfully preposterous and quirky Karl Wallinger and World Party (who is equally guilty of spawning the first of many ballads for cheeky chappy, Robbie Williams). And lastly we must Continue Reading

With four labels and just one full length album to his credit you could expect Royce Da 5’9” to have more than a little beef with folks in the industry but Royce is making a bit of a career out of it. Sure, he’s had his fights. Sure he’s had his gun charges, what’s new, this is how you earn your stripes in the fathomless pit of misogyny and bravado that is Hip Hop. But to take umbrage with those Continue Reading

Already released to the not-so-waiting world of the UK, The Hiss’s ‘Panic Movement’ now gets its American debut. Grown in the evergreen groove marshes of Florida, The Hiss trade in the kind of raucous, well over the top, wall-of-sound guitar orchestra favoured by fellow troublists, Spiritualized and Oasis at their most cacophonous and uncompromising with the customary Americana of more traditional rock outlaws like The Kings Of Leon and Aerosmith thrown in for good measure. Obviously the move to Atlanta Continue Reading

I’ll dispense with their already well-documented musical history, Craig Nicholl’s perfectly manicured insanity and the fact that debut album, ‘Highly Evolved’ became on of the most talked about releases of 2002. I’ll dispense with it because like Craig Nicholl’s perfectly manicured insanity, it’s really quite boring. Last years news is this years fish n’ chip paper, and The Vines have long since been tickling any trout of any worth. Still those carefully choreographed antics on the Late Show with David Continue Reading

There’ll be those of us, of course, who’ll try to squeeze The Walkmen somewhere between The Strokes (ludicrous, although both bands are from New York), U2 (scandalous), Joy Division (close) and Interpol (sorry, but no cigar). And even fans and critics alike have described them as having the sound of two different bands. So I’ll have to agree with the press release on this occasion, as it really is a fair assessment to say that they sound like nothing you’ve Continue Reading

‘And he sang out loud about stuff in your life you might find’. The words could quite reasonably be attributed to Obi frontman and songwriter Damian Katkhuda, as they can the album’s enigmatic star turn, ‘Incredible Jack’. It ain’t nothing in particular Katkhuda sings about, it’s just stuff. What kind of stuff? Just stuff. Pot-luck, lady-luck, the wheel of fortune, misadventure, chance and serendipity. One night in a casino would aquaint you with all these strange bedfellows, so too would Continue Reading

A little fun. That’s what self-styled bad boy, Armand Van Helden promised, and that’s what he delivered. Yep, just as you were thinking your obsession with New York City was on the decline, club music has reclaimed the city that never sleeps and wrenched it squarely from the hands of garage rock just as Casablancas was settling down to a well earned forty-winks. But in this city, you do anything but rest. And this little bristling mix of music spanning Continue Reading