Month: June 2004

Even if there’s no solid emergent mainstream genre raising above all others this year (aside from perhaps the gaining pace of Britpop nostalgia), it is becoming a year when some are nudged overground by the accessible work of select bands. Hope Of The States smartened up post-rock’s appearance surprisingly well earlier this month, and now The Killers follow through on the promise of two pristine singles by taking the dark slicing 80s synth-pop of The Faint, giving it a giddy Continue Reading

Some of our more affluent readers may like to follow this sage advise – never get involved with a celebrity, you’ll only end up stalked daily by some gimp photographer from The Sun and getting your kids slapped about at school for having a shit hippie name. Everybody else should pay heed to the following – never get involved with Taff rogue Russell Toomey, he will hate every moment he spends with you, eventually bolt himself in a darkened room Continue Reading

These things were sent to try us. It’s a British state of mind, our rainy disposition, expecting bottlenecks and broken bones every time we step out the door, outwardly denouncing achievements unless they were obtained over some insurmountable odds. If it is a requirement that we must earn our triumphs then Hope Of The States are, it would seem, rightful victors of their own little coup. But we don’t want to judge this album based solely on its external circumstances, Continue Reading

Four years after the delirious success of Tanto Tempo and the equally well marketed and equipped remix album, Bebel Gilberto (daughter of Brazilian Bossa-god, Joao Gilberto, step-daughter to Astrud Gilberto) returns to temper our lives with another twelve tracks of blissed-out loveliness. Drawing from an age of innocence where the flavour of your ice-cream was of cultural significance and beaches were a lush, exotic farscape of impossible fantasy rather than the loci of another stumble to and from Pacha, eponymously Continue Reading

Fuzzy, agitated, intensely frustrating, curiously funky and as restless as a bishop in a brothel. And if you can add anything to that I’ll gladly dip my dick in a salad dressing of your choice. Australian art-come-tennis-come-music fanatic Chris Colonna was fortuitous to say the least when he swindled a student exchange trip to Brooklyn’s renowned Pratt Institute in from his mentors at Canberra School Of Art in 2001. Afterall, a free ticket to your spiritual home is rare and Continue Reading

In a fashion that would better suit the Tin-Man, Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion in Victor Fleming’s, The Wizard Of Oz, New York-based funk-rock !!! are left clutching at straws on second release proper ‘Louden Up Now’. True, the club-friendly epic punksters pulled something out of the bag with last year’s 12 inch release, ‘Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)’ but in the words of one gentle and ever so lovely Harriet Wheeler; here’s where Continue Reading

So what to make of this then? Ethically, if in no other way. Posthumous collections of this, that and the other are commonplace, in some cases acceptable and occasionally laudable for their unearthing of hidden gems it would be have been cruel to leave concealed. Take a look at Jeff Buckley’s ever increasing back-catalogue care-of his mother for extensive arguments to support most sides. But where to place the decision by a major label to release the debut single from Continue Reading

The last album arrived like a rusty bullet train runaway in the dead of night, in an electrical storm, ripping out of the static fog with its halogen lamps overloading. It was the filth and the fury and its bastard love child. They tore around the globe in a discordant blaze of red and black. They seemed like a band who knew that and nothing else and they’d ride it till the wheels ground off. It was never really expected Continue Reading

A confident sick flow. I had no idea what it meant before this album, and I’ve barley a grasp of it now. In fact I’m pretty awkward when it comes to trading parlance with genres like this. A bit of a Jerry Lewis/Nutty Professor kind of figure stumbling through a corridor of beautiful women, none of which I could ever realistically approach with any real kind of assurance. But confident and sick this Chicago MC’s flow is. It’s also culturally Continue Reading

Bowie’s ninth studio album and an album that sees the departure of Mick Ronson and the launch of a loosely directive concept addressing the Orwellian prediction of an oppressive, authoritarian society controlled by the Ministry of Truth. In fact Bowie had sought permission to rehearse a full-blown ‘1984’ project some time before in 1973 but has been refused permission by the late author’s widow. Although bridging the gap between the ‘plastic soul’ direction of ‘Young Americans’, ‘Diamond Dogs’ is still Continue Reading