Month: February 2005

There are plain old prolific souls, and then there are earthbound vessels for the inexhaustible delivery of transcendent joy and melody to the masses. And they’re pretty rare (who can you think of? Mark E Smith? Lou Reed? Dave Bowie?), at such quality anyway, and without extended mid-career crises wiping whole periods off the scoreboard. She’s on course for a nice round 20 album releases, probably within the next 18 months at her current rate, is Kristen Hirsch. Of course Continue Reading

There’s a bittersweet irony in the fact that the last time we doffed our caps at Doves they were headlining Sunday night against Moby at the Glastonbury Festival 2003 – an eternity in music terms, giving that this was in some hazy, cautious period for the UK music industry, shortly before we really found our feet with the jerky, imponderable panache and swagger of the new breed of indie icons: the Franz Ferdinands, the Libertineses, the Keanes, the Snow Patrols; Continue Reading

As part of the 679 recordings mini mafia Death From Above 1979 have probably had it easier than most.  Sharing already acclaimed company such as The Streets, The Futureheads and The Secret Machines is the easy part, but making an album of the dominant primal intensity they have is totally different story, but one with which DFA 1979 have a panache for. Canadian duo Sebastien Grainger and Jesse F. Keeler, one part bass and one part drums, you do the Continue Reading

A film that takes on The Beatles is always going to fail in one respect or another. They were too big for Hamburg. They were too big for Liverpool. And they were too big for the hand of even the most gifted of scriptwriters. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s also too slippery a creature to handle with any success, and even though this stroll through the early years of the Beatles is a thorough delight in it’s Continue Reading

There are often more cons than there are pros to having the love and support of some of music’s most respected back-office members when you’re just starting out in your career. The first disadvantage you’re likely to suffer is that the weight of expectation is often far too great to carry off respectably. From the Dave Fridmann produced Elf Power to the surprisingly able Minnie Driver, the load carried over from previous major critical successes leads to inevitable disappointment. And Continue Reading

Holed-up in a remote country landscape near Chapel Hill the Elliott Smith endorsed Kingsbury Manx began work on third release, ‘Aztec Discipline’ with producer Jerry Kee who had also produced the band’s cautiously taken debut album, ‘Kingsbury Manx’. With recording sessions spread over six-months and with as much attention given to getting drunk and hanging out with friends it seems inevitable that there would be a mighty volume of undisciplined sketching in addition to the flawlessly structured and well realised Continue Reading

It’s used, sometimes, as a kind of defense for the indefensible. Imagine, for instance, a hefty fellow in a ten gallon hat ordering his third main course at a faux-grillhouse in London, because they don’t make the portions gargantuan enough over here, while hurling questionable right-wing diatribes at all and sundry. You might approach him and say “but in these days of more fashionable headwear, lo carb options and political correctness, why do you act like you do in public, Continue Reading

So you’re stuck in a random truck stop in some two bit desert town.  A 300lb local takes exception to your ‘purdy’ clothes and ‘your one of them city folk’ accent.  So what do you do? You fight the bastard! And the soundtrack, well it’d be exactly like this.  Purveyors of the ‘less is more ethos’, The Kills return with a brooding indignation of an album.  It’s devotion and its necessity and although they’re still rocking the monkey on my Continue Reading

I’ve been living with this album, at time of writing, for three weeks. Those three weeks, incidentally, aren’t enough – it’s a comfort then to know that my future is open to their continued influence – but they were necessary. Reflecting on it before now might have been like giving directions around a city before I’d even got there, going by the outline I saw on the horizon. You’ll be aware that Bloc Party are they who are most likely Continue Reading