Month: June 2005

What with falling off stages left and acquiring ear infections right, Ryan Adams could be doing with an understudy. Step forward Steven and Sherilyn Collins, two for the price of one husband and wife duo from Texas, and ten dusty tracks of coasting-on-the-breeze sunset soundtracking beauty. It’s music very much rooted in the formalities of the genre, strings played almost as if they didn’t want to disturb them, a touch of the twinkling old Joanna, slide guitar to these songs Continue Reading

The word “Nirvana” has been tossed around near North-West’s bratty noisemakers Nine Black Alps so much recently that, like a young child with an embryonic grasp of language, they may well be under the misapprehension that the name belongs to them. Their vocabulary past that point must be fairly limited. But it’ll all just end in heartache later, surely. All sorts of “I am not your father” type shenanigans, time wasted in the courts, DNA testing, the lot. Because that Continue Reading

You know when someone says they’ve got a really good joke and you have to then tolerate five or so minutes of excruciating boredom whilst they pursue it with an insistence and an abandon bordering on cruelty, then you’ll know how it feels when someone says they’ve got a concept album they want to play you. First off, you have to be interested. Second, you have to be interested. And thirdly you have to be interested enough not to collapse Continue Reading

Presuming that you were born, Hed Kandi remind you what you were doing in 1989 with a brimful of feelgood club classics from the year just prior to everything going wild when house was still credible and rave hadn’t yet thrown its upsizing scatter bomb into fields and warehouses everywhere. CD 1 has all the dancefloor friendly piano-house anthems from Ceybil Jeffries, Pamela Fernandez, Li’l Louis & The Fog whilst CD 2 plots a course through rare and inspirational kick-ass Continue Reading

In truth, Keren Ann wouldn’t be out of place on more low-key, high intensity labels like Nova Mute or Warp or sitting alongside such swarthy, melancholy eccentrics as Juana Molina on Domino Records. So when you learn that she shares a label with Norah Jones the whole thing becomes a misleading proposition and one fraught with uncertainties. Whilst there’s no doubting the continuation of Jones’s cool and nonchalant lounge menagerie, the tinkling of cocktail glasses is buried beneath a canopy Continue Reading

The thing about instant ‘classics’ is that they often feel like you’ve been carrying them around with you forever. Ultimately, however, the same could also be said of warts, eczema and a dozen or so STDs like chlamydia. You see, familiarity is not always the first requisite for that which is memorable or terrific, it’s also the first requisite for contempt – and Royskopp’s follow-up to their gently seismic debut album, Melody AM falls unevenly between the two. ’49 Percent’ Continue Reading

It would appear that ‘New Fellas’ is The Cribs second album, they’re not all as new then as they suggest. Meaning that the first record must have passed us by somewhat. Though from the brief mp3 snippets of on their official site we’ll label it, possibly unfairly, the sound of early-ish Idlewild covering The Libertines, averagely. For us though, and we’d imagine many more, it all started with the persistent rabble-rousing single ‘Hey Scensters!’, the sound of Art Brut reaching Continue Reading

Now and again you make the unwise decision to ask the guy with the scowl and the merciless way of brushing you aside what the problem is. But rarely do you expect such an eloquent, well-structured and relentless riposte. The ultra esoteric and leftfield hip-hop producer FBC Fabric joins Sarf London social oberservationist, Reindeer for the kind of non-dysfunctional, grammatically correct cultural reform project you’re more likely to glimpse in the pages of the Daily Mail than in the flow Continue Reading

Bright and breezy. Not necessarily what you’d expect after 10 years in the business but that it what it is. Defari (Likwit Crew) and DJ Babu (Beat Junkies/ Dilated Peoples) have combined forces for the Likwit Junkies – a blend of Defari’s Likwit Crew heritage and the legendary Babu’s personal triumph with the World Famous Beat Junkies DJ collective. By and large the album ploughs straight down the middle, failing to raise either eyebrows or expectations with a series of Continue Reading

The Departure come out of the shadows (though shadows are admittedly few and far between these days with the industry’s spotlights staking out post-punk’s darkest corners) with much the same confidence as The Killers did back when nobody was offering them chart placings or Glasto headline slots on a plate. Minimum fuss, a modest twist of competence, an inability to dress themselves but possessing the good fortune of having the decade their influences call home as tailor. These songs have Continue Reading