Month: December 2005

Buoyed by the recent (or recent enough) success of comeback single ‘Gravity’ and the brotherly support of fellow droning miserablist, Chris Martin, brothers Danny and Richard McNamara rifle through the archive of B-Sides, rarities and things we’d largely forgotten – a broad choice given the fact that most indie-lovers had up till recently largely forgotten most things the band had done, and furthermore, didn’t really care either way. So in a way it’s a bit like your best mate helping Continue Reading

A man is chiefly defined by what he does with his hands, and that David Axelrod’s career can be partly defined by a rock interpretation of Handel’s Messiah is more eloquent an illustration of the man than any turn of phrase you are likely to find here. Axelrod always was and always will be something of a unique proposition in music of the late twentieth-century in that he clearly never gave a fuck about satisfying the expectations of the popular, Continue Reading

All the way from Motor City and stirring up the kind of underground buzz usually reserved for Tubes straight out of Kings Cross: Big Tone – fat beats, fat bass, fat buzz. After Defari and Little Brother we get to see another side of ABB Records as Big Tone rakes his mic through the dust and grime of Detroit to expose its gritty underbelly, touching on everything from the fairer sex (‘Girl’) the dog-eat-dog pragmatism and the dreams and the Continue Reading

They may indeed have matured from being a teeny-bop sensation to a ‘tight live band’ but which you rather have? Call me a nerd, but I’d rather have scores of willy-hungry teenage girls throwing their pants at me than being celebrated for solid performances and pleasing but unmemorable compositions. But that’s just me. Hanson have had all that and more – but still they want to be taken seriously. And whilst the band’s ability to grow credible facial hair has Continue Reading

Honeysuckle Dog was a lost slice of country soul, an album buried by it’s label’s demise in 1973 and now released fully for the first time, stepping bewildered and blinking into the world of 2005. And it fits, kicking off its shoes and settling on a porch somewhere in Alt Country land. Chris Smither, born and raised in New Orleans, cut his teeth on the Cambridge, Mass. folk scene where he was discovered by producer Michael Cuscuna, resulting in a Continue Reading

Whether it was because I was the kind of eleven year old who saw the doc martens, the crew-cuts and the ill-advised dancing as somehow threatening, or whether it was because I had the kind of humour ordinarily found at the end of a ward for the terminally ill, I was never able to share with my classmates the joy of catching the latest Madness video on Thursday night’s Top Of The Pops. ‘Baggy Trousers’ might have been a right Continue Reading