Month: April 2006

It’s funny. Well not quite, not like that, that’s the thing. We never found Adam Green’s anti-folk that laugh-out-loud, not even when he was with the Moldy Peaches. He was a sweet rascal, meticulous and creative, a wiseass with a guitar capable of levering a cracked smile from your cold, straight face if you’d give him 3 minutes, but his songs didn’t often feel consistent enough. But here’s the thing; all of a sudden, with the arrival of his fourth Continue Reading

Pretty Girls Make Graves are a straight-up emo band, with saccharine quirks, or at least that always was the case. But they’re becoming less emo by the year. Concurrently, and contrarily, they’re sounding more like themselves with every step. There have been great records from them already – ‘Good Health’ was spirited and urgent, if scrappy, and ‘The New Romance’ was the original idea made muscular, justified with armour-plated songs that lodged in your head like hot shrapnel. Take the Continue Reading

To my mind at least, K.D Lang will always be best remembered, not for that heaving crock of melodrama that was ‘Constant Craving’ but as that testy lesbian bint of whom Madonna once declared ‘Elvis is alive….and she’s beautiful’ – which is probably why Kathryn Dawn Lang has decided to set the record straight with ‘Reintarnation’ – a roots-oriented package that focuses on the early years of Lang’s career when the little ‘cowpunk’ gal with the mighty Patsy Cline voice Continue Reading

Look. We don’t really have a problem with Craig Nicholls, never did, so there’s really nothing here to apologise for. It was just that there were some bands who came along who were better than The Vines, quite simply. It was good while it lasted. We were both consenting adults and we chose to move on. Who knows, if The Strokes or The Libertines or the Kings Of Leon hadn’t come along we may still be together. We don’t need Continue Reading

A Bluffer’s Guide to the New Romantics would probably have Japan down as the thinking person’s Duran Duran. For a dizzyingly short spell in the eighties their dark disco, 21st century cheekbones and bemusing song titles (‘Taking Islands in Africa’ anyone?) helped make them, simultaneously, darlings of both the electronic art-house scene and the readers of Smash Hits. A band who always felt uncomfortable with the pop-svengali tactics of manager Simon Napier-Bell (who tried to promote singer David Sylvian as Continue Reading

Following up on 2004’s psychedelic ‘Fur’ release, the West Country trio, the Archie Bronson Outfit surface from weeks spent jamming in the damp, sweaty basement of a farmhouse in Wiltshire with fulsome beards, a tireless, pounding 12-bar rhythm section, grit in their teeth, a few scars on their soul and a taste for the dirty, lurid, seedy things in life; the bruised, shredded blues of ‘Cherry Lips’, ‘Kink’ and ‘Dart For My Sweetheart’ marching like an army of dog soldiers Continue Reading

Does anyone remember Monty Python leaving out the bit about Jesus Christ in the comedy team’s benchmark movie ‘The Life Of Brian’? No, thought not. Then what possesses legendary studio maverick , Brian Eno to leave out ‘Qur’an’ after complaints from certain quarters of the Muslim far-right that it features soundbites from the Koran? The last time I heard a Muslim taking the moral high ground he was scoffing a bacon butty and looking forward to expressing his joy and Continue Reading

Sometimes you get something through and not even the outrageous claims of the press-release are likely to lift the oppressive mediocrity of the record that eventually rolls across your ear-drum, so you’ll excuse me if I confess I was in no way phased by the A4 plus-sized plaudits bestowed upon The Trews by their bright and eager press department. I mean, you should have seen what they said about The Delays. And imagine what it was like preparing for take-off Continue Reading

The DFA and their press-folks continue to impress upon us the significance of the DFA. You all should know the name by now. Tim Goldsworthy. James Murphy. Britney. Janet Jackson. Self-contained dance, remix unit based in Manhattan and almost single-handedly responsible for providing the cutting-edge for anything remotely post-punk or Rapture oriented. Well here they are again, this time drawing a big, fat juicy pen mark around their work for leftfield luminaries like Le Tigre, Blues Explosion, Chemical Brothers, Fischerspooner, Continue Reading

What were you doing at sixteen? Me, I was still trashing the local youth club with an arsenal of ping-pong balls, marker-pens and silly string and bashing out the occasional rhyme on my Les Paul re-production on the rare occasion I wasn’t busy bashing around at something else. Concerns infrequently drifted to serious matters. Spots, mood-swings and making sure I looked good in my ¾-length snow washed stretch jeans, espadrilles and pink t-shirt (always an uphill struggle) was about as Continue Reading