Month: July 2006

“There’s poetry in an empty Coke can / There’s majesty in a burnt out caravan” The mainstream can be an exciting place, and is, sometimes. But ordinarily it’s quite a dirty word, for something so clean. The oddballs know to congregate elsewhere, somewhere darker and with less ventilation. Would David Bowie still become the biggest pop star in the country (or a pop star at all) were he rooting around in the dressing-up box for the first time in 2006? Continue Reading

Since the beginning of this year, They Might Be Giants have been releasing a free monthly podcast. Irfan Shah was given a guided tour round some of the highlights so far… Here they come again, parodic, rhapsodic, flippant and ingenious. They Might Be Giants, a dozen or so albums down the line, are as close to a twenty-first century Bonzo Dog Band as it’s possible to get, with their huge span of musical styles, the twisted joy of the music, Continue Reading

In the early eighties New Romantic legends-to-be The Human League were just beginning to become bona fide pop stars, when three of their number left. And while The Human League went on to become the thinking person’s Abba, Glenn Gregory, Ian Craig and Martin Ware formed Heaven 17, in many ways a similar set up with less make up fewer hits but more critical kudos and, arguably, greater musical ambition. And here they come again with the re-release of their Continue Reading

Seems utterly pointless knocking the second half of something that has already managed to shift 225,000 copies, although it would be fun trying. Compilations of this type are always going to piss off as many people as they please as they’re often too broad upon which to deliver a sizable punch and knocking them out entirely is well on nigh impossible. True enough the first disc may represent little more than a ‘Now That’s What I Call House’ retrospective with Continue Reading

Shock factor was never the only dynamic at play, but it was key. When Brooklyn’s curious art-misfits TV On the Radio arrived in 2004 with their debut, ‘Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes’, there was arguably nobody else on the face of this planet making music as sizzlingly acute, as fiercely shaken. Warped barbershop? Minimal percussive millennial soul? Jazz shoegaze wall-of-sound odd-hop? Sure! It was a deeply stimulating ride along a convoluted route from A-Z through the city’s underbelly, hitching figurative lifts Continue Reading

Nostradamus probably would have been our best hope, but not even he could pull out a fresh scroll, ink his quill and hazard a guess at this. Or at least if he did we couldn’t decipher the reams of cryptic twitterings in time, in which case we’ll apologise to the mystical beardy lunatic. But he must know that already. 7 years ago a band appeared with an album, ‘Showbiz’, a rigid and occasionally histrionic take on the discipline of angst Continue Reading

Opposites attract, don’t they. Which must be why, as summer heaves up the gas mark to hitherto unbearable heights, the band who slope into town in black t-shirts and leathers, cranking out dense psychedelic rock and gazing their boots a fresh sheen seem like such a very good idea indeed. Better even than iced tea and a White Magnum. Yes, that good. In reality of course they couldn’t ever have existed without triple figure temperatures, clearly being the result of Continue Reading

Some bands are nourished by change, like it’s a requirement, even if hindsight is needed to ascertain and rubber stamp the suspicion. Stagnation can be dreadfully unsanitary after all. But not Mojave 3, surely? Their stillness has been key to their beauty all along, like slow-motion time-shift photography of a quilted azure sky on an August evening from just behind the safety of a comfortable straw hat. Lolling from chord to chord, slide to slide, ivory tinkle to ivory tinkle Continue Reading

Dedicated followers of fashion? Leaders of the pack? Some unconfirmed point between the two down to any idea or cultural phenomena suffering an unspecified delay before it can register in Bobby Gillespie’s drug-addled, formaldehyde-sealed medical case study of a mind? Whatever the answer you’ve got to at least give them props for turning a stumbling, mumbling, arm wavering, intoxicated, idealistically clichéd rock and roll fantasy into a reality. This is what many aspire to be; politically motivated, justifiably obnoxious, swinging Continue Reading

You can picture him can’t you – lounging in his lair, stroking the white Persian cat with dyed red streaks on his lap, perusing his tour returns and royalty cheques from within the depths of his walk-in red, black and white wardrobe, and laughing. Laughing out a big old hearty evil nemesis laugh, through his big crooked moustachioed face. Remember, as we ploughed into the brave new world of an uncharted millennium Jack White made our new obsession an elementary Continue Reading