Reviews

Things always seem to ring so very true with Elbow, like their life story’s already worn down the nib of the pen from bolding and underlining every word. You talk of struggles for recognition, that decade-long slog against adversity leading to the overdue release of their sterling debut ‘Asleep In The Back’ has already been well documented. You regularly talk of Second Album Syndrome, having your whole life to collect your thoughts for your first and then being surreptitiously dumped Continue Reading

Part of the fun culture fall-out, Freq Nasty is the kind of guy who can lop out his lap top and let spill a killer roll of shattering breaks and beats in the time it takes most others to say ‘it’s bangin’. A limited EP featuring 4 tracks from Freq Nasty’s forthcoming album, Bring Me The Head Of Freq Nasty (due to be released on Skint Records on 15 September 2003) this is a sampler that alone outstrips by a Continue Reading

Phil Kieran. He Aint Heavy. He’s Ginger. Collaborations with Belfast based Product Deluxe, Slide and BASIC and Kieran’s own club night Sector One (now gone) have seen the mighty ginger swinger played regularly alongside such notables as Richie Hawtin, Umek and Justin Roberston. Still only 25 and he’s released records on everything from Electrix, Mob and Eukabreaks, PIAS, Bugged Out, Turtle Trax and now Skint. So what’s the  Irish ‘beat freak’ up to now? Well he’s just released ‘The Bomb’ – Continue Reading

The first single from the soon to be released ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts’ on Groom Disques, Run Into Flowers sees dusky French duo Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau run headlong into moving, fuzzy techno. Sparse, minimalist and with only the faintest whisper of a vocal melody, the single combines european style and grace with dry as ice noize music. Backed by some cooky, ambient remixes by Jackson and some frankly noisy ones by KG, the single just goes Continue Reading

Whereas Norah Jones’ voice is the sound of half-light, dusky and seductive,former labelmate Rachel Loshak is a brighter, less original but nevertheless charming addition to the gentle wave of acoustic based chamber-pop currently washing over the airwaves. English-born, New York-based Loshak’s new album ‘Mint’ combines a sense of intimacy, with arrangements and production that pull it away from jazz toward a slightly more US college radio based sound, so that tracks such as ‘Rain’ ‘The Dreamer’ and ‘I Know I Continue Reading

Turning the guitars down. Against all rational thought indeed. But this is the daft idea the band had way back in 1996, when the Mendoza Line were holed up in downtown Athens, Ga – home of the fabulously jangly REM, Apples In Stereo, Elf Power and the so-called ‘Elephant Six’. You will be glad to know that the idea was a temporary aneurysm in an otherwise healthy brain and The Mendoza Line prepared a series of tracks that twinkle and Continue Reading

That’s a name of some grandeur they’ve given themselves. Quite something to live up to too. And we know little of the monarchic qualities and customs in previous royal Spanish hierarchies, but we’re sure such erratic changes of tack can do little to endear you to a nation. You can have your face on a stamp but there’s something to be said for leadership. So maybe they’re just hitching a ride on the cloak tails of previous established institutions, which Continue Reading

This album might be out of time, but it’s certainly not out of place. That’s to say that it is still relevant, with its blood-stained bilious tirades against the ongoing evils of the world how could it not be, but that its fires were lit a long time ago. Again, that’s not to say they burn any less fiercely now, just that some things never change. There’s an almost archaic sense to everything here, the raw materials were certainly harvested Continue Reading

Accompanied by a fairly generous DVD on the making of the album, and an extra CD of remixes, alternate versions and oddities, David Bowies’ 1993 ‘Black Tie, White Noise’ is now reissued as a strictly limited edition CD boxed set. True to his word, Bowie is again seen questioning all established values, all taboos – and searching only for that dislocate sense of self that a true visionary could trace and then expand. Only this time those values are his Continue Reading

If this were UK tabloid material the headline might read ‘At The Drive In Crash In On Prog-Rock-Suicide-Benz’. Steeped in a dense lyrical labyrinth of myth and speculation, the album cites the death of artist friend and collaborator, Julio Venegas in 1996 as it’s broad and brutally skewed conceptual basis. The alleged free spirit and free-thinker, bearing the scabby welts and scars of a radically tortured soul attempts suicide with a morphine overdose and lapses into a coma from which Continue Reading