Reviews

Partially synthetic and partially organic, Orbiter successfully combines trip hop beats, stellar guitar work, and perfect harmonies with a pop rock sensibility. The group returns with their second release (the bands 1st full length cd) Sparks on a String which will undoubtedly bring major labels knocking on Loveless Records door. Formed a little over 3 years ago by ex Hammerbox guitarist Harris Thurmond and vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Fiia McGann from the Seattle-based Alternative Rock band Goodness, the group’s  unique style caught the Continue Reading

On Ultraviolet, DJ Touché, the one time ‘Wiseguy’ and master of breakbeat this time whips up a dish of genre crossing house music. Perhaps best known for the hip hop and big beat inflected ‘Start the Commotion’, ‘Cowboy 78’ and the Budweiser advert for which sound over track, ‘Ooh La La’ made number 2 in the UK, Touché splices together enough funky house and bouncing beats to pack a packet of tens. So where did it all start? Underground hip Continue Reading

Liked ‘King of the Closet’? Harder vocals, harder sounds? Well it’s still as resolutely frantic and punky even if it’s a tad more ‘produced’ and a little less hardcore this time around. A little while on from fan-favourite ‘A Thought Crushed My Mind’ and Sweden’s Blindside augment their blistering guitar-driven rock with a little mystery, and a little of the mystical. Beefed-up to the pectorals like Frodo Baggins on steroids, Christian and his band of bristling, gruff cohorts continue to Continue Reading

No amount of priming could really prepare you for this album, just as nothing could have similarly prepared you for the collective meat and two dozen veg that was the KY: release. If you haven’t heard of Lemon Jelly then you’re not the only one, rejecting as they do the usual steady roll of press activity prior to any release. Mavericks? Activists? Well actually neither – they’re simply putting music together that they rather than you are necessarily meant to Continue Reading

Welcome is the second album from Michigan-based nu-metal foursome Taproot, and despite it’s firm anchoring in all that crass, generic rock, it’s actually rather ambitious: quirky, experimental, funky and as hard as nails. Whilst not exactly crafting great subtelty from their stab at complex dance rhythms, nor as clever and slinky as those obvious aces of funk-rock, the Chilli Peppers, it’s an album that does promise to yank nu-metal out of its prolonged and desolate winter. The usual primal growls Continue Reading

If you were looking for a record, a document that chronicled the past 12 months of musical counter-culture with its amp shoehorned up to 13, you have two distinct options. Earlier in the year there was Sonic Mook Experiment’s ‘Future Rock N Roll’ compilation packed with over an hour of frankly exhilarating lo-fi scuzz, spat out with cathartic nonchalance and tied together by its philosophy more than anything. Not to mention that Jubilee week poster campaign designed to rile the Continue Reading

“BRIGHTON IS A CITY. WITHOUT SONG,” spits a misshapen millennial (and Brightonian) Elvis, unceremoniously frothing at the mouth and riding serpents of distortion off the South Coast, scorching marks across the nipple-troublingly-cold British waters. And, y’know, on this occasion the boy may have a point. Other local company (British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade, etc) excepted of course. There is little evidence on here for anything as ‘institutionalised’ or ‘constrained’ as a ‘song’. Yeah, so there’s something bearing the hallmarks Continue Reading

It’s been three years since the critically acclaimed ‘1999’ was released, but don’t expect the same again from a band that has been described as “the missing link in French dance music”. The previous album, ‘1999’ was recorded during a three-week period in the summer of 1998 and was released the subsequent year. A blend of bass, house and techno ‘1999’ was a seminal album, encapsulating the continental mood of the dance music scene at the time. But times change Continue Reading

Crud’s own Allan Kemler put the proverbial needle in the groove when he wrote that like the Impressionists who evoked ‘wondrous sensations which hinted at half-realized truths buried in the recesses of our souls’, the Apples create ‘blissful harmonies wrapped in effervescent melodies which tug on the heartstrings and call out the universal names for the ineffable nexus of emotions, thoughts and feelings which govern our existence’.  But in direct contrast to most of the Apples previous records though, the Continue Reading

Furrowing the major label ground of gargantuan stadium-sized rock ploughs California-based AudioVent. Inspired by a rather strange variety of rock music both old and nü, Audiovent are purported to delve full force into the art of songwriting and sound experimentation. A bit like Stereolab, then? Well no – not really. With their burly blood relationship to Incubus’s Brandon Boyd and Mike Einziger, AudioVent songwriting nucleus, Jason Boyd  Ben Einziger turn out a record that whilst palatable enough for your average Continue Reading