An American noise pop band. I know what you’re thinking: these guys are just another in a long line of acts who want to have all the impact of the Velvet Underground but have none of the tunes, so what do they do? They throw together a jumble of vaguely familiar hooks, lather it in reverb, squeeze it threw a filter or two and set it against a background of jarring feedback and interminable drones. Sprinkle it with psychedelia, leave Continue Reading
‘Machinery’ – sexy, smouldering, monster pop, that’s what it is, making you feel a little uneasy and a little horny in equal measures. Take ‘Sweatshop’ – the aural equivalent of bondage gear – dark, relentless and about as uncompromising as a hammer coming down on your John Thomas. It arrives, it enters your head and it stays there. This is the steroid-enhanced follow-up to 2009’s debut, ‘Wait For The Revolution’ and described by the band as a ‘gut-inducing slab of Continue Reading
The last time I listened to an Undertones record with any real malicious intent was when I was tearing around the estate where we lived on my Raleigh Chopper bike. ‘Here Comes Summer’ was in the charts and we had just broken up for the six-week summer holiday. I had a terrific pair of blue corduroy pants shrunk-wrapped to my legs, a blue, orange-lined Snorkel Parka gracing my back, a full packet of Spangles in my pocket and a half-bottle Continue Reading
King Creosote’s Kenny Anderson has called the collaboration a “soundtrack to a romanticised version of a life lived in a Scottish coastal village“ and without knowing what life in a Scottish coastal village is actually like, I’ll have to take his word for it. But if said life in a Scottish coastal village can be best defined by the occasional rattle of cups on saucer, a courteous exchange or two between waitress and customer and the tickling of piano string Continue Reading
Gorillaz are at the top of their game. They were popular enough before but since Plastic Beach and the band’s subsequent and deliriously successful world tour – and the fact that Damon has all but ditched the exclusive (and almost apologetic) reliance on cartoon characters and animations to pitch his wares – the kids have gone Gorillaz crazy. Which probably explains this – The Fall – a fifteen track musical diary composed almost entirely on iPad during the band’s 19 Continue Reading
The Wild Palms sound is reminiscent of late 80’s-early 90’s goth-tinged indie (think Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure circa Head on the Door.) Right now, this is not a commercially lucrative furrow to plough and nor is it particularly as ‘cool’ as it once was and so an album like ‘Until Spring’ exudes a sense of what-the-hell freedom and sincerity that makes it simultaneously an act of homage and of exploration. Songs idle, twist and sprawl just this Continue Reading
The Decemberists’ Colin Melloy describes ‘The King Is Dead’ as an exercise in restraint, and he ain’t whistling Dixie, not when you recall that the band’s 2009 release, ‘The Hazards of Love’ was by contrast an exercise in epic, high-concept, multi-layered, unfathomably compound, high-fulutin’ boreal forest romance craftin’, hewn out of the very rocks that line the banks of the Hudson River; a rock opera in the mould of Tam Lin and The Scarlet Letter – only with more random Continue Reading
Why stew in your own juices when you can invite the whole weary world to stew in them also? Liam’s previous band, The Havenots has clearly not left the sweetest of tastes in his mouth even though the Leicester band’s sophomore release cooked up the dreamiest of whisper-soft Americana and the most heartbreaking boy-girl harmonies in 2005. It was like Joy Zipper but with rollerblades instead of razorblades; sun kissed sugar melodies blowing around in the surly pouting ether of Continue Reading
Legal wrangling ended successfully as the publishers of 1950s standard, ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’ allowed the band not only to include a sizeable portion of the song’s lyric’s on the band’s debut album, ‘Palace’ but to clue it in as a long overdue single in 2011 – almost two full years after ‘Surfacing’ was first recorded by the band for East City Records. And the delay might prove to their advantage, the interim years having seen the band Continue Reading
Crud has already exhausted the ‘tumultuous, rain-soaked orchestral pop’ plaudits, so we’ll make this as brief and on target as possible: Manchester’s multi-manned and multi-dimensional Spokes do for the overcast British North West what Arcade Fire did for Quebec and what the Polyphonic Spree and David Koresh did for Texas (no obvious parallels drawn). Not even Brisbane or Queensland have been threatened on this scale, tracks like ‘345’ and ‘Peace Racket’ building from quiet, desultory showers to thrashing, stormy climaxes Continue Reading