Reviews

Agit-lounge. An impossible proposition one might think, but not for Washington DC based DJs Rob Garrza and Eric Hilton whose slinky, smoky and curvaceous blend of dub, acid-jazz and variously Middle Eastern and Asian music collides in a challenging political hotpot. Whilst the band have enjoyed no shortage of support in their sixteen years together (from Wayne Coyne to David Byrne) the pair have drawn just as much attention from their opposition to the crazy antics of George W Bush Continue Reading

Since moving to the Highlands five years ago, I’ve been quietly seduced not only by the region’s generous supply of single-malt whiskies and its proficiency in coping with more than three-inches of snow, I’ve also grown more than a little fond of its music. Sure, the likes of Capercaille and Moray Youth Brass won’t win any prizes for transgressing any traditional boundaries or risk a custodial sentence for exposing themselves on stage or engaging in any similarly lewd acts (with Continue Reading

Body, money, power; that’s how this feisty Brooklyn collective described the band’s upcoming album, ‘Talk About Body’ in a recent interview with Amelia Magazine, and it’s as good as place as any to start. Taking its cue from the clipped, deliberate beats of post-punk revivalists like The Rapture and its wordy, boundary bashing, bra-snapping, tampax-trashing ethos from 80s New Wavers the Tom Tom Club, tunes like ‘Credit Card Babies’ bristle and fix with all manner of funk and reggae chops, Continue Reading

The well-carbonated spirit of acid-house, the slinky, well-oiled rubric of classic boogie-cop jazzsters like the James Taylor Quartet and the punchy brass lungs of disco – it’s all brewed up and served with the most vibrant of cocktail umbrellas by the funky George Fortadis as ‘Something Freaky’.  The titles themselves should give the game away: ‘Spot On Phunk’, ‘Disco Life’, ‘Get Down Boogie’ and ‘Makes Me Wanna Scream’. It’s no pastiche by any means, but record’s affection for the flair-flapping, Continue Reading

Don’t really know much about the band and a quick look on their Twitter page yields few clues. They’re feeling ‘totally absorbed’, working on new material that sounds a little ‘heavy’, have just been to the gym and like seeing a little bit of snow from time to time. It’s not Lennon’s ‘In His Own Write’ or Nikki Sixx’s ‘Heroin Diaries’ by any means but then what else do you expect from Kings Cliffe? Technically Fenech-Soler have yet to bother the Continue Reading

Instead of the complacent vanity of a band insisting they can’t be pigeonholed, I’d like to imagine Robert Wyatt, on being asked where to place the type of music he has helped produce for ‘Ghosts’, simply shrugging and saying ‘Oh, anywhere you’d like really.’ His work is so often stylish and technically polished yet suffused with an aura of absent minded beauty. At once mainstream, jazz and outsider art, he continues to plough a happy furrow through the music scene Continue Reading

‘Remnin Park’ – a fictional love story about two people whose two worlds will forever keep them apart, a story of separation that might well have described the 25 year musical divisions within the Toronto band itself. Michael, Margo and chums were never your standard ranch stash; too much weary ethereal melancholy for that, two-parts dusty Americana to three-parts gothic with bucketloads of creepy psychedelia thrown in for good measure. It was band pulling in two directions: the familiar and Continue Reading

To be honest I have really no idea what ‘glitch’ is. I have a vague understanding of what dubstep is (with some prompting), but to my reckoning this about as remote from traditional R’n’B as the Seychelles Islands are from Morecambe. When I think of R’n’B I think of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and even, god forgive me, the likes of Beyonce Knowles shaking her booty and busting her lungs about lurrve. It’s about enormously virile black men with tongues Continue Reading

I grew up listening to indie music and now if I were to listen to, say, the guitar part of an indie song I could probably fill in the kind of bass and synth that would be accompanying it, and the same applies to just hearing the synth part etc. African guitar pop, however, is a different kettle of fish. I am almost always smitten by the conflagrations of rhythm and at how each instrument tries to break away from Continue Reading