Reviews

Thank heaven for Wikipedia’s disambiguation pages. Just as I was about to regale you with tales long and short about Franz Kafka, a disambiguation page puts me right back on track with a well-timed reference to the post-punk sounds of early eighties Edinburgh band – Josef K. Signed to the ridiculously prickly Postcard label along with Orange Juice and Aztec Camera in an era that rattled to the art-punk sounds of Television and a local scene that literally throbbed with Continue Reading

Credit where it’s due, the press sheet that accompanies the first release in six years from drum and bass pioneers, 4Hero does its level best to persuade me that the band’s long established critical acclaim, their 1998 Mercury nomination, their MOBO award and indeed, the band’s widespread respect within the chin-stroking enclave of a ‘real music’ fraternity paves the way for a multi-dimensional, densely layered and lush foray into futuristic soul. And whilst I’m not sure it fits this handsome Continue Reading

Including the singles ‘Organ Donor’ by Lefties Soul Connection, the funk remake of Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force’s ‘Planet Rock’ and Jim Dunloop’s The Mexican’ More MPM Sound mashes up past, present and future music tenses with a shockingly fine, uncut diamond of a record that recreates using the latest DNA technology a fair likeness of what hip-hop, jazz and funk used to look like before the Beverley Knights, the Eminems and Jamie Cullums of this world confined decent music Continue Reading

‘Kitsuné – creating high quality new classics. A simple mix of sharp tailoring, cashmere knits, Japanese denim and jersey basics using traditional artisan factories.’ Or that’s at least how Kitsuné’s fashion founder, Masaya Kuroki would have us see it. Skinny school uniforms might describe it better, the kind you used to grow out of in under three months during the late 1970s and spill no end of bean juice down while scabbing the last 10 minutes of Magpie after jumping Continue Reading

That’s a big name he’s got, possibly too big. And Crud, for a while, also misread him as ‘Heckler’, which is really quite wrong. Abrasive, obnoxious, loud, damning, embarrassing – not a single one of those adjectives apply. He’d have been better shortening that first name to its initial, much like M.Craft and M.Ward in fact – much subtler, much more fitting. And as it happens he shares more than just a common initial with those two modern folk troubadours. Continue Reading

Although I am not sure I can run with all that ‘it’s an enigma inside a riddle wrapped in a copy of yesterdays Sun’ malarkey the DVD Concert film that accompanies the recent ‘Okonokos’ release from Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket certainly defies the odds. Let’s face it, most things that exceed 30 minutes thesedays tend to lose our attention (the TV, the new Strokes album, the President’s address to the nation, sex etc) so when I looked at the cover Continue Reading

Alvin Nathaniel Joiner IV suspends his holiday on colossal MTV hit, ‘Pimp My Ride’ to indulge his love of the underground with new album ‘Full Circle’ – a solid and fairly audacious addition to his catalogue of crime that whilst not specialising in exhausts, is fairly exhausting nevertheless, covering as it does the many evils and absurdities of living in the 21st Century. Politics, police-brutality, the Taliban, afternoon talk shows, paternity testing, cars, sex and more than a smidgen of Continue Reading

Imagine Rough Trade, Domino and 679 Recordings getting together to round up some of the best the year had to offer. Let’s face it, it’s likely you’d have bands like The Futureheads, Mystery Jets, Arcade Fire, Jarvis Cocker, Sufjan Stevens and Brakes rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, James Yorkston, Four Tet, Franz Ferdinand and Clinic. Pretty impressive, yeah? Well, to a large extent this is pretty much what you have with Top Of The Class 2006; a top-notch Continue Reading

The album slams wide open, no fuss; 6 straight seconds of ribcage-raking feedback, about the same of unblinking ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ drums and then a bass-line that drags you in by your hair and sullies you deliciously. It’s that irresistible moment the pub door swings open and you’re swallowed by a blast of hot air, that textured amalgamated mash of sound and smell, a first taste of everything that inevitably lies ahead; Friday night, Saturday evening, a lost Tuesday afternoon, whenever Continue Reading