The Norwegian indie/power pop quartet Beezewax are into their fourth album and the first that seems like capturing a sizeable audience in the UK and beyond. ‘Who To Salute’ is a gently euphoric wash of jangly guitars and thin yet soaring vocals, for example their opener ‘Let The Future Be A Stranger’ which layers voice upon voice into a calming wash of sound that leads us into the second track and their latest single ‘When You Stood Up’. I’ve said Continue Reading
It’s likely that I don’t know where I’m going with this, but that’s okay, when you don’t have great expectations you seldom experience disappointment, and as much could be said of Laura Lopez Castro; you don’t where it’s leading, but for all its sighing, spectral elusiveness it’s still a wildly seductive journey even in spite of Castro’s convoluted and slightly misleading history. On the surface of it, it sounds almost casually certain that Castro was born, bred and beautified in Continue Reading
Welcome then, to this year’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Although we realise that strictly speaking this year’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, having snuck through on a UK release date technicality. This season’s CYHSY anyway, more dusty summer than spring, we’re certain of that. It’s a convenient comparison, granted, but it is relevant one beyond just being 2006’s approved US indie hyperbole magnet. From their self-sourced DIY beginnings, through to shipping countless records Continue Reading
After Fischerspooner divides and rules the brighter and more fashionable tourist environs of New York, shamefully underestimated DJ and co-founder of City Rockers and Crosstown Rebel Records, Damian Lazarus guides us round the avenues and alleyways of the old smoke: London. You know the score. In any other trade this would be one of those righteous co-branding activities, promising all sorts of ‘synergy’ or ‘cross- exposure’, slicing through the greater part of modern demographics like a sword through a turd. In Continue Reading
Music can be fun. Yes, believe it. Crazy spinning on your head and showing your knickers fun. Giggling in a ball pool with a Mini Milk fun. The kind of fun that gives you the hiccups. Yet here in the virtual Crud Towers, while you can understand that we enjoy music, most of the time – occasionally getting so very excited we give ourselves a headache and have to have a little sit down – mining pits of despair, toilsome Continue Reading
There is a billboard just round the corner from my flat that I pass every morning on the way to work. It features the assertion, beneath 4 rather anonymous, skinny black jean clad youths, that Razorlight’s eponymous second record is, and I quote, “the best guitar album since Definitely Maybe”. Well, indeed. Courtesy of Q Magazine, if you were curious. Which says an awful lot more about Q Magazine, that writer and its blunted senses than it does about this Continue Reading
Peaches, Chicks On Speed, The Rapture, LCD Soundsytem, Miss Kittin. There isn’t anything we haven’t seen here before in one degenerate guise or another. But then you could say that about anything. I’ve seen plenty bags of chips before, but that doesn’t mean I’ll refuse a wee bag should a plate of haddock and peas look naked without them. It really all depends on how many you want stocked in your freezer at any one time, I guess. But there’s Continue Reading
Formed in Edinburgh, 1979, where they performed standards and soul classics to a largely perplexed punk audience, Billy MacKenzie and Alan Rankine were the Associates – a rich and dramatic, occasionally avant-garde collective, responsible for some of the most enduring and romantic records of the early 1980s and reaching something a personal zenith with the critically lauded ‘Sulk’ album after leaving Fiction Records for WEA in 1982 – the promise of a mightier budget lending itself perfectly to MacKenzies’ booming, Continue Reading
There’s really no introduction neccessary for Ben Watt: one half of the duo ‘Everything But The Girl’ and the creative loci for tracks like ‘Missing’ (remixed by Todd Terry) as well as for work with Deep Dish and Massive Attack; worlds apart from his humble beginnings in Hull and as spokesman for the band’s inoffensive brand of jazzy, acoustic pop music that was Ben and Tracy’s staple. Cut to 2002, and a raw underground House track by Ben Watt intended Continue Reading
It could be argued that with the release of his first ‘solo’ album Thom Yorke has engineered himself into a lose-lose situation. Unable to go down the road of breaking brazenly free from his routine in a fit of suppressed creativity – mainly because he already had Radiohead do that as a group with 2000’s much celebrated/maligned talking point ‘Kid A’ – he’s left to pursue exploration already explored, perhaps undermining the necessity for its existence and muting the fanfare Continue Reading