Reviews

In the nineties, Cracker were one of dozens of American grunge-tinged yet radio-friendly bands that dipped briefly into the charts with songs like ‘Low’ and ‘Get Off This’. The years since have seen them fall out big style with their former label, Virgin, and while their ex-bosses are planning to release a best of compilation later this year, Cracker – now on Cooking Vinyl – have preempted this by re-recording their most popular songs and releasing them all together as Continue Reading

The sprawling ragbag democracy and fascination for obscure vocal groups of the nineteen-sixties that defined this Swedish eight-piece’s first album appears to have been supplanted by a far clearer commercial perspective and the election of Victoria Bergsman as leader, subtle though it is. Out go the garage references, the ragbag, crazy time signatures, out goes the Velvet Underground, The Ronettes, Phil Spector, the tatty drum sounds and Mazzy Star and out too goes the band’s first producer, Jari Haapalainen, presumably Continue Reading

My, what an extraordinary and delicious curiosity shop of tunes this is. From the peculiar dramatics of the psychotic ‘Rubber Room’ to the cantankerous, wobbly sci-fi of The Fall’s ‘Lost In Music’ Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey have pooled some of the most savage and extreme mixtape burlesques in existence and still managed to give the impression they actually fit like pieces of the same grotesque puzzle. Whilst the emphasis is squarely on the quirky, the dark and the Continue Reading

It’s a thin line between the cool and the ridiculous. As Eddie Izzard explains it – a guy leaning against a wall with a cocktail stick between his teeth is cool, whereas a guy leaning against a wall with two cocktail sticks between his teeth is ridiculous. Similarly in music the divide between the chic and the shocking – Ziggy and Alvin Stardust – is as thin as heavily applied eye-liner. However, and here’s the rub kids, this line is Continue Reading

We want to like Morning Runner, really we do. If you have any kind of instinctive yearning for maudlin chest-beating gravel-dashed power-pop, the sort with lungs like massive steam-driven bellows you could probably spot from space on a cloudless night, you will too. Their first couple of singles didn’t hang about, like a grand piano coming in for a bear-hug as the world blinked by in the background. Reassuring, warm, familiar, but not without the feeling that things could hit Continue Reading

The good thing about Simon and Felix is that they’ve never tried to argue that Basement Jaxx are anything other than what you get. Sure they’ve courted the UK charts with the kind of romance usually reserved for teenage crushes and the frantic hand movements of 40 year old virgins but their determination in bagging a hit has never been anything more than transparent; they want a hit and they want it now. As a consequence we’ve had no end Continue Reading

Layo Paskin and Matthew ‘Bushwacka!’ build upon their seedy but well heeled origins and the storm created by their 2002 hit, ‘Love Story’ with an album that falls unevenly between two camps. No I’m not talking about those fudgepackin’ uphill gardening kind of camps like Graham Norton and Lawrence Llewelyn – I’m talking about two different kinds of camps – the thumping, sizzling, beeping electro base-camp that is that beat-surrendering floor drill, ‘Life2Live’ and the salsa lounge-lizardry of ‘Me and Continue Reading

It was never really punk, was it? It was always in a spirit of extreme power-pop that the Buzzcocks carried out their sonic ram-raids – in like Flynn and out again in under three minutes, just like the early rockers, the two minute classics from Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, and the early Elvis. What the Buzzcocks did have in common with punk was the jab, jab, punch of verse and chorus stripped of any superfluous notes until only the Continue Reading

Texas born, New York bred dark-indie merchants Calla are an easy band to like, but this doesn’t feel like it was necessarily a straightforward album to make. You only have to read between the worry lines, hear the dead-weight hitched to and pulled along laboriously by the croaky vocal chords and notice that every strike of any guitar on the album looms ever-more grimly, either perplexed or dismayed, disorientated or anxious. It’s surely a druggy record – it has its Continue Reading

You’re at the bar, it’s a little crowded but nothing out of the ordinary. Welcoming, let’s say. Nobody looks overworked, there is a good vibe, it’s mellow. And yet, after what seems like (no, no, what HAS BEEN) a dire, thankless eternity of readjusting your gaze, top button, posture and wedge of crisp, visible, top-end cash notes in your most prominent hand, climbing onto the bar in one final act of lurid desperation, producing a weighty chunk of gold bullion Continue Reading