Reviews

Take three unlikely misfits from Wakefield near Leeds, a baseball cap, an old keyboard bought with a couple of quid at Cash Converters plus some charity-shop harmonies and you have the kind of frightfully friendly pick and mix pop that saw the Fiery Furnaces scale the dizzy heights of kooky anonymity and shaped the lives of John Shuttleworths everywhere. It’s a simple brief: instantly hummable tunes, a childlike grasp of arrangements and a brutal disregard for fashion. The result? A Continue Reading

by Mat and Rob in late 2001 in Birstall, Leicestershire (unofficial capital of Rock’n’roll), DMB have released their third album in two years with the eminently charming Boom Times! The album has an attractively understated opening – See You In shuffles into your conciousness like a guest popping their head round the door, unsure of their welcome as Graham Coxonesque vocals weave over soft chords before finding the confidence to launch into a sedate but glowing indie ballad. Songs such Continue Reading

They’ve opened for The Raveonettes, Moving Units, The Kills, Bloc Party, and OK Go. They grew up listening to Run DMC, Public Enemy, The Cure, Prince and Depeche Mode. One of them has appeared on a Chemical Brothers track. One of them hasn’t released a record since they were a 20-year old rapper in the early nineties and one of them is also known as DJ Adam 12. They were signed (not quite from nowhere) by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst Continue Reading

Folk music, it seems, has been undergoing somewhat of a revival of late. BBC4 say so, there have been actual documentaries, so it must be. Of course it’s one of those things that never clears off entirely, but you only need look so far as the top of the charts, to Jose Gonzalez and Nizlopi’s (relatively) rampant successes, and further down the scale to the interesting achievements of Adem, Patrick Wolf, Ciculus, Four Tet and Chris TT, to know the Continue Reading

When The Minus 5’s ‘Down With Wilco’ album landed on my desk sometime early in 2003 I was tickled pink by what amounted to a veritable wish list of indie luminaries and a ‘multi-layered tier-cake of sounds and threads’ with tunes and ideas that literally buzzed, shook and rattled. So when this mighty illegal gathering of talents returned with a bevy of other bodies that included the Decemberist’s Colin Meloy and REM’s drummer for hire, Bill Rieflin I was naturally Continue Reading

Free Surf Music #3 is the sound of someone joyriding a UFO. It’s The Stray Cats with their drinks spiked, or a Tarantino movie set in the East Midlands. Put another way, this album is fourteen tracks of gloriously unhinged guitar twangs, inspired drum bursts of the Keith Moon variety, and moments of off the wall humour. Alan Jenkins (The ‘Phil Spector-from-Leicester’) has helped a whole host of offbeat bands produce  some of the most original yet determinedly uncommercial records Continue Reading

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, been pored over and become a primary source of inspiration for any dark, vitriolic, spiky, rigidly ordered performer you’ve ever cared to listen to for the next 2 decades. Or rather you don’t know what you’ve got until you know where it’s come from. Bauhaus’s heyday may be buried physically beneath a quarter of a century’s history (give or take a current reunion), but they’ve inadvertently become as current as most Continue Reading

I’d like to start things by first asking the question: why isn’t Stephen Duffy the most famous and the most eagerly celebrated artist in Britain right now? Even without recourse to his skewed and lyrical intellect, his astonishingly elastic wit, his impossibly tight trousers and his effortless romanticism, Duffy is a man who can whittle a golden, delicious pop tune from a lump of old timber and still have enough left for a pair of bedside cabinets and a keepsake Continue Reading

You could maybe think of stranger musical partnerships, if you tried really very hard and weren’t distracted. That weird ginger one from Girls Aloud and that chap with the inverted crucifix branded on his forehead from silly satanic rockers Deicide. There’s one, just. But this, with a serious face on, is proper beauty and the beast stuff. Nick Cave & Kylie odd at least. But like that particular example of odd, this one dispels its differences to find a tastefully Continue Reading

It’s inevitable that in a media environment cosseted by nostalgia and pastsickness Bristol’s relentlessly foppish Beat-Poets, the Blue Aeroplanes should find themselves slipping loquaciously through a wormhole into a cold, hard new century, hurdy-gurdying around with a handful of daffodils like it was only yesterday, and bursting out of the archive in a flowery, firework display of lilting folk romance and a very earnest demonstration of love. Remember that 1984 Argos Catalogue you placed a bid against on Ebay? Or Continue Reading