Reviews

Five musicians from five very different musical backgrounds all moving in five very different directions but all having one thing in common: they’re all in for the same big disappointment. Benzo’s debut album perfectly crystallizes the problem encountered by too many bands at the moment: consummate and stylish delivery with a poverty of compositional talent. The sound is grand, elaborate and twinkling with all the protracted angst and intensity of British progressives like Muse, Doves and Radiohead whilst still nervously Continue Reading

If I told you Matisyahu was a man courting the strict straddling beard of a member of the Amish community and dressed in the ascetic black suit of a Hasidic Jew regaling us with lolloping reggae narratives in a faintly unlikely Jamaican accent you’d laugh. But the sad truth of the matter is, Matisyahu is all this and more. A 25-year-old follower of the Lubavitch sect, Matisyahu (who grew up Matthew Miller) nurtures his adolescent love of Bob Marley with Continue Reading

They’re wide open for pot shots. Indie band squatting off-piste on infamously innovative electro label. Indie band as topical and new-wave as the next. Indie band that sound like another indie band that already exists just down the road. So are Maximo Park just The Futureheads, on the wrong label, without the definitive head-shaking harmonies and money spinning cover version, and only the A184 separating them? Well, absolutely not. And then yes, a bit. There’s no ignoring the similarities that Continue Reading

Rod Siddall? Stuart Arfield? Anybody? Steve Fellows? Comsat Angels, I hear you reply. So what? So it just shows how arbitrary success sometimes is for folks in Sheffield’s Broomhill. Record Collector was not only an eclectic little goldmine for all those students flogging CDs for the price of a night out down the Broomhill Tavern it was the seeding ground for Gomez – catalysts for what now must rate as one the big musicial retrograde steps of the last twenty Continue Reading

There have been plenty of examples over the years. To present three at random; Scandinavian epics Leaves’ debut, the 60ft Dolls’ posthumous sophomore album, and most notably the much maligned Terris – 2000’s great white hypes – who had a ferocious kicking heart wrestling with scattergun beats downsized to a badly laminated replica by the time it was immortalized as a long-player. The Duke Spirit can never become a laughing stock in the same way, too certain an impression is Continue Reading

Lawrence, real name Peter M. Kersten, purportedly hails from Germany’s rainy north – Hamburg. Already the producer of two wonderful albums for his own Dial imprint and Ladomat his growing reputation as one of Germany’s most sought after producers has yielded praise from Kompakt’s notable, Wolfgang Voigt amongst others. Currently enjoying residencies at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel Club and Click the gently prodigious Lawrence has also been known to release the odd 12” single on the Dial label under the name Continue Reading

Smog is Bill Callahan; underrated pioneer of the lo-fi revolution, a man as partial to a private melancholy world of fractured lives and strange pursuits as he is to parenthesis. Self-obsessed, insular and staggeringly candid about his considerable peculiarities, the greater body of his work (Julius Caesar, Doctor Came at Dawn, Red Apple Falls) reveals the produce of an addled and alienated individual leafing poignantly through a scrapbook of recollections and profoundly intimate sexual preferences; or as his own song, Continue Reading

What’s the point? Most pop, indie, dance music, whatever, doesn’t really have a point, it exists in the there and then, leaves maybe a drizzle of residue and life continues unhindered all around it. Pointless. Some people, like you or me probably, are affected and even defined by it, but in the scheme of things it doesn’t physically influence stuff, allow anything much to happen or change the course of history – with probably the notable exception of David Hasselhoff Continue Reading

They arrive on trains, leave on planes and everybody stares at them. One might naturally assume this to be for their incurably wistful and bittersweet brand of California melancholy or the rich and beautiful vocal chemistry that exists between them, but it’s not; it’s actually because for all their flower-handling West Coast dreaminess the pair actually hail from Leicester. And though I’ve made a good number of stopovers at the bus terminal at Leicester’s St. Margarets, never once was I Continue Reading