Reviews

Just exactly how long does an artist have to be considered a ‘newcomer’ before we are forced to accept defeat and acquiesce to the broader public consensus that they’re simply not that popular? Nick Drake was never popular. Ian Curtis was never popular; even Elliot Smith could have passed enough folks in the street to fill a liner without ever once courting recognition. The truth is, as intriguing, mysterious and downright obtuse an artist can be, it does not naturally Continue Reading

First – and, if we’re being fair, only – surprise on this, the long overdue debut from LA’s Moving Units, is how very clean it is, meticulous, clinical. It’s the kind of thing that Patrick Bateman of American Psycho might shave to before a dinner date/twilight killing spree. Dangerous dreams indeed. Only when they first hit these shores with their EP and live dates almost 2 years ago they seemed soiled and intent, a lot more dangerous to know, loitering Continue Reading

Together with other delicious ironies in life; the Cocteau Twins consisting of three band members and not two; the Walker Brothers being barely on speaking terms, let alone brothers and the Thrills being anything but thrilling; comes news of more disingenuousness, this time from the adult-contemporary nether-regions of New York. The Brazilian Girls are not only not Brazilian; they’re not all girls. Howzat! Brought together a year ago by the Rome-born, Munich and Nice educated, Brooklyn-based Sabina Sciubba and the Continue Reading

Crackle. Pfft. Crackle. Huuuuuuuum. That there was a reconstruction of the first 6 seconds of the debut album from The Beat Up (or The Beatings for the likes of us who still also refuse to recognise the Mean Fiddler as anything other than the LA2). And that is all the subtlety you’re getting for the next 32 minutes. So on your feet, and no slouching. Well, not unless you can make it look, like, really cool anyway. On initial form Continue Reading

Stars In Your Eyes, Pop Idol, Ally McBeal, The Delays, Little House On The Prairie; they’re all things that at one time or another we’ve all had to confess some kind of embarrassing (if well hidden) weakness for. And like any alcoholic itching nervously for the nearest off-licence, we find ourselves awkwardly pacing the floor looking for the next regrettable fix. We’re not a proud bunch, even if we do manage to conceal it well enough under a smokescreen of Continue Reading

Save for a fairly half-hearted resistance to invasion, the French have had little to feel guilty about in the last fifty years. From garlic bread to Eric Cantona you can pretty much rely on their feisty, bitter magic to animate even the most insipid of dishes or laborious long-ball clashes. And their musicians are no exception, managing as they do to combine the guttural and animalistic with the bookish and the intellectual, the just plain dirty with the just plain Continue Reading

The thing with revered and infinitely lauded chill-out duo Lemon Jelly was always that as soon as you’d settled down to let the silky electronica run wispy, stylish trails around you and tickle your nerve endings, two gurning blokes would inevitably gatecrash your personal space blowing those gaudy party-trumpets that unfurl and parp unceremoniously in your face, trying to touch their elbows with their tongues and galloping round like giddy supermen using your curtains as makeshift capes. A majority, it Continue Reading

It doesn’t matter if you’re an indie kid looking for something classic, a dance head looking for something new or an old head who’s just looking for something, unite under the banner that is ‘We are Little Barrie’.  It might be forty or so years late, but it’s as if Hendrix compiled a motown covers album and the stripped, rootsy grooves oozing out the CD player don’t belie the compact quality they possess.  Breezing from Hendrix patented riffs, to blues Continue Reading

This is it. This is the one. If you blindfolded strangers in the street and asked them to pick the major label debut from its unbranded equivalents they would choose ‘Worlds Apart’ time and time again, without quibble or a request for another taste. They’d be wrong of course, but that’s not the point. ‘Source Tags & Codes’ might technically hold that position, but as scorching and intense a record as it might have been it simply made the whole Continue Reading