Reviews

The mix-tape. It’s a simple enough proposition, but one which is fraught with surprising complexities. Is the selection of tracks an honest brokering of personal tastes, a gamble on eclecticism, a randomly compiled gallery of passing fancies, or indeed a wish list? Is the person who puts the tape together revealing their innermost soul or providing something they think we want to hear? Perhaps even expect to hear. It’s almost impossible to say. If truth be known my own favourite Continue Reading

Here we are five years later, ‘So…How’s Your Girl?’ fading like the stain on the proverbial bedsheet and superstar producers Prince Paul (De La Soul) and Dan the Automator (Gorillaz) are still laughing their socks off at the extended ‘so naff, we’re cool’ handsome boy modelling motif. Trouble is, they continue to extend, stretch and draw it out like a last dying breath over the 60 or so minutes the album lasts. And the joke is on them, because it’s just Continue Reading

It was a cash-in then, it’s a cash-in now. Off the back of the tsunami of critical acclaim that was lavished on Wilson’s recent ‘Smile’ album comes something of lesser stature: the Beach Boys’ singing well-known Christmas standards, backed by lifeless orchestration that Brian Wilson had precious little to do with. Released in 1964 – although admittedly bulked out and justified this time around with a couple of alternate mixes and rarities (the sound of Dennis Wilson getting poked up Continue Reading

A recipe that’s labelled ‘disaster’. A starter that’s prefixed by ‘non’. A kind of birth that rhymes with ‘drill’. You can take your pick, but none illustrate the notion of an uphill struggle with greater exactitude than the following mission statement: ‘The goal was to make an album that sounds and feels like the sample based hip-hop records the band love, yet capture the un-hip hop ‘band’ element of the group.’ Doesn’t bode well now does it? New York City Continue Reading

In time everyone of us has to grow up, throw away the cheeky attitude, the cute one-liners, the endlessly cycling riffs, the cheesy non de plumes, the subtle as a brick innuendo and get down to crafting something truly unique for ourselves – and sure enough – The Donna’s latest offering sees a maturation of the frenetic two-minute power-pop blitz and a move toward a more complex, more fully-dimensional lyrical and sonic approach. The chord-changes are more frequent, more unpredictable Continue Reading

If having a ubiquitous hit by way of a TV ad was criteria enough for slating a record, then everyone from Groove Armada to Röyksopp would be guilty as charged. As it is, Steriogram and their chirpy rock-pop-punk-rap hybrid for the Ipod ads, ‘Walkie Talkie Man’ provided a refreshingly unpretentious moment of glory for the New Zealand outfit. And just as inevitable as their spots exploding, or their chewing losing it’s flavour on the bedpost overnight, ‘Schmack’ should see the Continue Reading

If Metallica’s therapy centred ‘Some Kind Of Monster’ revealed a band in crisis and falling apart, then Iron Maiden’s The Early Days Part 1 reveals a band falling apart and falling together again courtesy of that dedicated rock Robocop and bass-player, Steve Harris – a Jonah if there ever was one – but alternately a committed, serious, reasonable, intense and fairly ruthless pursuer of excellence. But whereas ‘Some Kind Of Monster’ exposes the likes of Lars Ulrich and James Hertfield Continue Reading

You have to feel sorry for Eighties Matchbox. Really, you do. It’s got to be lonely up there at the summit of that jagged rock formation they fester atop; an unprecedented geological phenomenon in noisyfuckingmusic terms. Look around, see any peers? Anyone else erupting irritably from the earth’s core with a comparable command of the Richter scale? Their debut ‘Horse Of The Dog’, foamed over by just about anyone who had the stomach for it, was a blitz of the Continue Reading

Life’s fun, largely, isn’t it. But then it does have a habit of throwing up spanners of discomfort, just to fuck around with your day, or your very moral foundations, from time to time. Like, for instance, feeling conscience bound to watch the leader of the free world (that’ll be the President of the United States of America, if you were wondering) grump his way through an important internationally televised debate with the eloquence of a 6 year old forced Continue Reading

You have expectations. You make certain presumptions. Chances are in this case they’re driven as much by morbid curiosity as anything more reasoned, that’s only natural. This first (and last?) posthumous release from Elliott Smith will undoubtedly shift big units to death tourists in search of a suicide note they can clap along to, coded allusions to a big exit or just a piece of rock memorabilia to file alongside ‘You Know You’re Right’ and the “legacy” edition of ‘Grace’.  Continue Reading