Reviews

Camper Van Beethoven are back. Camper Van who? Okay, these were the guys who kick started the whole college rock thing in the US in the mid-eighties along with folks like Black Flag, Husker Du, The Minutemen and Sonic Youth and provided an eager and self-consciously geekish fraternity of bedsitters, bedwetters and art students such hopelessly shambolic masterpices as ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’ and ‘Joe Stalin’s Cadillac’. It was funny at the time in an intelligent, screwball, ‘hey lets do the Continue Reading

Originally scheduled for release in 1995 and to be entitled Seven Days a Week, Tommy Stinson’s post-Replacements ‘Perfect’ album was shelved due to record company politics. But not just record company politics one can imagine. The fact that it simply wasn’t very good may have had something to do with it. Not that there’s any glaring errors, just that it rattles along without in a psudeo-Clash army kind of way without ever really threatening any kind of positive rock violence. Continue Reading

Whimsy – it’s a funny old quality. A valuable social feature perhaps, but a funny one nonetheless. A personality undoubtedly benefits from it – it’s like an accessory, tarting up what’s already there, even to the extent that one can be defined by how they accessorise – but to be swathed in it, or buried beneath it? For other things to be left to merely accessorise it? Do you see what I’m trying to say with this at all? The Continue Reading

The crazy magic realism of Chris Cunningham’s work on Aphex Twin’s brutally antagonistic ‘Windowlicker’ video just about says it all really. Funny, disturbing, sexy, malicious, edgy, surreal, groovy, artistic, post-modern and beautifully, beautifully shot. Welcome indeed to the world of Warp – a label always teetering precariously on the edges of taste and decency and always at the proverbial cutting-edge of dance-music. This DVD compilation is a mind-blowing testament to all that shit and more. With two stunning, rarely seen Continue Reading

It’s no real wonder that practically every band putting out records in America right now seems hyper-politicised to the hilt, regardless of how blind cuddly their last offering was. Living under a near-totalitarian regime in denial does that kind of thing to a country’s liberally creative subjects. Radio 4 are already no strangers to such a movement, their 2002 breakthrough came in the form of a ridiculously danceable protest against NY mayor Rudy Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policy on various forms of Continue Reading

Brooks has come along way since the eerie and perverse wisdom of ‘The Stalker Song’ and Jo Wiley endorsed debut album, ‘Ming Star’. He’s come off the nimble and rather exclusive Beggars offshoot Mantra and arrived at the smaller, but no less eclectic Lo-Recordings – home to a curious breed of electronic phantasmagoria that ranges from Red Snapper, Barry 7s, Luke Vibert as well as dishing up collaborations with Squarepusher and Four Tet besides. Like much of the material on Continue Reading

Afrika Bambaataa may be a legend in his own underpants, and his name dropped more times (and no less inexpertly) than a US missile on an Iraqi wedding reception but the fact that his career was launched over two decades ago might suggest his Zulu brand of heavily percussive hip-hop is on the wane. Not so. Experimental and genre-defying, Bambaataa has inspired thousands of imitators (Damon Albarn included) and has managed to build an impressive canopy of hope for everything Continue Reading

“An extra 3 inches or your money back guaranteed!”, “cheapest Vi@gra on the www!”, “give her everything she desires!”, “notice results immediately”! Having an e-mail account these days is no better than hanging around at the back of the Glastonbury dance tent shortly after GLC have exited the stage. You’ve been approached, I’ve been approached and it would seem that even ageing archduke of the shadowlands Nick Cave isn’t safe in his private sanctum of pianos and pathos.  Or so Continue Reading

In case you were wondering, country music isn’t all about crusty old men in cowboy boots and style-challenged middle-aged women with theme parks named after them (sorry Dolly, we love you, but really…) It’s one of the most honest, powerful and provocative genres of music, and with young whippersnappers like Siobhan Parr making it all their own, it’s set to stick around for a long time after the likes of electro-clash and screamo have been lost in the dismal vaults Continue Reading

What stops a sub-culture becoming the culture itself? Limited appeal? Snobbery? Ineptitude? As New Rock ‘N’ Roll, whatever that is exactly, continues to gatecrash Top Of The Pops and pose for untold Smash Hits centrefolds, an undercurrent of electro japery has formed, kids pulling similar shapes to those towering above them, making comparable noises with alternative instruments and naively acting like the knife’s edge is still more theirs 20 years after Depeche Mode took the same thing mainstream. Some, like Continue Reading