Reviews

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

Straddling the uneasy divide between The Pogues, The Levellers, The Chieftans and the Dropkick Murphys is Los Angeles’ Flogging Molly. And whilst not as frenetically punky as their press release suggests, they do have the kind of raw and boundless energy traditionally asscociated with a bar-room brawl. Which is appropriate, as this is the perfect music by which to brawl (or music to watch brawls by, if you’re any kind of coward like me). Dissolute, merry, frisky, feverish and stampeding, Continue Reading

If you don’t know the movie already, Layer Cake (based upon JJ Connelly’s novel of the same name) is another of those nutty, brutal British gangster flicks glamorising the seedy underbelly of our deteriorating British culture. Not directed by Guy Ritchie this time, but by Ritchie’s producer pal, Matthew Vaughn. And who better to spearhead the ultraviolence campaign than ‘Our Friends In The North’ actor, Daniel Craig – regional anti-hero for hire. So there you have it. A crime thriller, Continue Reading

Jazz, funk, rap, hip-hop. Say this enough times and it begins to sound less and less like a recipe for disaster. Listen it enough times though and your initial impression was right. This is as awkward and as self-satisfied a record as you’re going to get – not falling bravely into either of the above camps, but instead teetering unhappily between cocktail schmaltz and over privileged urban muzak. ‘Questions’ is the fourth time out for Us3 debuting in 1992 not Continue Reading

The first I ever learned of Matthew Jay was from the giant overhead screen in the Oasis food area of the Meaodowhall shopping complex in Sheffield as he weaved his magical way through the dreamy, wintry video to ‘Please Don’t Send Me Away’. Why I have the memory of it at all – I don’t know – as I didn’t come across him again until I read his obituary in a national newspaper. What I do know is that I Continue Reading

They’re hardly going to use that title any further down the line, are they. Might as well now, the scamps. Goldie Lookin’ Chain are A Good Thing for pop music, belly-laugh fantastic, you know that (we’re not gonna get dragged down by their damn colloquialisms though, Oxford English all the way for us). They’re one of those curveballs, a magnified exaggeration of a vilified caricature rapidly turned C-list celebrity, an immoral danger to the Daily Mail readers amongst us, a Continue Reading

Sometimes, once you’ve said something hard enough, often enough, it begins to feel like it might not actually ring true after all. Oasis have done enough work themselves to make you seriously doubt the validity of it all, but ‘Definitely Maybe’ does remain one of the most significant records released in our lifetimes. It still sounds inspirational, it is without question legendary, with influence but without peer. It’s been 10 years, 120 months, more than 87600 hours (you carry on Continue Reading

For me the free-wheelin’ spirit of the 70s was best illustrated not by the self-conscious pogoing of punk, nor by the jerky post-modernity of new-wave but by gruff-looking men in beards, swinging their generous denim flares as they stood en masse singing songs about last trains running and hotels in California. – a fantasy as far removed from British Rail and Travelodges as their grizzly mutton chops were from decency. And these spaced-out mountain men had names too; names like Continue Reading

26 year old Icelandic/Scandinavian beat boy Gisli is seems to spend most of his time in front of his eight-track thinking of something profound to say, and yet no amount of cute one liners on debut album ‘How About That’ ever amounts to the kind of slack-jaw genius of evident hero Beck. Populating your cut n paste cultural narratives with all manner of social outcasts, whether its junkies, hookers, evil lawyers, overweight bankers, television presenters (‘How About That? ‘I Don’t Continue Reading

Finding yourself in the company of The Vacation’s steely, irascible debut ‘Band From World War Zero’ is a little like finding yourself in the company of ‘The Return Of The King’ right after sitting through ‘The Fellow Of The Ring’, ‘The Two Towers’ and both Magic Harry movies. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with it, quite the contrary, on its own and in its own right it’s fairly bloody marvellous. It’s really just a matter of timing. Likewise, Continue Reading