What we liked about Nick Dresti’s take on ‘I Would Die For U was its ludicrous, big, shiny intergalactic approach to a classic Prince song. By way of a contraction though, what makes this album suck is exactly the same thing. Well almost. Coming about as close to George Michael and Prince as you could possibly get outside of a lavatory cubicle, ‘Always and Forever’ is little more than the eager delusions of a slick fantasist. ‘Crazy Talk’ is to Continue Reading
As intensely as she screams like she’s ruptured a spleen and is strapped down in a dirty back-street surgery without anaesthetic getting a new one fitted, as many of rock’s male fraternity that she picks off and spits out in a bloody heap and as many people as she continues to knock out of the way without a drop of respect like Neanderthal woman with a club and a guitar on her back, The Distillers will always just be nu-rock’s Continue Reading
‘Samey’. It’s not in the dictionary. It’s not in your thesaurus, and it’s similarly unlikely to be in your ROM based Office lexicon. So what does it mean? Unexciting? Not exactly. Repetitive? Perhaps. Boring? The jury’s out… But ‘samey’ this album is. Bon Jovi love playing acoustically. Anyone who has seen their best performances in the last 10 years will tell you that, and for a handful of songs in the midst of a fist to the ceiling high wattage Continue Reading
Therapy. Some people take to the couch, the chair, go shopping, try jogging whilst others, like Peter Gabriel, shave their heads, experiment with the diceman philosophy, hang upside down from gravity boots, immerse themselves in Samadhi floatation tanks and spend the best part of 25 years exploring the elusive terrorscapes of their own fantastic imaginations through music. The greater burden of life is never that which goes into it – it’s that which comes out. And the same could be Continue Reading
‘Speaker-bustin dance music’. Says it all really. And whilst the term ‘techno pioneer’ might be an outrageously overgenerous moniker for anyone whose greater body of work was crafted in the mid-nineties, there’s no doubting that Dave Clarke is an undisputed beat champ. He might be a little misunderstood, he may have a fight on his hands in troubling the mainstream, but as ‘Devils Advocate’ confirms, Clarke is incendiary fringe material. The one-time hip hop and soul DJ weaved hip hop Continue Reading
Ever wondered what it would be like letting a dozen or so monks loose with Pro Tools and a copy of Cubase? Well your idle fantasies have been quietly answered in the form of ‘Spokes’. First meeting at school in the early eighties, Andy Turner and Ed Handley of Plaid have long been spinning and refining their diverse and considerable yarn for abiding forefathers of modern electronica, Warp Records. So it’s quality assured, as far as we’re concerned. No doubts Continue Reading
If one and a half minutes is good enough for the Bellrays, then it’s good enough for me, so here goes. Loud, messy, bluesy, filthy, dirty, growly, surly, heavy, mean, moody and totally, totally uncompromising. On paper it looks good. On paper it looks like everything rock n’ roll should be: quick, painless, brutal and satisfying. Tony Fate’s whirligig guitars spirals out of control to a satisfying degree just below that of the absurd and Lisa Kekaula’s lusty, soulful blast Continue Reading
Without words and without safety nets, Mogwai are can still pack the London Astoria two nights on the trot? How do they do it? James Berry has the answers …03/11/2003 We don’t like change. Only when there is none we inevitably lament its absence, as if the flipside is always worth aspiring to more. Long gone are times when these bullish Scottish post-rockers struck you between the eyes like a spitting Mount Vesuvius jutting crudely into a pastel mainstream. They Continue Reading
Mathematically speaking, you’d expect that something that was eclectic would stretch further than something that was not, by the logical reasoning that there is more to go around, less cause to scrape the proverbial barrel. Wouldn’t you? Of course you would, although there is also the pitfall that perhaps you would be tempted, by the reasoning that there is indeed plenty to go around, to avoid unnecessarily digging deeper. And here lies both Fort Lauderdale’s strength and weakness. 14 tracks Continue Reading
Formed in the spring of 1998 by Vito Roccoforte and Luke Jenner and inspired by punky new-wavers PIL and Televison, The Rapture typify the avant-garde New York DIY garage thing going on at the moment. Like Le Tigre, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve suddenly fallen for all the synthetic charms of dance. Not the Kylie Minogue kind of dance, you understand, the cool kind. The kind of phlegmatic sonic sizzle you find in dodgy downtown bars on the velvet Continue Reading