Carina Round has to be the most vital, stimulating, fluent and inevitable singer in the country right now. Bar none. PJ Harvey, with whom Carina elicits a worthy likeness, may still be regularly whipping up our interest (most recently in association with Josh Holme and a heated stretch in the desert of course), but it wouldn’t be unfair to say that she doesn’t tear the floorboards from under your feet like she used to. You know Polly’s traits and can Continue Reading

With the amount of time it took to find all the hidden extras on this disc I could have developed a tumour, died and had most of entrails removed against my will and passed on to sad, tragic and alchoholic former footballing geniuses; but find them I did. Eventually. And what did I get for all my hard work? A bored Nick and Simon discussing the recording and production of Seven & The Ragged Tiger, a tortuous and similarly bored Continue Reading

“ We thought we were really punky. Even The Adverts had learned one chord. We didn’t even do that. We just got a machine and tuned it on till it sounded nice.” Such is the candour and refreshing honesty of Phil Oakey interviewed for this DVD compilation of hits from 1980 to 1995, that he has no qualms in announcing that the Human League were little more than a ‘consumer version of Kraftwerk’. They didn’t make their synths, they bought Continue Reading

The words Drawn, Badly and Boy have been freely bandied around in the company of this Mancunian folk troubadour more than once. But he really lacks the defining qualities that Mr Gough hitched a dim, trailblazing ride into the mainstream on, and is all the better for it. In fact strip all of that clutter away and you’re left with an acoustic guitar. Which isn’t all that much of a similarity, really. You might as well compare him to that Continue Reading

It would be imprudent of me to try and better the description already put out by the press release: ‘tangled guitars, lounging organs’ and ‘brush-beats’. But imprudent I am, and for this I’d like to add ‘sonorous, comforting and melting three part harmonies basking in the dusky glow of twilight’. How’s that for imprudence? The Autumn Defense, consisting of multi-instrumentalists John Stirratt of Wilco and Pat Sansone provides the kind of lilting, cosy sunshine not heard since the likes of Continue Reading

There’s a new kid on the block: UK bass. He’s dirty, he’s scruffy and he’s screwed up big time. And the man behind the nascent UK Bass scene, DJ Cutlass has made his opening statement: ‘DJ Cutlass Presents UK Bass’. It’s fast, it’s furious, and it’s a totally bastard fusion of hip hop, drum’n’bass, electro, techno and ragga. And what a sly and brutal mongrel it is too. Punchy, pushy and still refreshingly minimal, this first slice of UK Bass is far Continue Reading

Based on the evidence of this album, Cale’s preceding release, the ‘Five Tracks’ earlier in the year, was merely the peeling away of old skin to reveal the first itchy flakes of regeneration. And whilst similar in terms of sounds, ‘HoboSapiens’ is a much meatier body of work; more consistent, more direct and less dependent upon the multifarious layering of samples and sketchpad ideas. Cale would be the first to admit that he was testing out new materials and working Continue Reading

‘Dirty funk’ – ‘shuffle techno’ – ‘noisy trash disco’? What are we critics like, eh? When we’re not clutching at straws or lurching off at an impossible tangent, we’re squeezing some outrageously square peg into a round hole of some dimension or other. Music fans are not much better. The only people who don’t seem to give a toss about genre fixing are the artists themselves, and T.Raumschmiere perhaps less than most. The latest in a long line of agent Continue Reading

Virgin revisit four classic albums. That what it says on the tin and that’s what you get, by golly. In fact, in an era where the likes of M83 and Sigur Ros have managed to somehow tickle the nation’s high brow with their mean and pernicious brand of existentialism and aching miserablism, it probably feels more vital now, than it did then. Back in the early1980s Japan straddled the happy divide between New Romantism and something else. What was that Continue Reading

In the spring of this year it was beginning to look for all intents and purposes like the sun was setting on the autumn of Belle & Sebastian’s necessity. For that was when The Hidden Cameras ceremonially crossed the Atlantic in Y-fronts and balaclavas to snatch the Glaswegian’s presumably safe twee-indie crown with a determined and effortless superiority. And it wasn’t only that their songs gushed out with an inherently religious twinkle, but also that there just seemed to be Continue Reading