It’s almost always the case that those records you love the most often yield the least words. What makes it even worse is when you have such celebrated alternatives as Grandaddy offer up an album that seems every bit as good as their previous without it ever really challenging the fragile – and often magical – base upon which that album stands. At a point where any other band thesedays would flout the standard set by their previous release by Continue Reading
La Musica Negra marks the first album without former guitarist and vocalist Anne Marie Griffin and although dedicated to her, it’s something of a departure from the Dave Grohl produced ‘In The Pink’. Scott Bondy and his Birmingham, Alabama gang dish up some trashy and sleazy riffs for colossal railroading track, ‘Way Out West’ and AC/DC thumping,’It’s Alright, It’s Okay’ (Jesus Told Me So) but elsewhere it all gets a bit sticky. ‘All The Saints’ bleeds the indie bandwagon dry Continue Reading
A little after a month of the release of their Still & Raw EP, Front 242’s first full-length studio recording for Metropolis, Pulse, will be available on May 6th. Like the EP, Pulse is a departure from hard-core industrial as the band adopts an ambient house sound. The first 5 tracks blend together into one mind bending journey of synthesized chaos and trip-hop beats. The mood of Pulse is ghostly unnerving as Jean-Luc De Meyer’s vocals draw on the eerie Continue Reading
We’re this time trawling the megahertz of the global village groove that is dub. But what is Dub? We all use it, we all abuse it and one or more popular artists at one time allege to have forged some deep, quasi-religious connection with it. Gorillaz even managed to score a number of hits claiming they were Dub’s original pop vagrants. They weren’t of course. It was often the people whose faces and names can’t be remembered for want of Continue Reading
In the dark, reclining obscurity of London’s Brixton Academy James Berry hunches over a shiny platter of beer and gazes into the bright, portentous fortunes of uber cool cyber-brummies, the Editors. ‘Baby, pleeease, stop scryin’. Crud can be really quite bad at making predictions. We thought Coldplay had probably peaked when they sold out Brixton Academy at the tail end of their first album and would just fade into indistinguishable mulch at the bottom of indie history’s bin. We honestly Continue Reading
A ‘talking book’ may not be the smartest attention grabber ever. Air and Italian novelist, Allessandro Baricco certainly didn’t to hit the spot with their book-come- performance art-come-record release, ‘City Reading’ in April – if only because nobody understood it. And whilst the addition of an English translation of the Italian novel from whence it came might have come in handy for some, it surely contradicted the very idea of pure narrative and pure sound that one supposes was its Continue Reading
Iceland – the new France. Gus Gus – the new Jimi Tenor. So inspired were the band by former Warp ‘artiste’ and ultra morphic polycrooner, Jimi Tenor that they provided him with a remix of his own song ‘Call Of The Wild for public consumption. As it is, Tenor was dropped before it could hit the shelves and the band just kept holding on to it. Re-recorded with new vocals by Earth, the track finally made it onto the Underwater released Continue Reading
What with the ubiquity of VU related noises going on at the moment and the unfaltering attention of garage-rock, it seems oddly fitting that May should see the release of John Cale’s new EP ‘JOHN CALE 5 TRACKS’ on EMI on May 26th. The prelude to a new album released this autumn; Cale proves that old dogs can not only new tricks but they can juggle deliriously fragile trip-hop and dub bass to boot. From his celebrated work with The Continue Reading
Scruffy New Yoik riff loving funsters White Light Motorcade are set foranother take-on of the British public. During a localised attack, centredaround their debut EP release in March, the four oh-so-cool looking geezersplayed a handful of tiny gigs. They set the interest levels high, promisesmust be held true and so prepare for the come-back, or should that become-on? The band are huge fans of Brit rock and classic power pop and with the extracred of Brad Jones (Jellyfish et al) Continue Reading
There’s a chink of distorted guitar, some background clatter, then a lazy chugging riff and a sedated, sarcastic lyric: “Wire is coming back again/Elastica got sued by them/When Michael Jackson dies/We’re covering Blackbird”. Classic Courtney Taylor (or Taylor-Taylor as it is to you now) behaviour. But bah! We’ve been short-changed! Then in steams ‘We Used To Be Friends’. A veritable flexibly-legged summer anthem (with a capital ‘EM) perhaps, one of the best in the Warhol-party-jukebox, and with the keyboards nudged Continue Reading