They may have lacked the marketable quirks of some of their peers when they appeared from nowhere with ‘A Certain Trigger’, but they were spotless, nary a foot nor combed-over hair out of place. And they turned out to be more literate than The Rakes, more immediately accessible than The Futureheads and frankly more reliable than most. Their massive success, initially surprising, can probably be attributed to the fact that there was, and is, nothing much to dislike about them. Continue Reading

These are frenzied times and we are busy people. Very busy. Patience is a virtue requiring more intense magnification than ever before, and one so very rarely indulged. It’s almost more trouble than it’s worth trying to hold your attention from one. Moment to the next. See, I even had to split that last sentence to increase my chances of you actually making it to the end. The days of poring over one band emphatically to the point that it Continue Reading

Remember the sixties? Of course you don’t, they were ages ago. Yes, before MySpace. Before there was even anything to play MySpace on. It wasn’t Betamax compatible, was it? I’d say ask your parents, but if the telly is to be believed they were probably dancing naked in a park in San Francisco, or wrapped around a tree (or a Rolling Stone) in swinging London, under the whale-numbing influence of an uninhibitedly creative cocktail of drugs unsoiled by the impending Continue Reading

If the swinging sixties-retro of the gas-guzzling ‘Setting Sun’ is anything to go by, The Aliens are throwing in more references than a final year dissertation on astro-physics, tipping more winks than a nodding dog and creating a kind of myspace traditionally reserved for aging hippies and zen-style motor mechanics. It’s like Dennis Hopper never got off his motorcycle. It’s like Jimi Hendrix never choked on his own vomit. It’s like The Doors went on to write folk records and Continue Reading

Save Your Face: hyperventilating country songs sucked into the vortex of a tornado then spewed across a sprawling Oxford landscape, mangling traditional country and western mythologies with their twisted, elliptical word-play, their misshapen chords and laying deliberate tripwires for the listener. And then they’re off screaming down alleyways and shimmying up drainpipes like wildcats. An album that could quite easily have been sub-titled ‘fear, loathing and getting out of tight scrapes in overcrowded bars’. It’s the kind of thing Supergrass Continue Reading

You can’t criticise a chap for naming himself Faris Rotter (or Joshua Von Grimm or Spider Webb) when just about everybody else making music is called something like Tom Chaplin (or  Chris Martin or Gary ‘Bloody’ Lightbody). You just can’t. And you can’t just have a pop at rock band for having abstract-goth vaudeville creations atop their heads when the most glamorous haircuts in British rock for the past decade could almost universally achieved with the aid of a medium Continue Reading

Strange one this. Difficult to pin it down exactly. Here we have a dose of luscious lounge, gently unfolding latin-beats, prickly blues-guitar and a delicate salsa spiciness. Featuring cameos and contributions from guitarists and writers like Ryan Scott, trumpet-man Kevin Louis, bas-player Andy Cotton, accordionist Nico Davis, percussionist David Martinez, Alex Huberty, David Brandt, the West Coast’s Luz Fleming (pronounced ‘Loose’) dishes up an unsually soft-focus menagerie of latin, jazz and roots reggae; part-sampled, part-live, part-programmed, part-played. My only gripe is Continue Reading

Excuse me if it sounds dismissive in any way, but rather than squeeze The Cat Empire within the fashionably cynical straight-jacket of shamelessly British artists like The Streets, Braintax and that inscrutably naff ska-pop-reggae-grime-anything-that’s-going pop princess, Lily Allen, Cat Empire’s press peeps ought to concentrating on the rich seam of roots based acoustic surf rock being mined from a faultline that includes San Francisco’s Bag Of Toys and Philly’s G. Love and Special Sauce. Yes the truth is really that Continue Reading

‘Can you vision this place?Where music defines our every move. A place where music is a sanctuary. A place where music is a winding road that leads to the most beautiful rainbow. A place where music is more important than the DJ, the promoter, the venue, the producer’. Aye, I can ‘vision’ it all right. This is the ‘vision’ we call Tescos – and we go there every Saturday morning right after swimming to see which CDs can be grabbed Continue Reading

The Kaisers’ sophomore album has us questioning our sanity somewhat, which is a reaction, but surely way down the list of preferable impressions. This is undeniably the Kaiser Chiefs, doing what the Kaiser Chiefs undeniably do. It “na na na”s and it “la la la”s and it almost inevitably “ooo-eee-ooo-oo”s. It has beats that could spur the most statuesque to pogo with unconscious glee. There are fun-size guitar riffs jostling playfully with one another. There are lyrics that require little Continue Reading