There is a billboard just round the corner from my flat that I pass every morning on the way to work. It features the assertion, beneath 4 rather anonymous, skinny black jean clad youths, that Razorlight’s eponymous second record is, and I quote, “the best guitar album since Definitely Maybe”. Well, indeed. Courtesy of Q Magazine, if you were curious. Which says an awful lot more about Q Magazine, that writer and its blunted senses than it does about this Continue Reading

There’s really no introduction neccessary for Ben Watt: one half of the duo ‘Everything But The Girl’ and the creative loci for tracks like ‘Missing’ (remixed by Todd Terry) as well as for work with Deep Dish and Massive Attack; worlds apart from his humble beginnings in Hull and as spokesman for the band’s inoffensive brand of jazzy, acoustic pop music that was Ben and Tracy’s staple. Cut to 2002, and a raw underground House track by Ben Watt intended Continue Reading

Formed in Edinburgh, 1979, where they performed standards and soul classics to a largely perplexed punk audience, Billy MacKenzie and Alan Rankine were the Associates – a rich and dramatic, occasionally avant-garde collective, responsible for some of the most enduring and romantic records of the early 1980s and reaching something a personal zenith with the critically lauded ‘Sulk’ album after leaving Fiction Records for WEA in 1982 – the promise of a mightier budget lending itself perfectly to MacKenzies’ booming, Continue Reading

Peaches, Chicks On Speed, The Rapture, LCD Soundsytem, Miss Kittin. There isn’t anything we haven’t seen here before in one degenerate guise or another. But then you could say that about anything. I’ve seen plenty bags of chips before, but that doesn’t mean I’ll refuse a wee bag should a plate of haddock and peas look naked without them. It really all depends on how many you want stocked in your freezer at any one time, I guess. But there’s Continue Reading

It could be argued that with the release of his first ‘solo’ album Thom Yorke has engineered himself into a lose-lose situation. Unable to go down the road of breaking brazenly free from his routine in a fit of suppressed creativity – mainly because he already had Radiohead do that as a group with 2000’s much celebrated/maligned talking point ‘Kid A’ – he’s left to pursue exploration already explored, perhaps undermining the necessity for its existence and muting the fanfare Continue Reading

Difficult to believe on the minimal, buzzing evidence of ‘Praying Mantis’ alone, but Rui Da Silva is the Portuguese producer and DJ, whose single ‘Touch Me’ (featuring the vocals of Cassandra Fox) topped the UK Chart in 2001. But that’s not all; Rui has also achieved a certain amount of notoriety as a remixer of Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Play’, the Lighthouse Family’s ‘Happy’ and Yoko Ono’s ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. So how does one leap from the environs of mainstream dance Continue Reading

Fair play to them, since the release of ‘Insomnia’ in 1995, Faithless have matured into an internationally respected act. Selling in excess of 1,000,000 in the UK alone the band’s recent ‘Greatest Hits’ album went triple platinum. A group of UK musicians described originally as a cross between trip-hop and dance, Faithless garnered attention for tracks like ‘God Is A DJ’ and ‘We Come 1’. Attempts to blend a range of genres into a mixtape sounding collection of sounds gave Continue Reading

What’s in an influence, eh? At what point does inspiration blur unkindly across of the boundaries of theft? It’s a question that has held court in a million pub debates: did Oasis rip off The Beatles? Did Gene copy the Smiths? Do the likes of The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand continue to plunder he archives of bands like the Gang Of Four? My own view is that there’s a point at which the hand that guides the pen of the Continue Reading

“There’s poetry in an empty Coke can / There’s majesty in a burnt out caravan” The mainstream can be an exciting place, and is, sometimes. But ordinarily it’s quite a dirty word, for something so clean. The oddballs know to congregate elsewhere, somewhere darker and with less ventilation. Would David Bowie still become the biggest pop star in the country (or a pop star at all) were he rooting around in the dressing-up box for the first time in 2006? Continue Reading

Since the beginning of this year, They Might Be Giants have been releasing a free monthly podcast. Irfan Shah was given a guided tour round some of the highlights so far… Here they come again, parodic, rhapsodic, flippant and ingenious. They Might Be Giants, a dozen or so albums down the line, are as close to a twenty-first century Bonzo Dog Band as it’s possible to get, with their huge span of musical styles, the twisted joy of the music, Continue Reading