Pity or detest as you may Hippy Dicky’s output thus far this century, there’s something that keeps us rooting for him. Perhaps we shouldn’t be swayed so easily, but it’s only the sort of thing that’s pushed the likes of the Arctic Monkeys up from colloquial pub-punk to iPod-melting icons of cool. It’s the kind of thing that is usually the preserve of the young and reckless, that only usually gets smothered or exchanged or ridiculed as bands push their Continue Reading

Is it me or are Belle & Sebastian albums sounding more like a day at the office with each passing release? Don’t take that as some sort of errant snobbiness though, it really isn’t. Some of us have bloody nice jobs, in vibrant places of work. Some of us don’t, but you take the point. It’s just they have, in the space of 7 albums, morphed from a sheepish invite-only indie-pact with the curtains closed into an electrically-powered effervescent pop Continue Reading

As much I liked the rasping, razor-sharp butchness of new single ‘Superchannel’ it still retained the unsavoury odour of a sweaty, 40-year old male thumping around on the dancefloor in a clash t-shirt, a pair of Doctor Martens and a Levi Red-Tab jacket he’d weathered expertly since the mid-eighties. So imagine my surprise when the album follows up this same said elixir-seeking missile with the equally defiant and prevailing pogo through the punk archives that is ‘Without A Fight’. Pitched Continue Reading

Formed in 1998 in Louisville, Kentucky, Code Red contain the body work of one MC Manfred (three tattoos, a fresh baldy, a few bad acid trips), one El One Wise (ex military officer, word-builder, business school graduate, short and to the point) one producer Watz (long, hard and lonely, long-distance driver, sound-student, bill payer, man with a dream) and one Junior Dread (unruly Jamaican vagabond, corrected juvenile, former soldier, storm survivor, man with nine-lives). Another hip-hop band exploding out of Continue Reading

If we were being honest, very honest, we’d have to agree that even queens of the heartbreak vocal fail to stir the imagination of a record buying public in the same way a pack of salivating youths with switch-guitars and guerrilla marketing scams can. Take those sickeningly vital chart shakers, the Arctic Monkeys; who would you rather have tear open the ring pull on your end-of-term party – Alex Turner and his pals or the gentle, purring melancholy of your Stuart Staples? Continue Reading

Ministry of Sound releases in the past have always been a bit of patchy affair. Big on commercial gloss, big on names but hardly low on self-esteem. Recently though, the whole credibility of the label has been reanimated with last year’s first proper ‘Sessions’s album in years, ‘nastydirtysexmusic’, hot off the beaches of Ibiza and still cooking on arrival from London Heathrow. On that occasion, it was Smokin Jo & Tim Sheridan dishing all the dirt, this time round it’s Continue Reading

Take three unlikely misfits from Wakefield near Leeds, a baseball cap, an old keyboard bought with a couple of quid at Cash Converters plus some charity-shop harmonies and you have the kind of frightfully friendly pick and mix pop that saw the Fiery Furnaces scale the dizzy heights of kooky anonymity and shaped the lives of John Shuttleworths everywhere. It’s a simple brief: instantly hummable tunes, a childlike grasp of arrangements and a brutal disregard for fashion. The result? A Continue Reading

It’s one thing not to believe the hype; it’s quite another to remain unaffected by it and I doubt there’s a creature in the industry who hasn’t braced themselves for what probably amounts to the most significant musical event to have happened in fookin’ ages; those wiry and septic social observers of the North, the Arctic Monkeys, are about to release their ridiculously long awaited full-length, ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’. It’s ahead of time, ahead Continue Reading

by Mat and Rob in late 2001 in Birstall, Leicestershire (unofficial capital of Rock’n’roll), DMB have released their third album in two years with the eminently charming Boom Times! The album has an attractively understated opening – See You In shuffles into your conciousness like a guest popping their head round the door, unsure of their welcome as Graham Coxonesque vocals weave over soft chords before finding the confidence to launch into a sedate but glowing indie ballad. Songs such Continue Reading