Absolute class. Outfoxing the likes of nouveau jazz sirens like Amy Winehouse, the Poistal Service’s remix of Nina Simone’s lyrical and melancholy ‘Little Girl Blue’ provides a rich, spiritual and dazzling introduction to what amounts to a very, very fine remix album indeed. With a melody lifted from the traditional Christmas carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’, some bubbling beats and an android groove producer Jimmy Tamborello prepares the way for a bakers half-dozen or so tracks of unexpected turns and surprises. Continue Reading

You are not this album’s best friend. Yet. Though maybe you will be, maybe that’s the deal here. It treats you as if you are from the word go. Actually, that word is “I” and is followed by “checked into a bargain priced room in La Cienega”, followed by many many more chattering illustrations. Those words are so vivid and familiarly worn that he, John Darniele, could surely only have chosen them for an intimate exchange. You don’t address a Continue Reading

It would appear that Hal could well be the new Dodgy. Apart from the fact that they do sound like the twee 90s hippie popsters to a degree, and share their unblinkered musical optimism, we can see this band being plastered all over the outdoor stages at this summer’s festivals, harvesting a few I’m-yer-behst-mate style mass-singy-songs and splitting opinion right down the middle. Of course in their more immediate surroundings they’re having a go at grabbing the new The Thrills Continue Reading

Having previously been a part of Twisted Nerve’s Dakota Oak Trio and still only one album into his solo career – the Derbyshire born Pedro (James Rutledge) has harvested his increasingly ‘cult status’ EPs and potted them in one gorgeously pastoral product. Gently recalling the charming, acoustic innocence of Lemon Jelly’s ‘Lost Horizons’ and cryptic mothballs like Andy Votel, ‘Early Pedro’ curls like a placid mountain stream around paddy fields of flickering electronica. Quietly rural. Naively rustic. Tracks like ‘This Continue Reading

A band is never as exciting as in its opening moments – all the acceleration, the promise, the hunger and ambition of all the years leading up to that point. Only that’s not always true. Some bands start good and get better. The National are one of those bands, and they just got better, a whole load better in fact. That’s pretty good considering they’re the authors of 2003’s inimitably classy ‘Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers’ record. And who could Continue Reading

Washington DC’s Dead Meadow became a reality back in 1998, fusing an appreciation of early 70’s hard rock and 60’s psychedelia with their love of writers J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. You know exactly where this is going, don’t you? Yeah, Snow Patrol this ain’t. Welcome to a land where lashing slow-motion guitars sound like an armour-clad warrior battling through milkshake-thick fog, axe symbolically elevated over the head. A land where songs sound like stoned dreams and where they no Continue Reading

The idea at the time seemed a bit ludicrous. But little did we know then that a decade later the same thing was going to be what humourless PR execs would probably regularly refer to as the “crown jewels” of Saturday night ITV. Only Pete Waterman, Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell never shook a maraca, strummed a guitar, or wiggled their arses onstage behind Gareth Gates et al as their backing bands. Small mercies. But Garbage succeeded in the first Continue Reading

It’s a lot to take on board, we know, but it’s there all the same. EMI have just reissued a small four-part collection of ex-glamster, Brian Eno’s film scores and public ambient announcements. This is in addition to the half-dozen or so album they released last year chronicling the early phase of his solo career as pop-surrealist to his middle years as daddy of all that is ambient. So let’s get started with the main bulk of the material. Produced Continue Reading

There’s a back story, you know there’s a back story. But that’s not really worth going into now. Save for perhaps a dash of compare and contrast, and to point out that almost without warning, and from the shadows, Coxon has assembled a body of work not far off that of his former band. ‘Happiness In Magazines’ was certainly a shelf or two above the incomplete sounding ‘Think Tank’. And that’s not said lightly or without prior consideration. He’s done Continue Reading

Last we heard of Miss Lorson was 1993’s darkly expressionistic mood record, ‘Piano Creeps’ with partner Billy Cote. It was a good album, sensitively compiled and executed but a little lacking in the actual ‘songs’ department, so it comes as a pleasant surprise to find Mary in robust lyrical health and chirping as sprightly and as brightly as a nightingale once again. So what’s changed? Well, there was the birth of Mary and Billy’s son, Roman and Mary’s recovery from Continue Reading