Save for a fairly half-hearted resistance to invasion, the French have had little to feel guilty about in the last fifty years. From garlic bread to Eric Cantona you can pretty much rely on their feisty, bitter magic to animate even the most insipid of dishes or laborious long-ball clashes. And their musicians are no exception, managing as they do to combine the guttural and animalistic with the bookish and the intellectual, the just plain dirty with the just plain Continue Reading

It doesn’t matter if you’re an indie kid looking for something classic, a dance head looking for something new or an old head who’s just looking for something, unite under the banner that is ‘We are Little Barrie’.  It might be forty or so years late, but it’s as if Hendrix compiled a motown covers album and the stripped, rootsy grooves oozing out the CD player don’t belie the compact quality they possess.  Breezing from Hendrix patented riffs, to blues Continue Reading

This is it. This is the one. If you blindfolded strangers in the street and asked them to pick the major label debut from its unbranded equivalents they would choose ‘Worlds Apart’ time and time again, without quibble or a request for another taste. They’d be wrong of course, but that’s not the point. ‘Source Tags & Codes’ might technically hold that position, but as scorching and intense a record as it might have been it simply made the whole Continue Reading

Just under 30 seconds into ‘Divorce’, the virgin moments of the opening track on the debut album from streamlined post-rock Essex boys Red Jetson, random ethereal insignificance gives way oh so suddenly to a crushing explosion of heavy-headed lament, a dense plummeting mass of punishing world-weariness. It’s like, I imagine, being regrettably sucked through the window of an airplane at 30,000 feet and recalling the event with reflective cinematic depth, in studied slow-motion, as you float on slipstreams shortly afterwards Continue Reading

By rights there should have been a line drawn under this whole episode a long time ago. It’d be like ‘do you remember that time way back when so and so said that thing and we were up all night laughing!?’, and you’d be like ‘Christ yeah, good times, how the years fly, yadda yadda, we should do it all again sometime’, and you’d both agree. Only you wouldn’t do it again, because those days are in the past and Continue Reading

You have to admire the restraint really, don’t you. Conceived at the height of grunge’s commercial success, when it was tricky to even nip down the shops for a pack of custard creams without treading on a fuzz pedal, their commendable mission-statement was to create music as quietly and as slowly as possible. Purveyors of (s)lowcore, whether through a reactionary stubbornness or genuine artistic desire, their methods paid great dividends. Songs developed like sketches of landscapes in the dim light Continue Reading

Athlete have gone soft. Sorry, what’s that, you say? Soft, I say. But Athlete were already soft, you say. Ahh, but not so, I say. That was a popular misconception forced upon them by short sighted folk who reacted badly to the fact that they favoured a close shave, looked like they might not be averse to a moisturising lotion and became a fairly regular fixture on Popworld and the like. You were never going to cut yourself on them Continue Reading

Here comes trouble. Just when you think you’re getting to like brother-sister duo The Fiery Furnaces they tie your shoelaces together, rip the final chapter out of your book and run off giggling delectably, leaving you aggravated and unfulfilled, but unable to rule out giving them a second chance. Their albums thus far have been investigations into the sturdiness of patience – watch a monkey throw daggers at an ice-cube for eternity and the law of averages will have him Continue Reading

It’s amazing, but on occasion it is possible for a guitar to make a wiseass tolerable. It’s true (though obviously not everyone can be saved, some just get more amplified – see the insufferable Jack Black). Of course we’re making presumptions here, based on the evidence available. And the evidence available suggests a guy who’s witty rhyming couplets and like todally easy going attitude completely define him. Take away the guitar and you’ve probably got the type of bar-fly who Continue Reading