Acoustic

Reviews

The King Is Dead ~ The Decemberists

The Decemberists’ Colin Melloy describes ‘The King Is Dead’ as an exercise in restraint, and he ain’t whistling Dixie, not when you recall that the band’s 2009 release, ‘The Hazards of Love’ was by contrast an exercise in epic, high-concept, multi-layered, unfathomably compound, high-fulutin’ boreal forest romance craftin’, hewn out of the very rocks that line the banks of the Hudson River; a rock opera in the mould of Tam Lin and The Scarlet Letter – only with more random Continue Reading

Reviews

You can’t polish a turd. Whoever said that? Were they onto something or were they just talking shit? The reality was something we knew all along: the turd was quite happy feeling shit. When you’ve been unceremoniously squeezed out of someone’s arse and suffered the ignominy of being chewed up, absorbed and subjected to the usual slings and arrows of the exhausting digestive process, you’re unlikely to respond positively to the demands of civil society, style or no style. Turds Continue Reading

Reviews

O ~ Damien Rice

It’s hard to expect all that much from a genre steeped so richly in tradition and built firmly on the foundations of convention and institution. Yeah, it can cast its shards of influence far and wide, but when stripped back to its bare bones Irish folk music seems convinced that it’ll have to apply a sticky plaster if lead too far off course. Now it’s not that Damien Rice has snapped his wooden stool over his knee or anything, it’s Continue Reading