May 2012
1 post
8 tags
Josefina Sanner - Sirens
Nora Jones was always one with a voice to sell a cup of coffee. A bit of light jazz, add a the accoustic echo of a rainy sunday afternoon and suddenly it’s all perculators blazing. Figuratively speaking.
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Josefina Sanner belongs to a similar world. It’s middle aged and middle-class and totally inoffensive.
Annoyingly however it’s also got some fairly efficient ways...
March 2012
1 post
11 tags
Katrin The Thrill - Earth Is Calling Us EP
The sub-title of this review could be “Is there a place for 90’s throw-back indie-rock?”
I won’t hold you in suspense, the answer is no, not particularly - or if there is a space for it it’s in the multi-disc changers of worn ford mondeos of family men who once quite fancied PJ Harvey.
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The problem is that this kind of music was supposed to be...
February 2012
2 posts
7 tags
Hutch Demouilpied - Otherness
Some albums seem split in two. While this one may come with a remixes disc, the divide doesn’t appear here.
No the fault-lines in the album run through every song, and every “remix”.
The remixes are less than dribbling distance away from the originals and are barely worth investigating beyond the few moments of interest in “Otherworldly” by William Fields, or...
12 tags
Easychord - Not In My Family Tree
Someone out there is clearly pining for a Tangerine Dream cover album. Otherwise I can’t see a reason for easychord to exist.
This is less a lesson in ambient soundscaping - it’s much more like a ambient whitewash. It’ll come out in the rain. The fields of noise do seem to have a pleasent “washing,” quality, you know, like the trusty slush of a white good procured...
January 2012
3 posts
10 tags
Monks of Mellonwah - Stars Are Out EP
Monks of Mellonwah, while not suckling the be-socked “teat” of Anthony Kedis and Flea of Red Hot Chilli Peppers fame, seem to want to get laid. Really badly it seem. So much so they’ve invested their time in putting together a cod(-piece?) -funk/rock band - assuming that this is definitely the best way to find themselves balls-deep in, well, in.
Mentioning Red Hot Chilli...
10 tags
Whistle Peak - Half Asleep Upon Echo Falls
I like an album which wants to play hide and seek with you. Radiohead used to do it a lot and Elbow’s first album is a great example of it; melody, sound, texture all hidden or unexpected. It’s a bit like a series of lovely ambushes on your ears. It lets you come back to the album again and again, there’s unpicking to be done after all!
I do admit to having a soft spot for a...
6 tags
Paul Newman & The Ride Home - The Importance of...
Paul Newman & The Ride Home are a Baltimore pop-punk combo who want to ruin your afternoon.
There’s only so much flat vocal delivery you can take in one album. It’s mainly a problem for “serious” pop-punk bands. The trap which always closes steel tooth’d around the ankle of these bands is the chorus.
“Chorus”, in “serious”...
October 2011
2 posts
8 tags
The Petter Seander - Til Death Do Us Apart
If you were going to write an album cynically with the intention of having your songs played on BBC Radio 1 16 months ago there would be few better blueprints than The Petter Seander’s “Til Death Do Us Apart”.
Slightly buzzy guitars and straight-up beats pervade throughout. Lyrically uninspiring, but hitting the right buttons to be played during lunch-time on Radio 1.
...
5 tags
GLEAM - Lady Psyché And Her Heart Mechanix
GLEAM are an interesting duo in their way, swinging from broad pop-rock choruses which wouldn’t be out of place on a U2 or ToTo album (please contain your vomit, chipmunk-like, in your cheeks for the moment) to Jarvis Cocker mumble-verses, angular Talking Heads-esque breaks, and Zeppelin-like drum-drum-tumbles. (Yes, you can swallow that chunky vomit back down now, save it for another...
September 2011
2 posts
8 tags
Big Eye Family Players - Family Favourites
Instrumental pop music falls roughly into two groups: one side represented by grand and epic post rock sound-mangle wankery and the other a focused soundtrack-esque narrative strain.
Big Eye Family Players are the second kind of cunts.
Like the Go Team without that feeling of a narrative arc they fling their pleasant enough Americana-tinged classical/jazz-trundling into your ear-brackets....
11 tags
Silver Tongues - Black Kite
Silver Tongues’ debut really felt like they wouldn’t disappoint; a stomping intro with some claps, a little funeral organ in “Highways” and interesting but familiar texture to the thing - a bit like David Sylvian/Japan - except sung a little off; showing not inadmirable weakness. Then I realise it’s not really Japan being channelled here, it’s Matchbox fucking...
July 2011
1 post
8 tags
Barry - Yawin' In The Dawnin'
Some would accuse this site of being one filled with endless pessimism; the glass is always half empty for us. With this in mind there has never been a more fitting EP to land in our inbox than “Yawnin’ in the Dawnin’” by Barry, a folk-rock four-piece. They feel like a capable band cracking out tunes, but they need their glasses topped up - with more whores whiskey and...
June 2011
1 post
9 tags
Genco - Confused Einstein
Genco’s debut is little more than whisper on the U-bahn between tipsy would-be-lovers. Deathly sparse but unrestrained you feel that the effort gone into making this album, the pure energy would be barely enough to boil an nearly empty kettle and make a cup of weak tea - even in a pyramid shaped bag which allows effortless circulation of the ground tea-leaves - without milk.
And yet it is...
May 2011
2 posts
9 tags
Wallscenery Demos - Half Asleep. Half awake
This week Wallscenery Demos offer up their third album for our greedy ear-gullets to swallow whole or choke on at least. The album opens with promising guitar fuzz, the kind of muted guitar fuzz-waves-in-aglass-box noises you absolutely fucking loved from Here Come The Warm Jets. The guitars lace and play with each other, one cheekily unzipping the other in the hope of something meaty.
Sadly...
16 tags
My Panda Shall Fly - Sorry I Took So Long
Sorry I Took So Long contains the required wet popping noises of a ping pong ball being blasted from the masterful vagina of a bangkok hooker and hip-hop inspired tape-warble to place it firmly in the “post dubstep” landscape. Yet this particular part of that sound-scape real-estate equates to something more like daft-punk asleep at the wheel of an aging hipster coach trip to the seaside. It’s...
April 2011
3 posts
25 tags
Fifty/Fifty - Political Affairs
National pride. Some think it’s out of fashion, some think it’s been made illegal by insane jobsworths (turns out the people who believe this are insane jobsworths), and others make music to celebrate it.
Enter stage left: Fifty/Fifty. British? Yep. Young? Yep. Angry as a badger with a hangover? Certainly. Proud of their country? As much as anyone could want them to be.
Political...
20 tags
World Dirtnap - Parents were invented to make...
World Dirtnap aren’t your average Finnish electro metal band. Sponsored entirely by Nokia they’re the bridge we’ve always wanted between the bleepity-bleep of chiptune-pop and neo-classical Finnish “Dark” metal. Not only are they they bridge, they’re under it as well - eating …things.
Sponsored by Nokia (yes, THAT Nokia) World Dirtnap use a series of...
5 tags
Carntyne - Salvation by Imagination
Cartyne’s first album is a mixed bag. Yes, they take a mighty run up at genre hopping, mostly crashing into the barriers and bouncing off rather than through anything - but the sheer variation of ricocheting musicality is impressive.
Treading old folk lines at its core Carntyne find ways to augment their sound with dub, reggae, progressive house & thrash-core. In...
March 2011
1 post
7 tags
Spontaneous Potential - Stay up and fight
Spontaneous Potential’s first foray into the musical landscape is clearly designed to leave us dazed and confused. Heavy, lazy and violent all at once they’ve produced an album so slippery with spunk that you’d assume they’re the proprietors of an elephantine breeding club.
Heavy sub-sonic beats mix with endless static produced by the front man’s artistry of...
February 2011
5 posts
8 tags
Curse Of The Boulder Valley - Of A Pleasure
Curse Of The Boulder Valley offer us another generic dancy ear-worm. As the dance duo’s 8th studio album in their 3 month career you cannot go wrong in saying they are a prolific pair. Yet their attempts to create aural pleasure always fall a little short in differing ways between one album and the next. So there is one which goes “Wub-Wub-Wub-Wub-Wub-Wub, WubWub-Wub-Wub-Wub”...
5 tags
John van de Ruit - It's time for the human race to...
Clearly no one has told John van de Ruit that the earth, and by extension the human race, can already be found in the solar system - our one anyway.
And Yes, as the title suggests, it is space-rock. But not any old space rock, this is space rock with analog nipples. This is space rock with a wooden dial. This is space rock with brass shoes and a series of pullys and weights to get it up in the...
6 tags
Anna Pollatou - More important than any one thing
Anna Pollatou mixes the 21 year old’s love of both torch songs, and “found noises” made by industrial deforestation machinery into what is a surprisingly powerful album. Containing only one song over 83 minutes Anna grabs you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to fellate the filthy pistons of her mechanical rhythms while she recalls lost loves and loves which may have...
6 tags
Whittington Low - Oh! Do not attack me with your...
Whittington Low’s first album Oh! Do not attack me with your watch is the minstrel first foray into the wildness of borderlands Americana. Recorded inside a small wooden shack built on the boarder of the USA and Canada Whittington Low takes you by the hoof through some of the finer sights and sounds of planning applications 300 miles from anywhere. Born of English stock Whittington moved...
5 tags
You Don't Want to Know - Act as if it were...
You Don’t Want to Know’s first album Act as if it were impossible to fail blends the hateful bastard son’s of Oasis’ swagger with modern self-abusing (in the catholic sense) wankery of modern Emo-Core music. The trio, based in the up-and-coming provincial town of Burton-upon-Trent unleash a threatening groin-buldge of mascara-soaked masculinity. Trevor Turin, the...