Archive For The “alternative” Category
Taut as body builders’ biceps, TV on the Radio are the Talking Heads de nos jours. And possibly the most exciting and innovative rock band on the planet. Hyperbole? Maybe, but this album reminds me why I love music so much. It is spiky, difficult and wildly exciting. Intelligent rock music. Another poke in the … Continue reading »
As excellent a collaboration as we are likely to hear all year; King Creosote’s ethereal folk, subtly enhanced by Jon Hopkins electronics and threaded with found samples. The songs are taken from various points in a twenty year career, re-recorded and sequenced into a coherent whole that presents in King Creosote’s own words, “a romanticised … Continue reading »
Phil Spektor meets the Shangri Las in electroclash car crash. What’s not to like? Reminiscent in tone of Groove Armada’s ‘Paper Romance’ this album takes tales of break up, revenge and despair, sets them to the most infuriatingly catchy melodies and whips a synthtastic souffle of pounding percussion, tinkling bells and girly vocals into one … Continue reading »
Something of a mystery surrounds this record – it was withdrawn a couple of weeks before its scheduled release date, but not before preview copies had been sent out to the press. it consists of twelve tracks, four of which resurfaced on “Nerve Net” and one on the CD single ‘Ali Click’. Others, if my … Continue reading »
Uplifting is not an adjective that has ever been applied to a Radiohead album as far as I know. And this is unlikely to break the mould. Quite what constitutes the vein of melancholy that this band taps into in the youth of the day is a complete mystery to me, however I have to … Continue reading »
From the days when men were men and Ray Davies took a song about an encounter with a transvestite to the top of the charts. The story of the Kinks is a strange one. A prodigiously gifted songwriter, Ray Davies was always an outsider to the Beatles and Stones in-crowd. His acutely observed vignettes of … Continue reading »
Simply. Brilliant. Take that Mr. Cowell… There are times when it seems its just not worth chewing through the straps and for those of us that remember Thatcherism in all it’s hideous detail, the empty council housing, the riots in Parliament Square, the pointless and tragic Falklands conflict, even Ben Elton deserves to be recognised [...]
Just as Rock is officially declared dead, along comes Anna Calvi, a singer and guitarist of determined originality to breathe life into the twitching corpse. Touchstones include Diamanda Galas, PJ Harvey, Edith Piaf, Brian Eno and David Lynch. Occasionally as forbidding as it is bewitching, this album is splendidly gothic, epic even. Better yet, we [...]
A reigning in of sorts (did you see what I did there?). Seriously, though the epic prog folk of ‘The Crane Wife’ and ‘Castaways and Cutouts’ has been abandoned in favour of a beautifully produced collection of songs, the Decemberists draw on the well of melancholia to good effect. Sadly it was for their wilful [...]
