Jean-Xavier Boucherat on the most cleverly named festival since Rockness, Doune the Rabbit Hole Jamie Murray is one of the names behind a somewhat curious event that took place near the sleepy burgh of Doune last summer. I wasn’t there, but apparently, in what was an all-together phenomenal coincidence, a sizeable number of campers (including [...]
Japanther Captains Rest 10/02/11 Japanther use cassette tape players in their live shows. They like to perform their art-punk-dance-party-silliness over recordings of their own songs. You hear it and you ask yourself all kinds of pointless questions about artistic ownership and the nature of performance. That, or you spend the next week boring your friends [...]
Trolling through endless review material to ascertain a flavour of what the furry sextet had to offer, the same buzzwords appear time again so much so that if we were to get our Staedtler highlighter out for the occasion there would be a florescent rainbow of ‘twee’ and ‘high fructose’ scrawled across our jotters. Nevertheless, [...]
NME Tour 2011 O2 Academy 3/02/11 This year’s NME Tour line-up consists of The Vaccines, Everything Everything, Magnetic Man and Crystal Castles. Disappointing list? Well in comparison to last year’s Maccabees and Bombay Bicycle Club, and 2009’s Glasvegas and Friendly Fires, I would have to say ‘YES’. As far as I was concerned, The Vaccines [...]
In her eighth studio album, Polly Harvey has taken a significantly different route from any of her previous works. There is little resemblance to the grunge of her first releases, nor is there any likeness to the sparse piano and breathy vocals of her last album, White Chalk. Instead, Harvey has done what it seems [...]
The award winning Glasgow based music festival was back again this January, bigger and better than ever. The cross-genre, multi-venue extravaganza showcased a little bit of everything, from hot new talent (Rachel Sermanni) to guitar legends (Richard Thompson), folk heroes (Sharon Shannon) to Indie giants (The Walkmen). With so many fantastic evenings of music you [...]
Nick Biggs talks with Iron & Wine about religious influence, film professorship and the joys of collaboration. Over the last decade Sam Beam (or Iron & Wine, as he is better known) has become well known for writing songs about love, recording on a shoe-string, and his distinctive, melodic guitar picking. His new release, entitled [...]
Jean-Xavier Boucherat chats with Ben Chansy, aka Six Organs of Admittance. As might have been mentioned, we’re big fans of inane genre tags. The uselessly vague Freak-Folk label started getting thrown around in self-absorbed magazines around about the turn of the century and since then has repeatedly failed to encapsulate an abundance of interesting sounds, [...]
My flatmate said something really clever not so long ago, which was, there is really just too much music. He’s almost certainly right. Musicians and producers the world over should really take a year out and let everyone catch up. I can just see lovers the world over locking themselves up in cheap hotel rooms, [...]
I wearied of the term dubstep far quicker than I imagined I would, and as such I instantaneously grew weary of the term post-dubstep. As the year begins to shape up, and various music polls tip their tainted hats towards ‘new’ artists that have been recording and releasing music for a considerable time longer than published, [...]
