Wild Nothing, Arches; 9/11/10 I love going to gigs, don’t get me wrong. But the one thing I hate when reviewing live music is that tense moment beforehand. You say your name at the door, and the girl (who, incidentally, always seems to be, in the immortal words of Kimya Dawson, the ‘skinny pretty girl [...]
Avey Tare – Down There (Paw Tracks) Down There is weird. There’s no other way of putting it. An assortment of voices take it in turns to hum and murmur, drifting in and out from behind dampened drum beats and an unlikely assortment of electronic rumbles and gurgles. But then again, would you expect anything [...]
Boy & Bear, Captain’s Rest, 2/12/10 Hailing from Sydney, Australia, Boy & Bear are a five piece outfit that are taking the burgeoning indie-folk pocket by storm. They have been lavished with critical acclaim since early 2009 but have also put up with being dubbed, rather glibly, as musical copycats, most notably of indie-folk royalty [...]
Kanye West is never far from controversy. If he isn’t speculating that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, it’s probably because he’s busy accusing MTV of institutional racism. It’s flavoured opinions such as these that have cast him as a divisive figure in the world of pop music, and there’s no shortage of evidence [...]
Ironic veneration of the past; don’t it just make you sick? Especially when you consider the possibility that current levels of retro-worship in all its tiresome, shallow forms might actually be distorting the efforts of the numerous outfits out there that have tastefully incorporated elements of the past into their sound, with the greatest sincerity. [...]
I’m not from around here. As badly as I might want to believe I can slyly fit in, as soon as I open my mouth – or in this case buy a ticket to a gig – it’s clear that I don’t belong. Nervous as hell when flying away from my dear Pacific Ocean, I [...]
Seeing as it’s our first issue of the year lets forget the usual wild-speculation-on-the-nature-of-the-generations-musical-identity malarky and keep it light. You’ve probably been hearing some unfortunate people throwing words like beach house, chill-wave or post-hypnogogic pop about. I’m sick of these people having all the fun making up genre names, so here are five as of [...]
When Swans disbanded in 1997, they left the world with the two-disc epic ‘Soundtracks for the Blind’, a collection of dark soundscapes, found sound and field recordings, and ambitious post-rock explorations. The parting gift was a testament to just how much the bands sound has developed since emerging from that short lived hipster wet-dream otherwise [...]
Deerhunter Halcyon Digest 4AD 28/9/10 Halcyon Digest will be the album to propel Deerhunter from their position as interesting indie outsiders into the front line of progressive, experimental pop music. Possibly. Halcyon Digest is a good album, very good in fact. But if making good music alone were enough to win popular acclaim, Bradford Cox, [...]
How To Dress Well Love Remains Lefse 20/9/10 It has been a year now since Tom Krell emerged from the forsaken playground of contemporary R&B as a salutary evening star. Behind the gentle moniker of How To Dress Well, Krell has put together the forgotten patterns of the 1990s to reconfigure them in an unparalleled [...]
