ALBUM: Gregory and The Hawk – Leche

Gregory and The Hawk, it sounds like a children’s book does it not? Indeed, singer songwriter, Meredith Godreau, took the name from her brother, Gregory, and his imaginary childhood hawk in a George Eliot-esque move – wearing the mask of someone/something else to gain credibility and avoid being pigeonholed. In Godreau’s case it was to […]
Ray Davies is without doubt one of the UK’s very best rock & rollers – a saint amongst songwriters.  The Kinks were to north London, what The Beatles were to Liverpool and their output was equally varied – from the distorted rock & roll of “You Really Got Me” to the gorgeous mellowness of “Waterloo Sunset”. Kinky Ray […]

ALBUM: Ray Davies – See My Friends

ALBUM: Seal Cub Clubbing Club – Royal Variety

Seal Cub Clubbing Club’s ‘Royal Variety’ sounds like a mix of Radiohead, Terrorvision, Hot Chip, Arctic Monkeys, Oceansize, blah, blah, blah, blah… If you want to read a review about who this album sounds like, then go elsewhere – because although it’s easy to compare SCCC to Radiohead, especially when listening to songs like ‘The Borough’, the comparison […]
If Liars are, “…interested in the alternate spaces people create in order to maintain identity in a city like L.A. Environments where outcasts and loners celebrate a skewered relationship to society,” then Proud Evolution marks the point where a dysfunctional relationship with society becomes pathological. Amidst the extended (and demented) periods of ambient wastelands, inhabited with single repetitive notes, […]

ALBUM: Liars – Proud Evolution

ALBUM: Jamiroquai – Rock Dust Light Star

Remember when Jamiroquai was cool?  Like, really… incontrovertibly….Antarctic chilly?  I remember the time of the first album, when those initial tracks began seeping through the PAs of the nightclubs I frequented in Sydney, where I was living at the time.  Those tunes sounded fresh – with great vocals, funky beds, an ecological sensibility and – well OK, admittedly, […]
In an age of dwindling profits and piracy so rampant one would imagine half of all under-30s wore eye-patches and wooden legs, it’s quite understandable that record labels don’t let untrustworthy oiks like me get our slippery hands on copies of precious, precious copyrighted music. Unfortunately, it makes it a little awkward for me to […]

ALBUM: Cradle of Filth – Darkly, Darkly Venus Aversa

ALBUM: A Genuine Freakshow – Oftentimes

Reading-based band A Genuine Freakshow is not a genuine freakshow. There are no superfluous third nipples to be found here (that I know of), no hairy babies and no gnomes or elephant men among their ranks. If anything, like putting a 5’10” Caucasian man in a cage at said freakshow, A Genuine Freakshow are disappointingly […]
Harking back to the folk and folk rock of the late 60s, there is something simultaneously retrogressive and gloriously refreshing about Sparrow and the Workshop. Belfast-born, Chicago-raised Jill O’Sullivan enunciates like Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick on the surf rock/Pixies riffing of ‘Black to Red’, and Sandy Denny on the reverberating tones of ‘Medal Around Your […]

ALBUM: Sparrow and the Workshop – Black to Red EP

ALBUM: The Dark Sky Singers – Like No English

Unusually in these times saturated with the minutiae of celebrity life, there is no superlative press release issued with this EP and little information available on the internet. This paucity of background detail is a predicament faced by those reviewing this EP before me, if the scant online critiques are anything to go by. However, […]
Refined via demo sessions at an old distillery grain store in the Scottish Highlands, Let Me Come Home has a sound that evokes its gestation – expansive, isolated, desolate and beautiful. Broken Records themselves have the sound of a folk band that gradually augmented into something louder and wider, and indeed these songs began acoustically, written in […]

ALBUM: Broken Records – Let Me Come Home