ALBUM: Motion Picture Soundtrack – The Shapes We Fear Are Of Our Own

“Every time I put this CD in my computer it makes a horrible noise”, is not the kindest way to start a review, but it’s true. I hope it’s only my promo copy of The Shapes We Fear Are of Our Own that’s dodgy and not the whole run. At least the disc is self-aware […]
From past experience we all knowPlanet Mu delivers the goods. Since its conception it’s yet to bring you anything your ears didn’t want to hear and has always been a merchant of the new and experimental. The Internal Tulipsare no exception to the rule, and with a LP entitled “Mislead into A Field By A Deformed Deer”, […]

ALBUM: The Internal Tulips – Mislead into A Field By A Deformed Deer

ALBUM: Communion – The Compilation

A Communion is defined as a joining together of minds or spirits, and although this compilation may put the fear of God into non believers with its religious connotations, the album is not a religious outpouring.  Communion is a collection of fantastic folk artists, whose music, whether you are atheist, Jew, gentile or Christian, pulls something spiritual […]
It is ten years now since Kathryn Williams’s second album Little Black Numbers garnered a Mercury Prize nomination. For a select few, including the likes of Dizzy Rascal – touted as Britain’s answer to the likes of Jay-Z but in reality rather more like our answer to MC Hammer – Mercury recognition has been the […]

ALBUM: Kathryn Williams – The Quickening

ALBUM: Shearwater – The Golden Archipelago

For those of you who weren’t cool enough to be in the Young Ornithologists Club (YOC for short), Shearwaters are medium-sized long-winged seabirds with over thirty species; and for those of you not familiar with tectonic geography, an archipelago is a chain or cluster of islands. Together they create a sense of something remote, wild and pristine […]
I hate Greatest Hits compilations for their soullessness, but on the other hand, I like The Who – especially for their soul – so this review might genuinely tear me in two, like a piece of Doublemint. ‘Tear me in two, like this album’ might have been a better analogy – the box-set comprises two discs, one […]

ALBUM: The Who – Greatest Hits and More

ALBUM: Musée Méchanique – Hold This Ghost

Conceived in and named after a museum of antique arcade machines, this Portland quintet have mastered the technique of transforming melancholic resignation into an art form and the result is wholly deserving of admiration. Like Home fades in with computer generated orchestration, arpeggio acoustic guitar notes, and a synth part that later morphs into something from […]
One thing that struck me when watching the Brits is how much of this awful pop-pap-r&b gunk we are spoon fed is not so much sung as shouted by whatever latest overdressed, overhyped bint some major has so delightfully delivered unto us.  And then you putThe Sea into your CD player, hit play, and you realise there […]

ALBUM: Corinne Bailey Rae -The Sea

ALBUM: Charlotte Gainsbourg – IRM

Charlotte Gainsbourg may very nearly share a surname with a hill-town in darkest Lincolnshire, but in fact she shares more in common with Jared Leto than arable land and sausages. This is because she an actress (a good one, best actress at Cannes Film Festival 2009 anyone?) and also a musician. So not like Jared […]
It’s always strange when hype focuses its attention on the young age of the artists in question: the press, the industry, need musicians to be young. They need to believe in youth, to keep the hype – the legend – alive. If The Big Black And The Blue had been made by two middle-aged, rather […]

ALBUM: First Aid Kit – The Big Black And The Blue