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

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 […]
Plucked from obscurity over in the US by Elbow, a band recently and famously plucked from the gallows by last gasp blaster The Seldom Seen Kid, Jesca Hoop has come to our shores backed by Britain’s newest favourite band. But it seems to me that she’s been plucked from somewhere far less familiar than the […]

ALBUM: JESCA HOOP – HUNTING MY DRESS

ALBUM: Mumford and Sons – Sign No More

There’s a festival feel here. I’m not sure which one either. Whether it’s the easy informality of Leicester’s Summer Sundae or something more profound like echoes of Woodstock. But I am sure that the songs are wonderful. They’re uplifting, skipping along with a deftness of touch which makes them comfortably familiar and yet still fresh […]
The problem With It Feels So Good When I Stop is that it was recorded as an accompaniment to his novel of the same name, and though I know it would infinitely augment the quality of this review I can’t be bothered to read it. However, if I was to take a wild stab at […]

ALBUM: Joe Pernice – It Feels So Good When I Stop (Novel Soundtrack)

ALBUM: Dan Mangan – Nice, Nice, Very Nice

Gracenotes only gives you one option – Nice, Nice, Very Nice is folk it solemnly declares. But don’t let that mislead you, as it most certainly isn’t. Acoustic singer-songwriter… OK, so those are misnomers too. Whatever it is or whatever it isn’t, Dan Mangan’s got an earnest voice, wrapping his vocals around decisive lyrics – these aren’t […]
I was quite excited for the album ‘About Love’ by Plastiscines;a quartet of “super-extra-hot French girls” who promised to take us by the scruff of our necks and force-feed us French grunge. By the time I’d reached track three, my illusions of this band being a part of ‘Girl Power’ 2010 were shattered, and I was […]

ALBUM: Plastiscines – About Love

ALBUM: Eamon McGrath – 13 Songs of Whiskey and Light

As Eamon slurs through smoke-shredded throat, “Well I got myself a drinking problem now, but I blame it on the town,” during the jagged and shadowy ‘Desperation, Alberta’, you’ll get butterflies and register that this album is superb. This Canadian fella has only just hit his twenties, that’s the scary thing. He sounds like he has […]
Opening with gentle guitar picking and breathy vocals, Hey Rosetta!’s ‘Into Your Lungs’ gradually builds, picking up all manner of instruments along the way and regularly bursting into uplifting chorus. One can’t help but be buouyed by the mood of these Canadian rockers, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard such an eclectic mix of […]

ALBUM: Hey Rosetta! – Into Your Lungs (and around in your heart and on through your blood)

ALBUM: Castrovalva – We Are A Unit

Whether Castrovalva took their name from the Escher lithograph or the Doctor Who series is unclear. What is certain is that this band’s output, which sounds like it’s been brewed up in Satan’s oily tar pits to bubble out through one of BP’s catastrophes, is as murky as hell. “We Are A Unit” is a […]