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

ALBUM: Cloud Nothings – Turning On

There’s such a buzz behind Cloud Nothings at the moment that it’s easy to imagine that they could be the next American alternative act to break through big, which makes the release of their debut album Turning Onrather timely. With that in mind, ‘Can’t Stay Awake’ is a fantastic way to open proceedings, very much a […]
In popular music time is nearly always against you. Most genres lend themselves to younger musicians. The apolitical/anti-political sentiments of the punk movement would have sounded lame and childish if they’d been sung by OAPs (though The Sex Pistol’s are immature regardless), and Westlife would never count legions of screaming, braindead female fans (and Wayne […]

ALBUM: John Fairhurst – Band

ALBUM: Denis Jones – Red + Yellow =

I’ve seen Denis Jones live thrice – once was with a full band, and it was the least effective of the three. The other shows gained a lot from the fact that Denis does everything himself (mostly with a loop pedal) – and it’s genuinely fascinating to watch him do it. I’m worried that this […]
Scrolling through FatCat’s recent and upcoming releases, it is abundantly clear that they set thebenchmark for fascinating, challenging alternative music of a standard that other record labels could only dream of. Few, though, are more challenging or fascinating than Hauschka, and no one takes as long to set up for a show. Until recently it took […]

ALBUM: Hauschka – Foreign Landscapes