ALBUM: THE GO! TEAM – SEMICIRCLE

Ever since they burst onto the music scene in 2004, The Go! Team have been on my gym playlist, and that’s in no way meant as an insult. Although if The Go! Team could see me red faced, sweaty and jumping around to the throws of Bottle Rocket and Junior Kickstart, they might disagree. Yet […]
BRMC aren’t a band who like to make it easy for themselves, they seem like the kind of band who throw their entire existence into making music and giving it their all at every live gig, as this writer witnessed a few years ago in Manchester, where they played for almost 3 hours! Yep, BRMC […]

ALBUM: BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB – WRONG CREATURES

ALBUM REVIEW: ZOLA JESUS – OKOVI

Nika Roza Danilova, better known as Zola Jesus, returned to her native woods of Wisconsin, built a house mere steps away from her semi-dilapidated childhood tree-fort and watched it slowly give itself back to the earth while raising her sixth offering in ‘Okovi’. Over the course of what she describes as “a profound meditation on […]
“I always remember things better than they were and miss people more than I should,” explains Austin Getz, frontman of  amber-drunk sun-seekers Turnover, when speaking of the mournful thinking behind the band’s fractured, Will Yip-produced breakthrough ‘Peripheral Vision’. Hyper-confessional meditations on sex, obsession, and loss ran through the self-crucifying offering, but where Turnover sourced ‘Peripheral […]

ALBUM REVIEW: TURNOVER – GOOD NATURE

ALBUM: L.A. WITCH – L.A. WITCH

Los Angeles three-piece LA Witch’s initial aspirations were humble: “We never really thought we would or could release an album, we were really just finding each other and finding our sound.” But following touring non-stop for the last three-years and a slew of singles on underground labels, their eponymous debut has now arrived and a […]
Often, despite writing poetry, I don’t know where the line is between poetry and song lyrics. Thankfully the mumbled spoken word of Ghostpoet stops the questions and starts the listening as he oscillates between the depth and meaning of poetry and experimental electronic sounds. I don’t know what the genre tag is for his music […]

ALBUM REVIEW: GHOSTPOET ‘DARK DAYS AND CANAPES’

ALBUM: THE WAR ON DRUGS – A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING

“We as a band went from worrying about the record to worrying about the person,” speaks The War on Drugs bassist Dave Hartley of Adam Granduciel during the making of ‘Lost In The Dream’, the band’s critic-aligning breakthrough – birthed in the grip of a mountainous, sleep-fearing depression. However, sourcing its strength from obsessive insularity, the […]
For almost two-decades, the Toronto-hailing army-of-indie that is Broken Social Scene have been traversing their counter-cultural anxieties with visions of familial community and refreshing doses of celebratory sound-collage – ushering in some of our darkest political hours with defiant, unabashed joy. 2010’s ‘Forgiveness Rock Record’ closed with a two-minute ode to the loneliness found in […]

ALBUM: BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE – HUG OF THUNDER

ALBUM: FOG LAKE – DRAGONCHASER

Combining the words ‘fog’ and ‘lake’ paint that of a tranquil scene – muddied with spirits and demons that quest and cloud. It’s hard to imagine Aaron Powell, Canadian downer-pop veteran, releasing music under a guise that conjures any other image, as Fog Lake is just that: peace-of-mind sitting dormant under a ceiling of head-fuck […]
RELAXER follows the Mercury Prize winning debut, An Awesome Wave and 2014’s #1 album This is All Yours. 2017 brings the notoriously tricky third album. Not that it has much to live up to… In my own experience, alt-J are incredibly good at dividing opinion. People either love or hate their quirky, awkward sound. I’ve […]

ALBUM: ALT-J – RELAXER