ALBUM: CIGARETTES AFTER SEX – CIGARETTES AFTER SEX

A crap name need not necessarily hold a band back. Coldplay are doing OK, U2 have shifted quite a few units. Still, unless you are completely without prejudice, you can be put off. I once skipped an early Manchester appearance by Vampire Weekend because I did not like their name – a truly regrettable decision. […]
Since his early records, the works of Mac DeMarco have felt consistent with fuzzy wistfulness, a non-embarrassing clarity of writing that can plausibly resonate with all (love, worry, cigarettes, mums). It lulls and flows, often without the prickly critical eye that might appeal to his largely millennial audience in present political times. Any moderately committed […]

ALBUM: MAC DEMARCO – THIS OLD DOG

ALBUM: MINISTRY – TRAX! RARITIES

Ministry is a band I’ve been recommended numerous times. I have generally found them too heavy and monotonous for my liking but I’ve never given them a serious go. “A serious go” is definitely what’s on offer with a recently-released double vinyl called Trax! Rarities. I am actually listening on an electronic copy, but the […]
Music writing is full of unending discussion of the fabled album number two. It’s a hurdle so many fall at – buckling under the weight of expectation, overreaching, rushing – all pitfalls for the difficult second album™. Well, one way to side step that particular cliché is for your debut record to go unfairly unnoticed. […]

ALBUM: TOM HICKOX – MONSTERS IN THE DEEP

ALBUM: FATHER JOHN MISTY – PURE COMEDY

I don’t need to tell you about Father John Misty (FJM for brevity’s sake) if you’re here, because I’m taking it you know about him. If not, you can just scroll through any half decent music news website’s newsfeed, as they report literally everything he says or tweets as a bone fide news story. This […]
Forty years after stepping onto the musical battlefield with one of the best albums of the late seventies in ‘Pink Flag’, WIRE return with an album that can be summed up with one phrase: more of the same. It’s better than their last release, the weirdly titled ‘Nocturnal Koreans’, but the plodding nature of many […]

ALBUM: WIRE – SILVER/LEAD

ALBUM: FUTURE ISLANDS – THE FAR FIELD

I fell hard for Future Islands when I heard ‘Seasons (Waiting For You)’ from their last album – 2014’s Singles.  To be more accurate I fell in love when I saw them play the track on Jools Holland – that lush, buxom electronic backdrop and lead singer Samuel T. Herring’s impassioned vocals.  Actually to be […]
What do Mary Berry, Mark Rothko, Benedictine monks, Bovis homes, Francis Bacon, photographer Richard Billingham and TV chef Rachel Khoo have in common? They are all victims in the equal-opportunity offence blitzkrieg from Idles frontman Joe Talbot on the Bristol band’s debut album, Brutalism. The record opens with an anonymous woman’s horrifying shriek of “NO […]

ALBUM: IDLES – BRUTALISM

ALBUM: TALABOMAN – THE NIGHT LAND

‘The Night Land’ is a strange place. Full to the brim with synthesized, robotic and electronic sounds, yet somewhere we make some of our most human connections. It’s a place pair John Talabot and Axel Boman capture effortlessly with their debut Talaboman LP, jam-packed with bleeps, beeps and drum machines but also sounding extremely organic. […]
When a family loses one of their own, it changes everyone in that family, for better or worse. The pain and grief can destroy them, or bring them closer together. Bands such as Led Zeppelin broke up after the tragic loss of John Bonham, but on the other side, bands like The Who and Rolling […]

ALBUM: SUFER BLOOD – SNOWDONIA