ALBUM: Broken Records – Let Me Come Home

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 […]
There is a weight of expectation surrounding High Violet, the fifth album from Brooklyn based band The National.  After a couple of false starts, Alligator (2005) jolted the band out of obscurity, gaining them a cult following and critical adulation. Boxer (2007) was a much grander and better produced effort, which, whilst not quite hitting the same euphoric highs as Alligator, allowed the […]

ALBUM: The National – High Violet

SINGLE: Ariel Pink – Haunted Graffiti

The people who Rule Britannia go to Eton. The people who Rule The World go to Institut Le Rosney. But the people who really matter – such as Oscar-winners Nicholas Cage and Richard Dreyfus, Emmy-winners Lenny Kravitz and André Previn, and Fellator-in-Chief Monica Lewisnky – are past pupils of Beverly Hills High School. When Ariel Pink was a student of […]
This track so nearly passed me by. I don’t listen to the radio much, I barely watch TV (which ignoring The World Service both so rarely broadcast something of interest), but luckily the night staff at my day job left a music channel running and I happened upon Velvet. You may already know the arrogant […]

SINGLE: The Big Pink – Velvet