I love albums like this. The ones that drop through the letter box unheralded which you then slip in to the CD player with next to no expectation and spend the next forty five minutes having your socks blown off and jaw repeatedly scraping on the floor. For me 2010 has been a little disappointing album wise, but here we are, down to the final quarter, and The Strange Death Of Liberal England have popped up with what could well be my album of the year. Read More…

September. Can you believe it’s September already? That’s just crazy shit. So what better way to battle the passing of time than to kick off with a couple of records that take you right back to the past? Read More…

Violent Soho
Tweak Bird
Hammock
Last Lungs
Boris
Ian Astbury

September. Can you believe it’s September already? That’s just crazy shit. So what better way to battle the passing of time than to kick off with a couple of records that take you right back to the past? Read More…

Violent Soho
Tweak Bird
Hammock
Last Lungs
Boris
Ian Astbury

Right from the start I need to admit a few things. Arbouretum are one of my favourite bands of recent times and their ‘Song Of The Pearl’ was by far my stand out album of last year. However, when it was announced that Arbouretum’s main man, Dave Heumann, was releasing an album of improvised instrumentals even I had to take a bit of a gulp. Potential for self-indulgent ego massaging? I should say so. Read More…

Coil Sea

From the jangly indie guitars to the lyrical content, taking in the Chiltern Hills, Camden and the A180 (road that connects the M180 to Orphan Boy's home town of Cleethorpes, fact fans), there's pretty much no way this album could be anything other than British. Read More…

So, that was the summer then. Blue skies, hot sun, beer in the park, barbeques and the temporary diversion of the World Cup have all kept us away from our desks. Consequently, there are a number of great records that have trickled out over the last few months that have here to escaped our attention but now, as the nights start to draw in once more, what better time to get back to darkened rooms and melancholic Indie music? Read More…

Chapter
Bandjo
Kasper Rosa
Natureboy
The Soundcarriers

Black Moth Super Rainbow's frontman, Tom Fec's (aka Tobacco) second solo album 'Maniac Meat' is an industrial, gritty, aggressive behemoth, laden with vocoders and synths. This is dance music to mosh (or fight) to – with looped, heavy bass riffs that wouldn't be out of place on a Part Chimp album or similar. Maybe this is stoner hip hop? Sludge dance? Read More…

If you’re going to call your band The Amazing you’ve got to be pretty confident that you can follow that up. I mean, they haven’t called themselves The Average, The Mediocre or even, God forbid, The Feeling, but The Amazing. That sets expectation pretty high right from the kick off, doesn’t it? Read More…

‘Apparitions’, the first full lengther from Chicago’s Light Pollution, falls in to very zeitgeisty territory, sitting as it does comfortably between the electronic noodlings of Caribou, the eccentricly harmonious Grizzly Bear and the epic, emotionally wrought song space of Arcade Fire and Besnard Lakes. Is this ‘chillwave’? Frankly, I have no idea these days but the result is a hugely engaging set of songs perfect for summer listening. Read More…

Mon 5 Jul – The Sword, Gentlemens Pistols

Gentlemans Pistols; terrible name, awful, awful band. Not terrible in a musically inept way, they were perfectly competent which brings with it the appalling implication that they’ve consciously chosen to sound like a band from the fag end of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal when the tide was going out. I know The Sword themselves are not what you would call original but they add something of their own to the template from which they start, these guys take something away. I imagine if I had been drunker I…