DVD Review - Introducing Morrissey

Music Reviews Thu, Oct 02, 2014

MORRISSEY’S SOLO career could be characterised as a three act play, with a dramatic opening, a sagging middle section, and a triumphant - and still ongoing - third act.

Album review: The New Pornographers

Music Reviews Thu, Sep 11, 2014

THE NEW Pornographers are something of a Canadian indie supergroup, featuring the diverse songwriting talents of AC Newman, Dan Bejar, and particularly Neko Case.

Album Review - Various artists - Tinmine Soul Supply

Music Reviews Thu, Sep 04, 2014

MENTION THE Numero label in some soul circles and you can nearly hear the toes curling due to the company’s preference for replicating original record labels for its own repressed 45s. For others its nice to have an affordable record the way it would originally have looked.

Album review: Field Mouse

Music Reviews Thu, Aug 14, 2014

INDIE MUSIC, in its ‘classic’ sense is the union of two seemingly disparate and incompatible forms into a whole that, in practice, ends up making perfect sense.

Album Review: Bear In Heaven

Music Reviews Thu, Aug 14, 2014

SOUTHERN BOYS they may be, but Bear In Heaven’s DNA is not Dixie, but the electronic art-pop of Britain and Germany in the 1980s.

Weed Priest’s new EP reviewed and streamed

Music Reviews Tue, Aug 05, 2014

IF THERE was a musical sound to denote heavy, dense, flows of molten lava, slowly burning everything under its wake, then the opening riff to Weed Priest’s ‘Possessed’ would be it.

Album review: Parquet Courts

Music Reviews Thu, Jun 26, 2014

DO I like Parquet Courts's Sunbathing Animal because it is good on its own merits, or is it because I love Pavement and these guys so obviously do as well?

Album review: Haunted Hearts

Music Reviews Thu, Jun 12, 2014

SUBJECT MATTER wise, Haunted Hearts debut album Initiation (Zoo Music) is a little naughty, being inspired by the New York S&M scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

Album review - Sharon Van Etten

Music Reviews Thu, May 29, 2014

Sharon Van Etten - Are We There (Jagjaguwar)
SHARON VAN Etten’s world is of dark, late night confessionals of heartbreak, unrequited love, failing relationships, relationships that should have worked, and yearning for better times that may never arrive.

Album review: La Sera

Music Reviews Thu, May 29, 2014

La Sera - Hour Of The Dawn (Hardly Art)
“I WANTED the new La Sera record to sound like Lesley Gore fronting Black Flag. I didn’t want it to be another record of me sad, alone in my room.”

Album review: windings/Land Lovers

Music Reviews Thu, May 15, 2014

THE SPLIT release has a long tradition within independent and alternative music, going back to at least the early 1980s. This particular incarnation of the format, released through Out On A Limb Records and the Popical Island lable finds Limerick’s windings sharing space with Dublin’s Land Lovers.

Damon Albarn's Everyday Robots

Music Reviews Thu, May 01, 2014

IS IT surprising Damon Albarn has taken this long to make a solo album? As one of the major figures in British popular music for close to 25 years, Blur, Gorillaz, his collaborations with African musicians and composer Michael Nyman, have given him plenty creative endeavours to be going on with.

Album review - The Pixies

Music Reviews Thu, Apr 17, 2014

WHEN THE Pixies reformed a number of years ago and started touring again, the welcome was warm and the verdict positive.

Album review: Arc Iris

Music Reviews Thu, Apr 03, 2014

AFTER TWO barely noticed albums in the mid-noughties, Rhode Island folk-rock/indie-folk trio The Low Anthem struck creative gold with 2009’s Oh My God, Charlie Darwin.To hold their own and not be outdone by the considerable shadow cast by Fleet Foxes’ magical debut was some achievement, as was the band’s ability to balance the rabble rousing, beer’n’brawling side of folk, with the genre’s sensitive, introspective, side, showing in the process, an emphatic understanding and love for the heritage of this Hiberno-British-American strain of music.