Album Reviews
Album Review: Descendents – 9th & Walnut
“It’s difficult to imagine there being that many collections of short, fast, fun, straight-ahead punk songs released this year that are as enjoyable as this.”
Album review: Neil Cowley – ‘Hall Of Mirrors (Reflected)’: ambient piano is tripped further into leftfield on this excellent remixes set
THE REMIX album is a really interesting thing, a gathering of the tribes in a meeting place that’s arisen from the sphere of dance music, in which like minds bring their aesthetics and splice it with another’s; a trading, the one overlaying, informing the other, creating a new offspring. When it comes off in the …
Album review: Merpire’s debut album ‘Simulation Ride’ is beautifully crafted rock serving to soothe the lost and lonely
Purveyor of sensitively insightful indie, Melbourne’s Merpire has just released her long-awaited debut album Simulation Ride via Warner’s ADA. The record is a heartening and satisfying culmination of the artist’s favourite songs, taken from the ‘video store of her mind’ and written over the course of the past few years. Merpire also co-produced with partner …
Album Review: Infinity Broke swagger out on to the streets with ‘Your Dream My Jail’: a brilliant and visceral coating of indulgent excess and cathartic chaos – plus tour news.
Infinity Broke are a band that does not go gently into the night: their new album ‘Your Dream My Jail’ is an excoriating, driven, thunderous slice of post-punk cake that is angular, studded and visceral. Guitars wail and caterwaul, drums crash like waves on an exposed coast and singer Jamie Hutchings (formerly of nineties indie …
Album Review: Sydney’s Darren Cross (Gerling) creates a little ‘DISTORDER’: a splendid electronic fugue for our dystopian times
Darren Cross is a pillar of the inner city indie scene in Australia: one of those hyperactive artists who never stands still. In the nineties he was in Gerling – a genre-defying iconic indie band that transgressed the boundaries between guitar-based indie rock and electronica. Later as part of Jess and Dep, he delved into …
EP: Jhariah releases the evocative and dynamic genre-defying ‘A Beginners Guide To Faking Your Own Death’
Every so often I find myself bored with my current rotation of music and before I know it I am falling down a rabbit hole on streaming platforms trying to find something new to hold my attention. When “Needed A Change of Pace” first dropped on my desk, I remember feeling physically excited to hear …
Album review: Llyr – ‘Biome’: a deeply textural exploration of ecological IDM for Mesh – and frontrunner for electronica album of the year
YOU KNOW that if no less a renaissance man than Max Cooper is taking enough of an interest in what you’re sculpting in sound to sign you up for his label, Mesh, then you must be doing something not only very right, but also very interesting; Max really these days being at the forefront of …
Album review: Dusted – ‘III’: A cross-country relocation blows the dust off an intimate, autumnal beauty
THERE’S a very strong argument to be made, in the sphere of the more introverted singer-songwriter and that of Americana, that the best music is the living music, the real music, captured in the moment, not fussed with in any way – far removed from the sheen and multi-tracking and the endless possibility of the …
Album Review: Cochemea- ‘Vol II: Baca Sewa’
What is roots music? Well Cochemea Gastelum’s earthy new album, ‘Vol II: Baca Sewa’ out via Daptone from 16th July, would pretty much nail it if you’re searching for definitives. Roots has nothing to do with retro, it’s not about seeking to sound like the past, it’s about connection and inspiration, exploring a personal heritage …
Album review: Alasdair Roberts og Völvur – ‘The Old Fabled River’: Scots-Norwegian sextet debut a record of correspondences, life cycles and exploratory depth
HE’S GRACED us with a very Northern European and delicious take on introspective folk since that trio of lovely albums, The Rye Bears A Poison, Daylight Saving and The Night Is Advancing as Appendix Out, beginning back in ’97; and it should come as no surprise that a man whose music arguably sounds best with …