Album Reviews
Album Review: JAF Trio – JAF Trio
JAF Trio are an up and coming young Finnish-Danish band featuring Adele Sauros of Superposition, Bowman Trio bassist Joonas Tuuri and drummer Frederick Emil Bülow. They won the We Jazz Rising Star at the We Jazz Festival in 2017 and now that very label are putting out the trios debut album The trio’s self titled …
ALBUM REVIEW: V/A ‘Come Stay With Me’ – a leg up for a virus-hit Leeds scene
IT NEEDS no reiteration that the ‘rona has devastated the working British music scene: no gigs, no festivals, no instores, no nuttin’. So in a little way, in response to the privations being experienced on the grassroots Leeds scene in particular, that city’s Come Play With Me label is set to release a compilation entitled …
EP REVIEW: Magik Markers – ‘Isolated From Exterior Time: 2020’
CONNECTICUT’s foremost ragged, slacker squall-rockers Magik Markers have descended from their years-long recess and deigned to bless us with the benison of a new four-track, download-only EP for Drag City, Isolated From Exterior Time: 2020, their first release of any kind in five years. The band, Elisa Ambroglio, John Shaw and Pete Nolan, said: “The …
Album Review: Mike Shinoda – Dropped Frames, Vol. 1
It’s a brand new innovative solo project from Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda; an album written with the help of his Twitch live-streaming community. What could be more lockdown, right? Released through Kenji Koboyashi Productions, Dropped Frames, Vol. 1 is an eclectic amalgamation of any and every genre you could think of, which is to be …
Droppin’ Knowledge: Meet Rising Bronx Rapper BA PACE & His Musical Collective PUBLICHOUSINGNYC
Rising Bronx Rapper BA PACE released his new EP, The Tower, this past week, an excellent collection of down tempo hip hop, that features his languorous, deep voice over hazy, scratchy beats. The artist, who was born in Washington Heights but now lives in the High Bridge section of the borough that birthed hip hop, …
Album Review: Mr Ben & The Bens – Life Drawing
In a recent interview we did with Ben Hall, aka Mr. Ben and the Bens, he told us about new album Life Drawing, saying “I came up with the idea of calling a record ‘Life Drawing’ and having the lyrical content of the songs be semi-lucid sketches of events happening in an imagined town. Vignettes …
Album Review: DMA’s – The Glow plus tour news
DMA’s have forged their own unique and exhilarating path ever since they first came to the world’s attention with their single ‘Delete’. I remember when they appeared, apparently out of nowhere in Sydney, and were dismissed by some reports as a sort of Oasis tribute band. Anyone who actually listens to their music soon realises …
EP REVIEW: Hanya – ‘Sea Shoes’
BRIGHTON’S small but perfectedly formed indie label Austerity Records, the brainchild of industry gentlemen and label co-owners Garry Saunders and Jamie Windless, has gone all chromium oxide on us with the launch of its C60 Club. A reel-to-reel move across from the singles club, Austerity launches its new venture thus: “A lot of us grew …
ALBUM REVIEW: Quest Ensemble – ‘The Other Side’
THE TRIO of pianist Filipe Sousa, cellist Tara Franks and violinist Preetha Narayanan, who record as Quest Ensemble, are far from your vanilla classical trio. Drawing on backgrounds in which they individually explored western and Indian classical, jazz and improvisational technique, and all alumni of the Guildhall School of Music, they have brought these multidisciplinary …
EP Review: Moscow Apartment – Better Daughter
The delicate fragility of the music and the achingly beautiful melodies that permeate ‘Better Daughter’ by Toronto duo Moscow Apartment plays a fundamental part in why this EP is so good. It is not, however, all that there is. Lyrically and in attitude, the band, despite its youth, is far deeper and more complex than …