Album Reviews
Not Forgotten: John Grant – Queen of Denmark
It took three years but I finally found the proper follow-up to Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther in John Grant’s Queen of Denmark. Man, I can’t believe I’d never listened to this album. It’s filled with Midlake’s penchant for creating these wooded landscapes and D&D-lite atmosphere, but since it’s NOT their album the melancholy …
Album Review: Killing Joke – Singles Collection 1979-2012
First up I need to declare an interest. I think Killing Joke are an amazing band. I loved them when they first emerged as part of that morass of styles that has been termed ‘post-punk’, and they are probably currently my favourite band. In between times I have lost touch with them, found them, and …
Album Review: White People and the Damage Done by Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine
I first came across The Dead Kennedys when I was in my early teens, I was obsessed with the singles chart at the time and they were a band who, somehow, did not get their records played so much on the chart rundown on BBC Radio 1 on Sundays. I guess if Frankie’s Relax got …
Album Review: Altadore – Golden Hills
Wow. I haven’t been this excited about a new artist for a very long time. Wow. I’m not claiming that this band is doing something that is going to break the world wide open. This isn’t the birth of rock and roll or hip-hop. And that’s not what they are trying to do. But it …
Say Psych: Album Review – Pearl Mystic by The Hookworms
I find it hard to think of any band who I have seen live more often over recent years than The Hookworms. They have been on the live scene in Leeds, where I have lived for most of the previous twenty years before my move to Sheffield last year, for a few years now. Strangely …
Album Review: Blue Angel – Departures
Fate, it seems played its part with Blue Angel. The first piece of fate happened at rehearsal rooms, the now defunct Backstreet Studios on Holloway Road in London , when producer/Instrumentalist Jason Newton heard Bella Bennett in the next room, rehearsing for a wedding, and he knew he’d found the voice he’d been looking for. The other piece …
EP: Ty – Kick Snare and an idea (Part One)
I didn’t come from the slums, in fact there’s very little about me that is even remotely ‘urban’. When I was at school we had to do this tracing your family tree thing. There were others in my class where there parents had been involved in exciting jobs, like in the army or merchant navy, …
Album Review: British Sea Power – Machineries of Joy track by track
Have British Sea Power really been around a decade? It doesn’t seem that since, shortly after the release of their second album, Open Season I saw them in London, as support for the much missed (in my house anyway) Electric Soft Parade. They wore odd costumes, paraded around the stage on each-others shoulders, made a …
Album Review: Johnny Hates Jazz – Magnetized
You heard right: Johnny Hates Jazz have a new album out. Radio 2 are playing their new single. It’s technically their third studio album, although only the second with the original singer, Clark Datchler. This time round they’re a two-piece, just Clark and bassist/producer Mike Nocito, returning without drummer Calvin Hayes. The story of JHJ is …
EP: Blood Sport reveal new EP ø, and download it for free
One of the things about music is it can create mood. You hear a piece of music and at once it can take you back to a moment in your life, or a mood you felt. I’m sure that when I was younger I had break-up songs and stuff like that, but I can’t remember …