Album Reviews
Album Review: Whitney K –’Bubble’ : Hard-won songs ringing with indie pop sharpness and country rock twang.
Canadian singer-songwriter Konner Whitney aka Whitney K is keeping that hardcore troubadour tradition alive and still kicking up the rubble. After releasing three mighty slices of his raw, country rock poeticism for Bologna’s Maple Death Records (the indispensable ‘Two Years’, the hypnotic ‘Hard To Be A God’ and the raucous ‘Viva!’) he’s now jumped into …
Album Review: Welcome to the blindingly luminescent cinematic world of Selve as ‘Breaking Into Heaven’ thunders into the universe.
Let’s face it, the current world is in rather a fetid state. We can choose to let it overwhelm us and watch the dank waters rise over our heads, or seek escape and consolation, and even resist. And like some sort of rainbow bridge across the dark miasma, Gold Coast (Yugambeh/Kombumerri)-based six-piece Selve, appear with their …
Album Review: Blank For.ms – ‘After The Town Was Swept Away’ : Subtle but significant experimental downtempo from the New York based electronic musician.
It’s been a decade since Brooklyn-based Tyler Gilmore, aka Blank For.ms followed his musical intuition and shifted from the world of big band jazz composition and ensemble arrangements to focus on the soundscape expanses of electronic music. Since then he’s taken his spiralling interest in DIY cassette loops and synths to become known for his …
Album Review : Gwenifer Raymond-‘Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark’ : Primitive guitar thrillingly taken widescreen and cosmic.
It’s difficult to make a personal imprint on solo instrumental music but Brighton-based, Welsh acoustic guitarist Gwenifer Raymond continues to make an impression with every step she takes. Opening up in 2018 with her ’You Never Were Much Of A Dancer’ debut, she introduced her steely, blues-pining tones to the world. Come 2020 she’d broadened …
Album Review: Big Thief’s Double Infinity Finds Beauty in the Collision of Opposites
On their sixth album, Big Thief distill contradiction into melody—songs that hold sweetness and shame, mortality and permanence, all at once. Double Infinity is a luminous meditation on duality that cements Adrianne Lenker as one of the most fearless songwriters working today.
Album Review: CMAT’s Euro-Country Turns Heartbreak and Humour Into Pop Brilliance
On her third album, CMAT folds Irish politics, late-stage capitalism, and intimate confessions into a vivid pop-country palette. Euro-Country is at once biting and funny, sad and euphoric, proof of an artist who can turn a diss track about Jamie Oliver and a ballad about financial collapse into the same dazzling world.
Album Review: Deep within the ‘Winter Palace’ The Valery Trails unleash an indie pop master class filled with soaring anthemic tracks that jangle and sparkle.
The Valery Trails have today released their new album ‘Winter Palace – their first release since 2022’s ‘The Sky Is Blue’ (reviewed by me here) and absence certainly makes the heart grow fonder with the welcomed return of their indelible melodies and harmonies. Opening track ‘Another Time’ provides an anthemic entry point with its thundering, chiming …
Album Review: Rún’s exhilarating self-titled debut – an alchemic forging of psychedelic doom and dark folk.
The darker hues of metal, folk and other musics enticingly converge on the self-titled album from new Irish trio Rún, released by those perennial psych-rock discoverers at Rocket Recordings. A threesome of significant like-minds, all pivotal to the island’s leftfield scene, Rún brings together vocal artist Tara Baoth Mooney, Dublin composer/performer Diarmuid MacDiarmada and drummer, …
Album Review: Supergroup Bleak Squad – Mick Turner (Dirty Three, Mess Esque), Mick Harvey (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, The Birthday Party), Adalita (Magic Dirt) and Marty Brown (Art of Fighting) – gather together to brew the spectacular ‘Strange Love’.
Naarm/Melbourne’s gothic noir Bleak Squad consists of living legends Mick Turner (Dirty Three, Mess Esque), Mick Harvey (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, The Birthday Party), Adalita (Magic Dirt) and Marty Brown (Art of Fighting) today release the fruits of their collaboration with ‘Strange Love’ – a dark brooding collection of visceral and raw vignettes worthy of their genetic make …
Album Review: Fantuzzi – ‘An Open Heart’ : Re-issue of the Woodstock visionary’s absorbing seventies debut.
Following on from the exquisite folk-rock curio ‘Stargazer’ by Shelagh McDonald, DJ and selector Oz Adams’ Different Strokes For Different Folks label brings more crate diggers’ grail with ‘An Open Heart’ by hippy-dom’s mystical Fantuzzi. Born in Spanish Harlem in the Fifties, of Puerto Rican descent, Fantuzzi’s bio is shaped by movement, music and performance. …