indie albums
Album Review: The Flaming Lips – Oczy Mlody
It’s been a long strange trip, hasn’t it? The Flaming Lips have been a musical freak exhibit in a constant state of flux since the late 90s. Each record since 1997s Zaireeka has been a reinvention of the Lips. After the band became a three-piece(along with honorary member and long time producer Dave Fridmann), Wayne …
Album Review: The Suncharms – The Suncharms
Sheffield five piece The Suncharms were one of those bands, in more ways than one. You know the sort I mean – we all have them. They made the sort of tracks that, if you knew them, you loved them, pestered your friends about them, included them on all the cassettes you made that probably …
Album Review: The Blue Aeroplanes – Welcome, Stranger!
The shotgun marriage between rock music and poetry is not always a happy one, but in the work of Bristol’s Blue Aeroplanes they have coexisted quite easily for over thirty years. Their unusual mix of REM meets Lou Reed, with jangly Peter Buck-style guitar backing mainly spoken word performances, was beloved among the indie and …
Album Review: The Emerald Down – Scream The Sound
The Emerald Down, a band who Ian Watson (Rolling Stone/NME/BBC 6 Music) ranked among “the more innovative fringes of rock and electronica”, have re-released what has been deemed a lost classic on Saint Marie Records. Its original release in 2001 (the height of shoegaze’s ‘uncool’ period) on a small label in America unfortunately saw the release sink …
Not Forgotten: World Party – Goodbye Jumbo
A lot more people should really know who Karl Wallinger is. He left The Waterboys at exactly the right time and set up his own musical project under the catchy name World Party. He immersed himself in 60s influences a good five years before it became fashionable, releasing albums like 1990’s Goodbye Jumbo, but by …
Album Review: One Eyed Wayne – Attack of the Luxury Flats
There’s various touchstones that appear to have influences Londoners One Eyed Wayne over the course of their debut album Attack of the Luxury Flats, which is out tomorrow (November 28th) on limited CD and download. There’s Faces and a general sense of Mod about it, there’s the gritty real life poetry of Ian Dury, but …
Not Forgotten: They Might Be Giants – They Might Be Giants (a.k.a. Pink Album. a.k.a. First Album)
Released into a musical landscape over-populated by purveyors of synth-pop, stadium rock, post punk, underground alternative, heartland rockers, disposable pop and The Smiths (the band that pretty much defined what the mainstream thought indie / alternative music was in the mid 80s, at least here in the UK), the eponymous debut of They Might Be …
Album Review: Honeyblood – ‘Babes Never Die’
Honeyblood haven’t just survived second album syndrome – their triumphant sophomore record, ‘Babes Never Die’, proves they’ve thrived on the challenge. The follow up to the 2014 eponymous debut album from the Glasgow-based duo, of Stina Tweeddale and drummer Cat Myers, has been eagerly awaited. Having appropriately fallen for Honeyblood around thirty seconds into ‘Fall …
Not Forgotten: Super Furry Animals – Fuzzy Logic
Released at a time when seemingly every reasonably new(ish) band within the UK and Northern Ireland who featured at least one guitar player was pigeonholed as Britpop, Super Furry Animals’ Fuzzy Logic is an album that could have been mistakenly dismissed as landfill indie by those who found the whole scene devoid of inspiration. I …
Not Forgotten: XTC – Skylarking
To the casual observer, by the time Skylarking was released in the mid-80s XTC looked washed up. Having had to stop touring in 1982 due to Andy Partridge’s crippling stage fright, their subsequent pair of albums, the pastoral Mummer and the industrial The Big Express hadn’t achieved the sort of commercial acceptance that anyone had …