With endless streams of downtrodden alt. moans leaking from laptop speakers these days, it's reassuring to stumble upon a band not only content with getting that serotonin gushing but doing so in an expansively orchestral manner as blindingly euphoric as a triple bill of Michel Gondry sat in the front row. Take Jenny for instance, a sprawling mid-West drawl centred on adolescent emotional incompetence, bolstered by ooh la la's that Alison Goldfrapp'd be proud of, before bursting into a b-side Beatles chorus that's as unapologetically satisfying as a clan of vegetarians sitting down to a 3am Big Mac Meal. Hence [...]
Needless to say, NME gigs oft come fairly loaded with a somewhat blasé attitude and acts that may, or may not endure the dubious media frenzy generated about their haughty self-perceptions, all admired by vapid clientele ruffling unwashed hair throughout whilst expressing vacuous stares about as imposing as Portsmouth Football Club, tonight sipping on absinthe (well, Pastis) cocktails. Quite suitably then, bang on 10, enter stage right: Chapel Club , a London quintet as drab as the rain globules that splatter the pavements of Old Street outside and about as likely to crack this music malarkey as Justin Bieber [...]
If you've been to either of Hainault's Offset Festival's past two editions, you'll know exactly what the score is here. Dots & Dashes got caught up in a haze of moccasins, self-awareness and downright decadence in a forest overlooking the twinkling spires of the suited and booted and beyond. This year, Offset returns once more in the wake of Reading & Leeds Festivals, taking place over the weekend of 4th & 5th September and with a throw-back line up encompassing the second ever UK show from veteran New Yoik funksters Liquid Liquid , as well as dragging [...]
Mississippi isn't all that well renowned for much besides inevitably thieving a mark off of every eight year old unfortunate enough to take any spelling test in which it's contained. And on first glance, Lissie may not appear to be anything to exalt and proclaim about. Touring the UK with the smarmiest slouch to slobber all over Radio 1's A-list since Jason Mraz, Joshua Radin, Lissie trades in howling geetars snatched from the wastelands of the deep South and dusty stomps. In Sleep, her latest single (released this week), cashes in dust-bowl drawls for shimmering instrumentation whisked away [...]
These days, if your mind drifts over to the hallucinatory wilderness that is dream pop, Beach House is presumably your first port of call, with their wistful minimalistic guitar lines, swamped by hazy drones. Well, if you'd opt for a more affecting, distressing listen Snow & Voices offer up a rather valid alternative. Born out of the City of Angels, Lauri Kranz and multi-instrumentalist Jebin Bruni deal in a similar heart-wrenching melancholic wallowing to Sarah McLachlan, drifting down streams of self-depreciation oft sailed by Joni Mitchell as eyes begin to bulge, well up and deflate in an exodus [...]
Following the announcement's for End Of The Road Festival's initial round-up for 2010 with patience-trying highlights including the likes of The Mountain Goats, Black Mountain and Cymbals Eat Guitars the long and winding path to this year's End Of The Road just became a little more agravating as the latest slew of essential acts just popped out of the West Sussex/ Dorset border like a pristine egg flops out of a peacock. Cult heroes Yo La Tengo make it down to Larmer Tree Gardens for an exclusive UK festival show, joining previously announced Garden Stage headliners [...]
Ever since Volcano's Beautiful Seizure erupted five years ago in a flurry of ramshackle hysteria and blithering, yet beautiful incoherency, the realms of disjointed noise-core and palpated sonic onslaughts bordering on the clinically insane have become all but rather sparse. And this is precisely where Atlanta, Georgia's Untied States come into their own in a frenzied bustle of writhing guitar harmonics and crazed squeals. Distilling down the raw vociferousness of doom mongers Liars, the virtually crazed virtuosity of Menomena, the crunching instrumentation of Sonic Youth and the purified rage of Fugazi Untied States are such a rounded package, [...]
For far too many months have Calvin Harris and Daniel Bedingfield represented the creamiest crops when it comes down to bedroom mavericks of the electronic persuasion. Especially in this day and age, where dubstep troupes turn their attentions to dark and dirty electro-pop whilst gracing the cover of the NME... That said, it's not all forward-thinking, with Bow's leading lad getting up and out of "da corner" and turning all Ibiza lout on us. Thank Joy Orbison in that case for the torchbearers of the minimalist electro revolution we're currently experiencing out of bedsits the length of Blighty. [...]
Where once we levelled bombast at the innumerable scruffily-coiffured boys playing scuzzy post-Strokes Fenders in the wake of Pete Doherty's drug-fuelled derailment into the neighbouring wilderness of irrelevance, there's an inescapable sense of foreboding that the hordes of female voices currently clogging up the airwaves and wireless internet particles that we respire are doomed to a comparable fate. Aesthetically, Sparrow & the Workshop are yet another collective blurring backgrounds and genders, as well as forcing malleable acoustic instruments into the tones of a visceral raucousness and a further female-fronted forest-dwelling outfit may initially seem rather superfluous. [...]
Can a band sound like a place? How do we define place? Does anybody particularly care about the aforementioned inquisitive musings? Whether you'd cover such thoughts in a thesis or couldn't give more of a fuck about them than the grubby chewing gum splattered all over the pavements of Salford, never before have a band reeked so pungently of their origins as The Heartbreaks , four impeccably coiffured Mancs. Well, they're actually from Morecambe initially. And bonded over an indisputable enthusiastically for Motown. Quite right too. Yet they couldn't sound more like a contemporary take on The Smiths were [...]
Those horrid faded jeans splattered all over American Apparel and Urban Outfitters that look like a whole load of sulphuric acid just seeped into the Levi's factory really out to be obliterated from the face of this planet. They look like ripped wallpaper and that doesn't even look all that hot on the crumbling walls of a Shoreditch bedsit. Acid Washed however, not to be confused with shit leg wear, are a Parisian duo caught in a frenzy of vintage synths and post-Justice retro euphoria. As bongos cascade headlong into tempo-rupturing arpeggiated breakdowns, Change explodes like a viciously [...]
It's not all that often the finale of gargantuan ten-minute tracks veers into view, let alone stumbling across ones that enslave your every sense throughout. What with the saplings of Spring finally burrowing through the stony soils of Europe, a rather special talent is blossoming over in Alabama, an experimental assault on the hallucinatory dance hall dins of Animal Collective and muted joys of Four Tet. Friendly Foliage is 19 year old Garrett Crosby. Seemingly obsessed by the aforementioned Baltimore dream renegades, after under two years of dabbling over in lush lo-fi electronica, Masonic Meadows is accomplished. And [...]
Stereotypes of Stereophonics-obsessed Mondeo men, daffodil face paint and sheep shagging are tiring at the best of times. Such monotony is aggravated if you actually happen to be Welsh, as you get it from the very first day you're spat into the schooling system like dejected chewing gum lying sultrily on the pavements of Swansea's suburbs. Musically, some rather wonderful cult stars have been born of that jutty bit just west of Bristol. Where, oh where would we/ MOJO be without the likes of Gruff Rhys, Nicky Wire and of course, Bryn Terfel. And the ubiquitous drizzle that shrouds the [...]
Returning to Spain's east coast for its sixteen birthday bash, this year's FIB Heineken festival set in the sleepy sun-cracked haze of Benicàssim promises sangria, copious sweating gushes and The Specials . Special indeed. Situated a detoxing stumble from la playa, FIB Heineken demonstrates precisely why festivals needn't necessarily revolve about mucky boots, swamped tents and weather laments. Hosting 24-hour bars pulling litre pints all night, a smattering of electro-orientated acts and the likes of Goldfrapp and Dirty Projectors to soothe those cracked lips and throbbing skulls the afternoon after the morning before, [...]
Stereotypes of Stereophonics-obsessed Mondeo men, daffodil face paint and sheep shagging are tiring at the best of times. Such monotony is aggravated if you actually happen to be Welsh, as you get it from the very first day you're spat into the schooling system like dejected chewing gum lying sultrily on the pavements of Swansea's suburbs. Musically, some rather wonderful cult stars have been born of that jutty bit just west of Bristol. Where, oh where would we/ MOJO be without the likes of Gruff Rhys, Nicky Wire and of course, Bryn Terfel. And the ubiquitous drizzle that shrouds the [...]
Where once we levelled bombast at the innumerable scruffily-coiffured boys playing scuzzy post-Strokes Fenders in the wake of Pete Doherty's drug-fuelled derailment into the neighbouring wilderness of irrelevance, there's an inescapable sense of foreboding that the hordes of female voices currently clogging up the airwaves and wireless internet particles that we respire are doomed to a comparable fate. Aesthetically, Sparrow & the Workshop are yet another collective blurring backgrounds and genders, as well as forcing malleable acoustic instruments into the tones of a visceral raucousness and a further female-fronted forest-dwelling outfit may initially seem rather superfluous. [...]
A sumptuous geek pop pie was baked crisply on Saturday, as Hot Chip and Scritti Politti's Green Gartside popped into to visit that infuriating buffoon clogging up the BBC airwaves every weekend and ruining their Glastonbury coverage annually, Jo Whiley. She's about as informed as Kerry Katona and Peter Andre delivering Harvard lectures on astrophysics, Shakira's She Wolf takes on a whole new lupine sass courtesy of Alexis Taylor's androgynous glimmer vox and Joe Goddard's vocoded grunts. Co-written by The Bravery's Sam Endicott, and therefore his second greatest track to date (I quite sincerely fell for [...]
Bursting from the blocks, right from the initial wiry, anemic guitars of 911, No Great Lost: Songs, 1979-1985, Kevin Dunn's lost collection of sheen-pop diamonds in the rough sheds a skin of pretense; the very same pretense that shrouds the majority of the originality spawned from East London in this digital day and age. Having twiddled knobs for the B-52s and co-founded The Fans, Dunn's no stranger to the psychedelic side to everything that constituted kooky before the 90s swung into view like an obese beast behind the wheel of a Hummer. No Great Lost is composed of [...]
It's not all that often the finale of gargantuan ten-minute tracks veers into view, let alone stumbling across ones that enslave your every sense throughout. What with the saplings of Spring finally burrowing through the stony soils of Europe, a rather special talent is blossoming over in Alabama, an experimental assault on the hallucinatory dance hall dins of Animal Collective and muted joys of Four Tet. Friendly Foliage is 19 year old Garrett Crosby. Seemingly obsessed by the aforementioned Baltimore dream renegades, after under two years of dabbling over in lush lo-fi electronica, Masonic Meadows is accomplished. And [...]
Those horrid faded jeans splattered all over American Apparel and Urban Outfitters that look like a whole load of sulphuric acid just seeped into the Levi's factory really out to be obliterated from the face of this planet. They look like ripped wallpaper and that doesn't even look all that hot on the crumbling walls of a Shoreditch bedsit. Acid Washed however, not to be confused with shit leg wear, are a Parisian duo caught in a frenzy of vintage synths and post-Justice retro euphoria. As bongos cascade headlong into tempo-rupturing arpeggiated breakdowns, Change explodes like a viciously [...]
Dots & Dashes
Avicii – Two Million
Scissor Sisters’ “Baby Come Home” Video: Watch The Band Get Animated
Yellow Magic Orchestra edit from Chrome Canyon
Beck – I Just Started Hating Some People Today
