Tagged: musicreviews

LAURA Marling is a darling. Everyone loves her - she's the acceptable face of the Mumford & Sons alt-folk juggernaut, she's been nominated for the Mercury Prize twice, won a Brit for Best Female Solo Artist, , won Best Solo Artist at the NME Awards, singer songwriter Beans On Toast even wrote a song about how much he loved her. Luckily, it gives me great pleasure to say the latest LP from Ms Marling, Once I Was An Eagle, is high up there with her best material. And it gives me great pleasure to listen to, too [...]

There is so much to say about the newest ADULT. album, The Way Things Fall. It's the duo's first album since 2007, but the 5th in their discography.  It's the kind of album that you'll want to tell your friends about, ... Continued

Animals In The Median is an intensely varried album from Radiation City.  It's the band's second album, and it's absolutely entrancing.  Because the album fills me with amazing emotion, I don't really want to talk about the concrete aspects of it. ... Continued

In 2011 Record Dept named Colleen Green one of the SXSW Bands to Watch. Now the Oakland-based Green is out with her Hardly Art debut full-length, Sock it To Me. The ten tracks (nine originals and a cover of the Queers "Number One") of uptempo lo-fi pop and punk mixes her passion for the Ramones and laid back, California surf rock. Green sticks with guitar driven songs filled with bass, synth, drum machines and simple themes of boyfriends and romance. Check out top tracks “Only One”, "Every Boy Wants A Normal Girl", and “Time in the World.” [...]

Toronto singer/songwriter Donovan Woods, who lately has been working out of Nashville, follows-up The Widowmaker with another storytelling gem, Don't Get Too Grand. The title is from award winning fiction author Richard Ford and serves as a reminder to Woods to keep things simple and true to real life. The collection of eleven songs showcase Woods' commitment to this mantra, from spare instrumentation to straightforward lyrics, to melodic simplicity. Top tracks include “Put On, Cologne”, “Sask”, and closer “Let Us Now Praise Simple Men.” – Written by SMarx http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =danq5BE64Pk [...]

★★★☆☆ After Volume 3 revelled in accepting missions of infiltrating clandestine factions and subversive bass metamorphoses, Volume 4 arrives with an expansion team staying both on-point and ahead of the pack by cultivating its dubstep rams and raids. Jakes begins the fourth quarter with more of the same speaker stalking and severing, despite being backed by a gameshow choir that could make you millions, and Kryptic Minds and Steve Digital explore contrasting digital lost worlds where one wrong move and the walls cave in. So Tectonic have hardly lightened up, [...]

SISTERS CocoRosie are harder to pin down than a greased hog on new LP Tales Of A Grass Widow. The globetrotting American siblings have a real European influence to their work - not least in their vocal stylings which sound like a mutant cross between Sinead O'Connor and Bjork, both distinctive and compelling. And their music, well, it's like a bastard cross between freak folk and brooding urban - like the soundtrack to a robot lost in a forest, or a wandering goblin in a metropolis. You get the idea, it's odd. But still it's oddly [...]

Young Statues are yet another promising up-and-coming band to emerge from the Philadelphia music scene, which gave us such artists as The Wonder Years and Valencia. From the first listen you can tell their new EP, Age Isn’t Ours, is ... Continued

★★★☆☆ Not a compilation giving a chance to MCs to run their mouth — and they’d be hard pressed to make words stick here anyhow — it’s the turn of producer overlords and instrumental heavies to pull up and create chaos. From beat one, roughneck enterprise creates pixelated nightmares (Youngstar) raked with too-hot-to-handle bassline gunfire, unwieldy brute force that makes any silence deathly, and realises epic high speed chases (J Beatz) or predatory games of off-future hide and seek. All the while keeping alive a DIY ethic that magnifies the bedroom studio setup to a monstrous [...]

The legendary 1975 Wings tour, Wings Over The World, lives on through this reissue, more clear and in better quality than it ever has before.  This is one of the finest live recordings I've ever listened to, and it's all the ... Continued

The Features are a Southern American indie rock band from Tennessee, first releasing The Beginning EP in 2003, the Nashville-based combo has now released their new album The Features on May 14th of 2013. Falling somewhere in the middle between ... Continued

★★★☆☆ Recorded when the morning after has come too soon, Jimpster’s easygoing deep house and soul solutions make enquiries as to the lounge’s opening hours. When engaging space-sprinkled themes, Jamie Odell regularly checks his distance away from the bar and when to engage in the dancefloor’s throng, battling to energise and refresh you. "Hold My Hand" is for when the techno-schooled nightowl wants to come out and play, mildly more persuasive in telling you to convert your casual head-nod into something more pro-active; while "High Wire" is a soul clap gesturing to go with [...]

ALTHOUGH only released in 2006 but recorded almost a decade before, Darc Mind's long-awaited, almost forgotten album was still a breath of fresh air. Originally recorded between 1995 and 1997 for Loud Records, the New York label went bust and Symptomatic Of A Greater Ill never saw the light of day recently, when Anticon unearthed it and put it out to a muted response. But the Darc Mind duo of rapper Kevroc and producer X-Ray are two treasures that had to be found. Kevroc's rap style is a laid back one, but with metronome-sharp timing, instrumental old-school [...]

★★★★☆ Derrick Boyd starts with some real rock 'n' roll with not-gone-to-bed-yet swagger. Doing the twangy dance/punk-funk/DIY disco thing that sticks up the dance floor, yet unafraid to grab a keyboard and ensure all eyes are on him as a synth evangelist, the transition from blasé, on-the-road icon to retuning the glam and chasing stardom/stars means timing really is everything. To make you buy into Boyd and Zoe Presnick’s vision, they impersonate a Parliament-style unit with less pizzazz (though the title track gets close) and more streetwise attitude posting freedom of spirit in its [...]

THE energy of Jupiter & Okwess International is out of this world. On latest LP Hotel Univers the group kicks in with Bapesi, a funky, sped-up track which showcases a disco-meets-Afro-rock sound, and doesn't let up. As a result the former Damon Albarn-collaborating Congolese's fast-paced and jangly sound can be a bit cheesy at times, as a result, undermining any seriousness to subject matter. But it doesn't matter really, because you can almost hear the smiles on the faces of the people performing the tracks coming through your stereo - of you check into Hotel Univers, you'll [...]

Coined by Bill Brewster as the “best dance track of the Noughties,” the 2009 release of Mugwump’s “ Boutade ” is set for a re-issue on vinyl this summer. A slow motion churner that comes in around 107 BPMs, it separates itself from the too-cool-for-school nu-disco mentality and brings in a sound often associated with the corny side of traditional disco: orchestral violins and percussion. Mugwump’s recipe avoids making cheese soup by adding just enough loops, time stretches, builds and futuristic sounds to compliment the string section and timpani drums. The result is a retro-disco cut [...]

RAFFERTIE'S latest EP sees the electronic artist building up his sound. The Build Me Up effort allows the London artist, real name Benjamin Stefanski, to add his own vocals into the sound which has earnt him an up-and-coming tag, following in the wake of peers like Jamie Liddell, James Blake, Jamie Woon, and probably more similar sounding knob-twiddling men called James. His sound is a dreamy one, and the extra soft vocal edge does add another dimension. But his lazy early-hours electronica still fails to build the listener up with anything amazingly engaging, although you're unlikely to [...]

Crawling Up The Stairs is the sophomore release – and follow-up to 2011’s stellar Pleasure – from Austin psych-rock band Pure X. The album was inspired by Nate Grace’s personal struggles caused by a serious leg injury and recovery. Crawling Up The Stairs is about what you do after you've realized that escaping a bad situation isn't an option and the moment when you have to face the situation head on and the emotional turmoil that ensues. While Crawling Up The Stairs stays faithful to the heavy sound found on Pleasure but adds shimmering atmospherics and a new perspective [...]

You may know Mikal Cronin from Ty Segall's garage rock band or his self-titled 2011 album about moving on, Trouble in Mind. The 27-year-old garage-punk wunderkind has been playing music – often with high-school buddy Segall, who drops a couple guitar solos on MCII – for about 10 years, so it makes sense that he’s getting a little self-reflective and contemplating fresh starts. Cronin’s latest pushes musical boundaries by moving beyond the reverb saturated and surface noise of previous efforts to catchy pop melodies layered with acoustic and electric guitars alongside Cronin’s falsetto harmonies. All these explorations culminate [...]

★★★☆☆ The Black Dog mark their territory with an hour long warding off of intruders. For bark and bite, the veteran unit’s ambient techno, IDM and interstellar ordinance still doesn’t have to come at you in a blaze of teeth and slobber. The collection of astro bric-a-brac, as if to verify their whereabouts (and title), is intentionally charged with jolting the LP’s flow, but the unannounced changeability of sound does as good a job by itself anyway. "Atavistic Resurgence" grunts through electro with confrontation on its mind, representative of the sparse shunting together of [...]