"It's better when it's short! I mean, we can have a nice, long conversation but I like it when the pieces are relatively short. Unless it's supposed to be an in-depth piece centred around a certain idea – the way in which the writer looks at the world, or something. Then maybe it's interesting." So spake Alex "Agor" Cowan of Blue Hawaii now some weeks ago at the somewhat insalubrious end of Holloway Road and although this won't be the so-called "snapshot kinda: 'Blue Hawaii come from Montréal, and their favourite game is billiards, and they love drinking [...]
The problem with the internet is that people's opinions can influence your expectations too much. I realised this after seeing the Knife at the Roundhouse on Wednesday. I had made the mistake of reading the bad reviews on the internet and was expecting the show to be embarrassing, boring, weird and perhaps a waste of my money and time. It was no Silent Shout tour but I found it incredibly fun and also slightly strange (dance aerobics) but perhaps no stranger than a Bjork show. Yes [...]
My granddad died at 4am this morning – the kind of time for which Silent Shout was first fabricated. I suppose it's the very essence of passing away amid the silence the quite literal dead of night brings with it, although these past few years had been something of an ordeal for him. I'd suggest an ordeal similar in tenor to The Knife's latest full-length, the unrelentingly challenging and as yet unrewarding Shaking The Habitual , were it not to trivialise his in many ways tragic demise. He forgot who I [...]
It's a bad wind that don't blow somebody some good, or so the hackneyed old adage goes and so it seems on a blustery Camden eve for Barry – the solitary inhabitant of a nearby phone box perma-clad in sunglasses even at this, the death of night. He's his eight cans of Special Brew, and a wicked tongue with which to lap them up – a devilish flicker of beard protruding forth form his chinny chin chin. It's hideously chilly out as we draw close to midnight, and yet there's an inexhaustible hope hidden deep within him as he spacks [...]
Chan Marshall may well have (albeit belatedly) wound up in the UK last night though she wasn't stood out with the smokers of Euston Road, but instead busying herself with the serenading of Jools Holland's studio audience over at The Maidstone Studios, Kent where rather than revisiting anything from the abnormally rowdy Sun LP of yesteryear, she instead opted to air a slight obscurity entitled Bully. Ostensibly aimed right between Giovanni Ribisi's two peepers, the track plaintively harks back to Cat Power standout album The Greatest as Marshall mourns the demise of better times, crooning [...]
For reasons as to which we're still as yet unsure, we took a technophobe along to Sónar last year and that which stuck with him most adhesively was not the tinnitus, nor the ineluctable exhaustion incurred by unending euphoria, nor indeed anything to be even translucently deemed techno but instead the dissonance Tom Jenkinson so concertedly strives to contrive. He came home and diligently read up on the almighty disharmony he'd been subjected to but days before, and became transfixed by a BBC interview during which Jenkinson confessed to feelings of disgust toward "the overt [...]
It really wasn't all that long ago that Victoria Legrand and longstanding accomplice Alex Scally last shacked up in London. Then, Beach House sold out the Roundhouse ; tonight they're in town for the first of two full houses way out west London at the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire. It was then earliest November; it's now late March, and it's considerable degrees colder. Yet bitter though it may be, it feels an apt fit with the unrelentingly wintry themes to have long since blighted their back catalogue. Another element to have changed along with the [...]
Today categorically has to be the low in an itself unspeakably dire week. You know the ones encrusted with an impenetrable crud during which little, to nothing works out alright? Yeah, this is one of those alright. But then occasionally, every now and again, something absolutely blinding permeates the gloom and that, right here and so too right now, comes from Maryland ensemble Mt. Royal . 'Baltimore City has become known for having a robust and diverse music scene', or so goes their blurb and though the city's musical outpour is doubtless robust, I sometimes set about wondering how diverse [...]
Any day that goes by without even so much as a transient burst of David Longstreth's Dirty Projectors is one which somehow leaves me feeling strangely unfulfilled. And truth be known, I've thus far this year rather neglected Swing Lo Magellan so it's something of a saving grace that they released this one over the weekend. There's A Fire originally featured as the flipside to a limited white label release of Offspring Are Blank pressed especially to coincide with a show at New York's Carnegie Hall last month, and it's one to really rekindle [...]
I just want to take up a few moments of your day to introduce you to Eliza and the Bear . At a time where it is almost 'not cool' (everyone hates Mumfords now right?) to like folk music or folk pop/folk rock etc etc, I can't shout it loud enough that I L O V E Eliza and the Bear. Think your Hey Rosetta! or your Arcade Fire. I'm not sure how I find myself unknowingly listlessly swaying to Eliza and the Bear at The Roundhouse whilst stood next to a [...]
Photos by Jason Williamson
If 2012 was widely regarded as the year of Death Grips , then 2013 already looks set to belong to Scandinavia's omnipotent sibling duo The Knife who, having already stoked the flames of intrigue with Full of Fire last month, here return with a second glimmer of their fourthcoming full-length, Shaking The Habitual . Close as I've since kept the former to my heart, it's A Tooth For An Eye which will surely have all attentions firmly locked back in on Karin and Olof Dreijer as they do away with the unabating agitation of its sprawling, lost-marble nine-minute [...]
So the last two quotes I've read concerning The Flaming Lips are thus. The first comes right from the greying horse's mouth – à la Wayne Coyne – and has to do with the composition of the shapeshifting, genre-morphing Oklahoma ensemble's forthcoming thirteenth studio LP, The Terror . It reads a lil' summin' like: “Why would we make this music that is The Terror – this bleak, disturbing record…?? I don't really want to know the answer that I think is coming: that WE were hopeless, WE were disturbed and, I think, accepting that [...]
So it's happening. Or rather, it's finally happened: The Knife are back. Back if not from the brink then the brief hiatus – Karin's albeit effervescent Fever Ray divergence ; the siblings' minimalist opera centred around Darwin's theory of evolution; whatever it was that Olof got up to in the all too protracted interim. Full Of Fire (a preliminary glimpse into Shaking The Habitual , the pair's fourth full-length anticipated April 8th) seemingly derives little from either Fever Ray or indeed Tomorrow, In A Year but [...]
The VPME Take one recent graduate of all female Alt- choir Gaggle, add an Australian guitarist and refuge from the London metal scene and complete the musical triangle with one of Andalusia’s only female drummers and the result is ? A History! Aquila Rose, Graham Alderton, and Bel Conde are A History and their début single ‘Fox’ is a dramatic glitter frosted gem that weaves a poetic narrative alongside broodingly, beautiful dark cinematic pop. We could of course employ any number of musical aphorisms or journalistic clichés, but its best to just [...]
While January has effectively lived up to its London billing as a month as drab musically as it is meteorologically, they're having a topsy-turvy time of it down under if recent triple j Like A Version sessions are anything to go by. First there was dear ol' Sharon doing Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' People Ain't No Good , and now there's this: David Longstreth's Dirty Projectors reinterpreting Usher's heady, chart-glooping Climax. Still swinging high off 'Magellan by the sounds of it, he's joined on the track by the band's [...]
So it's happening. Or rather, it's finally happened: The Knife are back. Back if not from the brink then the brief hiatus – Karin's albeit effervescent Fever Ray divergence ; the siblings' minimalist opera centred around Darwin's theory of evolution; whatever it was that Olof got up to in the all too protracted interim. Full of Fire (a preliminary glimpse into Shaking The Habitual , the pair's fourth full-length anticipated April 8th) seemingly derives little from either Fever Ray or indeed Tomorrow, In A Year but [...]
"Everybody still yearns for the old bands." That was the message emanating from the Happy Mondays' longstanding vocalist Rowetta Satchell when we recently convened with the expressive Mancunian and now deeper within December, her belief couldn't be more explicitly vindicated. Shaun Ryder, Bez et al. have the north of the capital covered, whilst Liam Howlett & co. button down the hatches and take the south by storm, Brixton caught up in a hefty whir of trance-scented ex post facto revelry. Tonight is neither today, nor yesterday, nor even yesteryear but a violent throwback to a decade long [...]
Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December 20th 2012. Happy Mondays, Roundhouse, December [...]
Hello, and welcome to Monday. And so we begin: as Bryan Ferry once conceded on Roxy's itself straight-up sublime If There Is Something number from their eponymous début effort, "to keep a straight course not easy." And however the weekend just gone treated you, he, for one, has done his fair share of slicing himself up with that straight-edge lifestyle and allowing in all manner of ill. Though why the witter? Well, because it is down a comparable pitfall of elaborate overindulgence and limitless intoxication the length and breadth of England itself that the Happy Mondays so often [...]
Dots & Dashes
A Pocket Full Of Seeds
The Ruckus
The Line Of Best Fit![The Flaming Lips - "Sun Blows Up Today" [Lyric Video]](http://cdn.elbo.ws/youtube/wR0kjG-uab4_130.jpg)
The VPME
Lana Del Rey – Young And Beautiful (No Pets Allowed Remix)
Kanye West Rapped About Ruining People’s Stuff A Lot On ‘Yeezus’: Here’s The Comprehensive List
