• James Holden – The Inheritors

    July 1, 2013 - By 

    The Thin Air was always rubbish at maths (GCSE Grade B, y’all!). Frankly, we couldn’t see the point. Now, of course, we very much regret not concentrating more on the ol’ sums. For one thing, it’s embarrassing being unable to work out whether you’ve been given the correct change in a shop. For another, if only we’d been better at the subject we could have ended up like James Holden, self-confessed mathematics nerd, feted DJ and producer and – with his second album The Inheritors – producer of some of the most dense, dissonant and downright uncomfortable sounds you’re likely…

  • Palms – Palms

    June 28, 2013 - By 

    If you’ll allow me to make a quite large generalization, supergroups are by and large quite awful. To be fair there is some gold in those hills;  bands like CSNY, Cream and Bad Company are a testament to that fact. But any type of music where the self-aggrandizing Scott Weiland fest Velvet Revolver are considered to be one of the better acts, leaves little to be desired. This leaves us with Palms, a four piece made up of metal icons Chino Moreno of Deftones and Jeff Caxide, Aaron Harris and Bryant Clifford Meyer of ISIS. This, on paper, is a…

  • Empire of the Sun – Ice on the Dune

    June 26, 2013 - By 

    If one disregards melody, songcraft, and a general air of recycled psychedelia, the thing that best categorises Luke Steele’s career to date is inactivity. In a perfect world, Empire of the Sun would have capitalised on the success of their debut album and their incendiary live shows in 2009, ushering in another album to let us soak in their esoteric and exciting world. Instead, they disappeared for four years, before returning with an album that is almost identical to the previous one. And where Walking on a Dream shimmered, Ice on the Dune thumps and hisses. The debut, whilst not…

  • Zomby – With Love

    June 26, 2013 - By 

    Ever since he began to turn heads during the dubstep boom of 2007 and 2008, Zomby has delighted in confounding expectation at every turn. At a time when Skream and Benga were becoming crossover dubstep stars, he preferred to look back to the long-gone era of rave and jungle on his electrifying debut album Where Were You In ’92? By using such a title, he set himself up as a rave guru despite the fact he was only a kid at the time, while his Twitter account is a non-stop stream of self-aggrandisement, hectoring and sometimes tedious, sometimes amusing beefs.…

  • Sigur Rós – Kveikur

    June 25, 2013 - By 

    Allow me to tell you a true story. Many moons ago I purchased a Sigur Rós album on a whim, the one which is entitled with a neat pair of symmetrical parentheses and whose tracks are similarly oblique. It was only a year or so later – after many listens along moonlit country roads and empty motorways – when I discovered that the album I was listening to was not in fact the album I thought I was listening to. The record shop clerk had mistakenly slipped the wrong disc in the sleeve and, given a bum steer by the…

  • Tunng – Turbines

    June 24, 2013 - By 

    Tunng have been sighing out gorgeous folktronica for a decade now, and on fifth full-length Turbines, it really shows. There’s an undoubted confidence to the construction and performance of these nine tracks; an ability to wring depth and a surprising level of dynamics from ostensibly hushed, layered music that betrays the quintet’s experience. Their pastoral leanings are more pronounced than ever before, but the gentle fingerpicked guitars and sweet, almost whispered vocal harmonies still bob precariously on a river of burbling electronic malevolence that keeps any potential tweeness at bay. That said, this record is not without its weaknesses. Firstly,…

  • Iamamiwhoami – Bounty

    June 20, 2013 - By 

    Jonna Lee set the bar high when she released her impressive debut album Kin in June of last year. The Stockholm-based artist, under the moniker Iamamiwhoami, produced one of the most captivating electronic records of 2012, laden with art-pop grandeur and trip-hop intricacy. The audiovisual release followed a series of videos posted online, dubbed the ‘prelude’ to Kin – now a year later, those tracks have been released properly to form a spiritual prequel: Bounty. The album opens with ‘B’, an uncomplicated piano piece with echoing vocals heaped on. From the first listen it’s a pretty yet unremarkable song, and…

  • Airhead – For Years

    June 21, 2013 - By 

    Long-time James Blake collaborator Rob McAndrews aka Airhead is quite happy doing things at his own pace. Since the release of 2010’s ‘Pembroke’ (his breakthrough single with Blake) McAndrews has only released three 12” singles, and whilst he’s kept himself busy with Blake’s touring band on guitar and synth duties, he hasn’t really thrust himself into the limelight in the way that he might have done following ‘Pembroke’’s success. He was briefly, after all, being mentioned in the same breaths as Blake and Mount Kimbie as a kind of post-dubstep ‘One to watch’  – yet both Mount Kimbie and James…

  • Jon Hopkins – Immunity

    June 17, 2013 - By 

    It’s been an unfortunate quirk of  Jon Hopkins’ career to date that his own fine solo work has been largely overlooked in favour of his collaborative efforts. Playing with Brian Eno, popping up unexpectedly on Coldplay’s Viva La Vida and conjuring up the sparkling Diamond Mine mini-album with Scotland’s finest, King Creosote are undoubtedly impressive CV points but give the impression of the Londoner as a talented studio gun-for-hire rather than a great artist in his own right. This is the record that should finally change all that. Though not by any stretch a concept album, Immunity has been sequenced…

  • Gold Panda – Half Of Where You Live

    June 17, 2013 - By 

    Derwin Schlecker, formerly of Peckham and Chelmsford but now Berlin-based, has metamorphosized into his alter ego Gold Panda and returns to bring the listening public the follow-up to the highly acclaimed and 2011 Mercury Prize-nominated Lucky Shiner.  A little bit of cursory internet research provides hints as to the influences, references and source material that provide the layers and strata for Gold Panda’s world. Time spent in Japan and study at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London has certainly left a lasting impression on Schlecker, as this release is held together at the seams…