• Perfume Genius – Too Bright

    October 9, 2014 - By 

    Mike Hadreas’ third Perfume Genius album marks a sea change for the Seattle-based singer-songwriter. The grungy outfits, introverted lyrics and subdued piano confessionals with which he made his name are consigned to history; in their place struts a shiny androgyny and a corresponding confidence in the power his words and appearance invoke. His music reflects this new-found sense of empowerment, employing an impressive level of sonic and vocal variation across these eleven songs. Hadreas leads us gently into this brave new world via the album’s most familiar-sounding track. Brief, aching and piano-centric, ‘I Decline’ cleverly summons uplifting clichés before unceremoniously…

  • Classic Album: Bark Psychosis – Hex

    February 14, 2014 - By 

    You’re familiar with post-rock, right? Long, usually instrumental tracks that start off quiet and pretty, build slowly then BOOM – erupt into cathartic crescendo, before tailing off with a swooning little coda. That’s post-rock. Beautiful and yes, intense, but formulaic; “alternative” muzak safe enough to accompany football highlights, teen melodramas and Sir David Attenborough whispering feverishly over infra-red footage of rutting beasts. Let’s rewind back to 1994. Mojo hack (and subsequent alt-music historian) Simon Reynolds slips the promo from a new British band into his stereo and presses play. The sounds which ooze from his speakers are alien – an…

  • Pelican – Forever Becoming

    October 22, 2013 - By 

    Woah. It’s apparent from the gargantuan opening thuds of ‘Terminal’ that Chicago riffmongers Pelican have undergone some major surgery in the four years since the lacklustre What We All Come to Need limped into earshot. Indeed, it transpires that founding guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec has flown the nest, to be replaced by The Swan King’s Dallas Thomas. Gone, too, are the grungy guitars, spacier textures and vocal dabblings of the previous record; Pelican 2013 is an angrier beast, pounding the listener with monolithic slabs of guitar abuse, pummelling rhythms and huge bottom end. If all this sounds strangely familiar, it’s because…

  • Jesu – Everyday I Get Closer to the Light From Which I Came

    October 8, 2013 - By 

    Justin Broadrick has long been a progressive influence in heavy music, from his pioneering work in industrial legends Godflesh to the stunning ambient/drone soundscapes of Final or any one of his other countless side projects. His output under the Jesu moniker has seen him marry shoegaze blur with metallic heft to remarkable effect. Like its predecessors, Every Day I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came  features pretty melodies nestling snugly inside woolly swathes of distortion, guitars chiming and chorusing around languid drum patterns and gargantuan low-tuned bass, while distant vocals float airily over glacial tempos. It’s a…

  • Drenge – Drenge

    September 9, 2013 - By 

    As introductions to the national consciousness go, it was truly surreal. Amid alleged underhand shenanigans over candidate selection, Labour election co-ordinator Tom Watson publicly fell on his sword via an open letter to his party leader, Ed Miliband; a missive which suggested that public servants would be much improved by attending Glastonbury and specifically recommending that those reading listen to Drenge. Quite how young brothers Eoin and Rory Loveless felt about their role in this political suicide is moot; no publicity is bad publicity, it’s said, and any band capable of bringing about spontaneous abdication in our beloved leaders is…

  • Washed Out – Paracosm

    August 27, 2013 - By 

    “Nothing like this sound I make that only lasts the season and is only heard by bedroom kids who buy it for that reason.” Matt Berninger probably wasn’t singing specifically about chillwave on the National’s ‘Lit Up’, but he might as well have been. Like anything sporting the “nü-” prefix or the NME’s current, desperate hawking of “psych”, chillwave was one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-em musical trends that sounded great on first exposure but rapidly vanished like the one-trick ponies they so obviously were. With its easy-to-digest blend of muffled vocal harmonies, shoegaze fuzz and blissed-out Balearic beats it’s not hard…

  • Swim Deep – Where The Heaven Are We

    July 23, 2013 - By 

      Back in the early nineties, when grunge was king and the Britpop cloud had yet to cast its boorish shadow over the nation, indie was a much more interesting minority concern. The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays’ pilled-up baggy; the fey jangling of Suede and early Blur; shoegaze swaying between the plangent ache of Slowdive and the speaker-threatening cacophony of My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain – few could have predicted that by the middle of the decade, Ocean Colour Scene would be shifting units by the truckload. Many an ageing hipster will still get misty-eyed…

  • Lemuria – The Distance Is So Big

    July 8, 2013 - By 

    Given the mercurial nature of Lemuria’s sound, the fact that the group take their name from a mythical lost island continent seems somewhat apt. This third full-length sees the trio as difficult to pin down as their eponymous land mass, kicking off with a brief choral swell before opener proper ‘Brilliant Dancer’ shuffles into view. The twanging first few bars are pure slacker indie, but the track suddenly takes off on an unexpectedly raucous tangent, its skewed rhythm at first appearing utterly at odds with the effervescent pop melodies being played out on the surface. No sooner have you sussed…

  • 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,…

  • 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…