• Caribou – Our Love

    October 17, 2014 - By 

    Most adults have, at one stage or another, suffered from a broken heart. A thoroughly miserable life experience, the majority of us deal with it by ingesting copious amounts of chocolate, moping around the place feeling sorry for ourselves and – if you’re The Thin Air, at least – drinking ourselves into pointless oblivion in pubs. Dan Snaith clearly does things a bit differently, channelling what has been – if the lyrics are anything to go by – a period of considerable emotional turmoil into the ten songs that make up his fourth LP under the Caribou moniker (after two…

  • patten – Estoile Naiant

    April 7, 2014 - By 

    Once, a long time ago, The Thin Air had reason to find itself upon a small boat, sailing around Australia’s Whitsunday Islands. “Lucky you,” you might think. But it was not so, for – entirely lacking sea legs – immediately upon embarking on the voyage we succumbed to a vicious, day-long bout of seasickness. Entering the fourth or fifth hour of miserable nausea, lying helplessly spread-eagled on our bunk while friends frolicked happily up on deck, we did what any reasonable person would do to remedy the situation: began drinking heavily. Fast forward to that evening, and as we reached…

  • The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream

    March 20, 2014 - By 

    For myriad reasons, we are sadly unlikely ever to hear a collaboration between prime-period Bob Dylan and Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized at their peak. For one thing, the laws of space and time prevent it – the two acts’ greatest moments occurring some thirty years apart. Damn you, physics! Fans of imaginary musical dream-teams need not despair though, because we have the next best thing in the form of Lost In The Dream, the third album from Philadelphia’s finest pioneers of psychedelic, spaced-out Americana, The War On Drugs. There’s no two ways about it: frontman Adam Granduciel’s voice unmistakably recalls a…

  • Chequerboard – The Unfolding

    October 10, 2013 - By 

    Back in 1993, Damon Albarn coined the phrase Modern Life Is Rubbish for the title of his band’s second album. Damon, mate, you didn’t know the half of it. 20 years later and modern life is rubbisher than ever. There’s just so much noise: constantly connected to our ubiquitous bleeping smartphones, we’re hit with a non-stop barrage of tweets, texts and emails, while social media sites urge us to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ every two-bit product and adverts blare at us from every conceivable space. Honestly, it’s enough to make you wish they’d just drop the bomb and bring an end…

  • 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…

  • Tieranniesaur – DIYSCO

    June 10, 2013 - By 

    It’s a curious truth that there is no justice. For proof of this incontrovertible fact, consider the cases of Daft Punk and Tieranniesaur. When the none-more-fashionable French duo recently released their ‘Get Lucky’ single, they were hailed as the saviours of disco music. Yet mere months before that, Dublin’s own left-field funksters had unleashed ‘DIYSCO’, a track in a not-dissimilar musical vein that was every bit as good, yet – lacking as it did some heavyweight guests and an irresistible marketing  campaign – was inevitably met with a fraction of the acclaim. See? No bloody justice at all. Nonetheless, like…

  • Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

    June 4, 2013 - By 

    Unlikely though it sounds, it is actually possible to simultaneously love and loathe something. A catalogue of things that The Thin Air has at once both liked and disliked might include: the effects of alcohol; Wayne Rooney; various members of our social circle; and most of all the taste of olives (delicious, salty, greasy, disgusting olives). To this non-exclusive list we might now add Random Access Memories, which is partly ludicrously enjoyable – and partly just plain ludicrous. Where to begin with this sprawling ginormo-album? Perhaps with joyous single ‘Get Lucky’. It hardly needs saying at this point that it’s…

  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Mosquito

    May 20, 2013 - By 

    Ten years on from their garlanded debut, and four years since their last album, much has changed for Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Singer Karen O has moved to LA from her native New York, and then come back. Guitarist Nick Zinner has taken time off to indulge his passion for photography. Drummer Brian Chase has, through the simple mechanism of growing both his hair and beard, transmogrified into Warren Ellis of the Bad Seeds. The question is, in the face of these various transitions, what has changed musically for everyone’s favourite NYC boho art-rockers? The answer – and apologies if this…

  • The Fall – Re-mit

    May 3, 2013 - By 

    It’s never easy reviewing a new Fall album, mainly because – in the experience of this reviewer at least – Fall albums always sound terrible on first listen. You hear it and think “Boysadear, but this is a lot of ramshackle crap”. Then, insidiously – almost sneakily – some angular guitar hook or muttered guttural utterance embeds itself in your brain; you find yourself inexplicably returning again and again to this record that so baffled and frustrated you; fast forward a few weeks and you’re telling anyone who’ll listen that the new Fall album might just be their best ever…