• Marika Hackman – Any Human Friend

    August 20, 2019 - By 

    A decade on from Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’,  pop seems to have arrived at a place where girls kissing girls is no longer being treated as provocative or performative, or being fetishised for clout. Queer stars like Haley Kiyoko, Princess Nokia, Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens and St. Vincent are dominating the mainstream landscape, going beyond heteronormative boundaries and exploring what it means to be queer in 2019.  Marika Hackman’s latest release is a bold and brazen addition to the zeitgeist. Written in the wake of the English singer-songwriters break-up with fellow musician Amber Bain (The Japanese House),…

  • Clark – Kiri Variations

    August 9, 2019 - By 

    In 2018 a British TV miniseries, Kiri, was revered for admirably broaching the contentious topic of transracial adoption. Viewers and critics alike applauded the series bravura performances, so much so it went on to receive two BAFTA nominations. The composer of its score, Chris Clark (a.k.a Clark) clearly shares the same infatuation, feeling that he wanted to revisit and rework the series soundtrack for his tenth studio album.  On his first LP playing away from the ever-wonky Warp (home of Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, Oneohtrix Point Never), boundaries are tested. It’s clear that this ambition of Kiri was. Never one…

  • Purple Mountains – Purple Mountains

    July 25, 2019 - By 

    David Berman quit music in 2009. The reasons for retiring his two-decade spanning cult indie-country-rock project as Silver Jews were characteristically bleak. The disbandment, Berman revealed, was because he felt “the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm” wrought by his Washington lobbyist father, known to many as Dr Evil.  He also, relatable, just wanted more time to read and work on his poetry. Surprisingly then, this year came the announcement of Berman’s first album in ten years, the unexpected eponymous Purple Mountains – and it’s a tentative…

  • Thom Yorke – ANIMA

    July 12, 2019 - By 

    A potent side-effect of modernity is the prevalent disconnection we experience from our inner selves; Freud identified the basic, instinctual drive of humans as the ‘id’, Jung was interested in the ‘anima’ of man — the ‘feminine’ aspect of the brain underlying the conscious self. These concepts of double identities had been prevalent in psychology before the mass subsumption of digital technology, but have since gained a new and increasingly urgent significance. With OK Computer in 1997, Radiohead developed a seminal text reflecting on modern technological anxiety. 22 years later, Thom Yorke’s perspective has shifted from the potentiality of the…

  • Palehound – Black Friday 

    July 9, 2019 - By 

    With a warm, longing ode to a friend, Palehound’s third record opens with the kind of astutely observed, compassionately wrought sketch that we have come to expect from Ellen Kempner since her 2015 Dry Food, and indeed its 2017 follow-up, A Place I’ll Always Go. Where the former dealt largely with Kempner embracing her own sexuality, the follow-up was more mournful in tone, although encased in Palehound’s exuberant and often inventive indie rock they never felt maudlin or morose. ‘Company’, just Kempner and an organ, is the introduction to a Palehound record that, while tackling the same uncertainties of relationships as those previous,…

  • Bill Callahan – Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest

    July 5, 2019 - By 

    From his extremely ramshackle 1990 debut Sewn to the Sky up until 2013’s far more polished Dream River, Bill Callahan – better known for the first half of his career by the alias Smog – managed to maintain a reasonably prolific rate of output. Following a dub remix album in 2014, however, things fell rather silent. Had the man often referred to as the spiritual successor to Leonard Cohen finally run out of ideas after fifteen albums? Well, as it turns out, no – life merely got in the way. As Callahan found himself getting married and fathering his first…

  • The Divine Comedy – Office Politics

    June 28, 2019 - By 

    Neil Hannon has always been, rather consciously, something of an anachronism in contemporary pop – an urbane, arch throwback to suave crooners and irreverent singer-songwriters of the 1960s. In a way, this made sense in the ’90s, when The Divine Comedy were at their commercial height. After all, Britpop juggernauts Oasis and Blur were fetishists of the ’60s, lifting the Beatles’ and Kinks’ aesthetics from the middle part of that decade; Jarvis Cocker, when not drawing inspiration from Serge Gainsbourg, shared Hannon’s obsession with the wry, literary Scott Walker. But while Albarn and Cocker combined those influences with more contemporary sensibilities, Hannon was a purist –…

  • Julia Shapiro – Perfect Version

    June 20, 2019 - By 

    Perfect Version finds Julia Shapiro wrangling with the idea of the self at a tumultuous time in her life, cataloguing the period following her exit from Chastity Belt’s third album tour due to a flustered blend of relationship woes and emotional toil. Facing the mirror to see nothing, she begins to question what it means to be someone at all, to be truly authentic. ‘Parking Lot’ materialises this thought into the daily task of trying to find somewhere to park, unmasking routines as things done out of mere habit rather than because we want to, raising questions about the significance…

  • Cate Le Bon – Reward

    June 8, 2019 - By 

    The songs on Cate Le Bon’s fifth album, Reward, came about as the result of time spent in a cottage in England’s rural Lake District, where she lived for a year in almost total isolation. Retreating from several years of going through the looped motions of touring, writing, and recording, there in nature and solitude Le Bon spent her days learning how to build furniture from scratch and her nights pouring over a second-hand piano, where she found herself writing the most introspective and personal songs of her career. Unsurprisingly then, location plays a vital part in Le Bon’s writing,…

  • In Their Thousands – Acrasia

    June 7, 2019 - By 

    Donegal’s In Their Thousands are no overnight story, it’s fair to say: brothers Aidan and Declan McClafferty have been playing music with their cousin Ruari Friel since childhood, and have been performing as In Their Thousands, alongside bassist Marty Smyth, for around a decade or so. These years of shared experience permeate through, the band’s debut long player. The 13 songs collected within feel distinctly ‘lived-in’ – from the collective setbacks, small victories and long nights of the soul detailed in their lyrics, to the ease of the band’s confident, unshowy playing. The title track and lead single, a recent…