• Surfer Blood – Pythons

    July 8, 2013 - By 

    It’s fair to say that amongst most people of a certain age you’d struggle to find anyone who doesn’t, or didn’t at one time love Teenage Fanclub, Pavement or Weezer. That combination of Ric Ocasek guitar, sweeter than sweet melodies and chunky fuzzy distortion is the perfect mixture for the music fan who loves the power and energy of punk but needs that wonderful hook to drag them in. When done right, you end up with Bandwagonesque, Slanted and Enchanted or The Blue Album, albums so good that cries of heresy instantly follow any sort of critical dissent.  But when…

  • These New Puritans – Field Of Reeds

    July 3, 2013 - By 

    Distant, stand-offish, awkward in the extreme and too serious by half. With the music press expressing such sentiments to describe These New Puritans, you get the impression that, despite the praise heaped upon 2010’s Hidden, the Southend trio would be afforded little leniency or understanding if they were to make a misstep with its follow-up. Thankfully however, Fields of Reeds once again sees the brothers Barnett unequivocally delivering a record worthy of bountiful acclaim that will surely feature in many critic’s reckoning for album of the year come December. Recorded over the course of twelve months, throughout the LP’s conception Jack…

  • Kanye West – Yeezus

    July 1, 2013 - By 

    Yeezus is Kanye West’s most polarising album to date, and it’s not just down to the testing sonic wonderland he’s created from such anti-pop genres as Chicago drill, house and industrial. Detractors who charge West with accusations of egotism, narcissism  and a bloated sense of self worth are unlikely to tolerate the most confrontational and aggressive piece he’s ever made, with topics such as power, materialism and a creeping distrust of women on Ye’s increasingly insular agenda. Inevitably, deriving enjoyment from Yeezus comes down to whether you can endure what’s on the mind of the man who in a recent…

  • 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…