• Grizzly Bear – Painted Ruins

    August 23, 2017 - By 

    Grizzly Bear are a band of individuals and this has never been as true as it is on their latest record Painted Ruins. In the five years since Shields, the once Brooklyn-based band have scattered across the east and west coasts slowly reconvening to create new music. These years have perhaps been the most formative in the band’s tenure as vocalist Ed Droste describes, “life happened”. Marriage, kids, divorce and everything in between has transformed the four indie rockers into adults, each unique in their experience of the world. And it’s with this experience that the band approach Painted Ruins.…

  • Tortoise – The Catastrophist

    January 22, 2016 - By 

    There have been several acts that have stood as the totems of instrumental rock music, or post-rock in the broadest sense of the word: Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Sigur Rós all acting as cornerstones of the genre’s respective corners. For the past 26 years however, Chicago five-piece Tortoise have been the oft-unsung heralds of a scene’s progressive evolution, gradually bubbling under as one of those defining acts, cementing their influence on the countless bands that have followed a similar stylistic path. Originating as a “rhythm section for hire” of sorts, the focus on rhythm…

  • Confab Review: Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks

    April 17, 2014 - By 

    Wait, who?  Avey Tare. He’s out of Animal Collective. Oh right. Has he gone solo? Not really, Animal Collective like to keep themselves busy with side projects. So what’s the Slasher Flicks bit? Is it horror picture music? Well I suppose that might depend on your tastes. But essentially no, there’s no long, suspenseful atmospherics followed by sudden dramatic explosions with added bone-crunching sound effects. Nor is it black metal. Is it just a name then? Good question. It does seem a little bit tacked on, a convenient story providing opportunities for blood-dripping photo shoots, spooky artwork and a comically…

  • Future Islands – Singles

    March 25, 2014 - By 

    The hardest working band in electronic pop have moved to 4AD for their fourth album of delicately skewed and melodically-crushing heartbreak. Superficially, Singles carries on the Baltimore trio’s business of creating crafted, if slightly unsettling vignettes of loves lost, unrequited or simply illusory. The likes of ‘Tinman’ (from breakthrough second album In Evening Air) frantically pulsed with a combination of galloping bass and simmering synth washes and –most importantly – the astonishing voice of one Sam Herring. Herring’s half strangled, affected and utterly effecting throaty laments leant those songs a kind of raw, unnerving authenticity that made you believe he…

  • Frank Turner – Tape Deck Heart

    May 14, 2013 - By 

    It’s been ten years since Frank Turner first howled his lungs out on Million Dead’s debut. One band dissolution, a genre hop, multiple releases and an Olympic ceremony later the Winchester lad is still wailing, albeit with a greater sense of melody. Tape Deck Heart is Turner’s fifth solo album in seven years and it is around this point in an artist’s career that the cracks invariably begin to show – this album is no different. There is an increased feeling of lethargy with some of the music on display. A release schedule like Turner’s puts a strain on any artist’s musical ability and…