Music: Album Review: Post War Years – Galapagos
Recently the UK has not exactly been short of indie bands dealing in synth-heavy modern rock. Amid heavyweight new releases from Foals and Everything Everything, perhaps we should take a chance on the much less well-known Post War Years’ Galapagos. Opener ‘All Eyes’ is a proggy, mid-tempo slow burner which launches itself into an epic instrumental chorus [...]
Music: Album Review: Atoms For Peace – AMOK
After over a year of hints, it is here. Despite the addition of some unexpected and some unsurprising members to the lineup (put Flea in the former camp, Nigel Godrich the latter), this full-band effort is best seen as a continuation of Thom Yorke’s earlier solo effort The Eraserrather than an entirely new venture. It occupies [...]
Music: Album Review: Shout Out Louds – Optica
Four albums in and Shout Out Louds have taken the time to polish their strain of saccharin, synth-driven, dream pop. Behind Optica is a band with confidence in their sound, certainly more so than previously heard on albums such as 2010’s Work. The album follows the typically Scandinavian habit of sounding clean and crisp, yet Optica has a sincere level of [...]
Music: Album Review: Johnny Marr – The Messenger
Since The Smiths broke up in 1987, Johnny Marr has jumped around from band to band collecting all sorts of accolades along the way. He has played on a US No. 1 album with Modest Mouse, as well as contributing to a multi-award winning soundtrack written by Hans Zimmer. It therefore seems ridiculous that it [...]
Music News: Live At Leeds Announces More Acts
Everyone’s favourite local multi-venue musical event Live at Leeds has added even more exciting names to this year’s line up. This year’s festival will take place from Friday 3rd May – Monday 6th May, beginning with the ‘Unconference’, with practical advice on how to enter the musical industry, and will finish with a 5-a-side football [...]
Music: Album Review: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Push The Sky Away
Well it was about time. Nearly five years have elapsed since Cave’s last full-band outing, 2008’s superb Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, and with a title as grand-sounding as Push The Sky Away fans might expect a gloriously noisy return on this, their fifteenth studio album. But they would be wrong, for this album has much more in common with [...]
Music: Album Review: Widowspeak – Almanac
Having avidly admired the BBC’s ‘Escape to the Country’ for many years, I had high expectations of the musical equivalent Brooklyn duo Widowspeak pursued with the rural recording of their second album ‘Almanac’. Robert Earl Thomas and Molly Hamilton were quite the urbanites before recording the album in a 100 year old barn, aiming to [...]
Music: Miracles of Modern Science – MEEMS EP
Miracles of Modern Science is the Brooklyn-based quintet which since 2005 has been making indie-pop with a twist: they use baroque-style instrumentation; the results sounding something like Tokyo Police Club backed with strings and mandolin. MEEMS is their first release since 2011’s debut album Dog Year, and the band’s sound has not greatly changed since then; the [...]
Music: Album Review: Tegan and Sara – Heartthrob
For those with a vested interest in the bland and banal, I present a new album to limply poke your beige taste buds, namely Tegan and Sara’s release “Heartthrob”. As a twin myself I feel the need to stick up for other geminals across the globe, but as the album progresses imperceptibly through bubble-gummy synthesized [...]