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 [...]
Music: Live Review: Villagers @ The Wardrobe
Conor O’Brien’s Villagers might not strike many people as the most riveting live prospect out there, but after tonight’s performance many will look at the band in a new light. Right from the beginning they play with a feral kind of energy that renders many of their songs, in particular several newer cuts from recent [...]
Music: Live Review: Calexico @ The Cockpit
Tucson-based Calexico expertly embody the sounds and feel of the US-Mexican border. With influences from traditional Latin American sounds, American country music and indie rock, they create an exciting soundscape best described as desert noir. In a live setting, what really stands out is how heart-felt their passion is for these styles. The band starts with excitement-builder ‘Epic’, but [...]
Music: Live Review: Swim Deep @ Brudenell Social Club
Birmingham’s ‘Sunshine-Popsters’ Swim Deep took to the Brudenell stage amidst a recent NME-spearheaded flurry of hype and managed to just about justify the acclaim surrounding them. After a shaky start (in which poetic justice shined through, when the SWIM DEEP background artwork fell from behind the stage following frontman Austin Williams’s singing off-key), the surf [...]
Music: Live Review: Exclamation Pony @ Brudenell Social Club
Here we have the unveiling of Exclamation Pony, Ryan Jarman (The Cribs) and Jen Turner’s (Here We Go Magic) out-of-the-blue collaboration, and Ryan seemed genuinely enthused to be bashing his poor guitar in a word-of-mouth sold-out Brudenell before anywhere else. The one track available as a precursor to the show, ‘Rumours’, couldn’t have prepared the [...]
Music News: BRIT Awards 2013 Winners
The winners at the 2013 BRIT awards are as follows: Emeli Sande – Best British Female Solo Artist Emeli Sande – Best British Female Solo Artist Ben Howard – Best British Breakthrough Ben Howard – Best British Male Solo Artist Coldplay -British Live Act Adele (Skyfall) British Single The Black Keys – International [...]