Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Favours For Sailors – Furious Sons (Saddle Creek)
Favours For Sailors
Furious Sons
Saddle Creek
Love at first listen is something of the emperors new clothes of the music industry. What hits you initially with a sugar high, pupil dilating delirium sounds staid and forced after only a handful of rotations. However, roaring well into double figure plays and I’m still writing up my ‘Records of 2009′ charts with ‘Favours For Sailors’ debut mini album ‘Furious Sons’ teaching Steven Gerrard and co just how to fight for a title.
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Dan Deacon – Bromst (Carpark Records)
Dan Deacon
Bromst
Carpark Records
Bromst is the latest outing from prolific electro-acoustic New Yorker Dan Deacon. It’s a collection of hazy quirkpop outings that dance along slowly seeping in through the back door of your mind, like a cross between Kevin Shields and James Yuill. Bizarrely most of the album was debuted live by an ensemble Deacon collected together at the Masonic Temple in New York.
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The Balky Mule – The Length Of The Rail (FatCat)
The Balky Mule
The Length Of The Rail
Fat Cat
The Balky Mule trades in quirksome electrofolk numbers. The mule himself is non other than Bristolian multi-instrumentalist Sam Jones. Jones has now emigrated to Melbourne Australia, but ‘The Length of The Rail’ collects together works from over the last 5 years mostly created in Bristol.
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Storsveit Nix Noltes – Royal Family – Divorce (FatCat)
Storsveit Nix Noltes
Royal Family – Divorce
Fat Cat Records
There are some universal truths about being Icelandic. You have probably seen Bjork and Damon Albarn stumbling around the capital, You almost certainly dislike bankers right now…and, far more importantly, you have been onto the shimmering beauty of ‘Royal Family – Divorce’, for nearly 2 years now.
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…and You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – The Century Of Self (Justice)
…And You Will Know US By The Trail Of Dead
The Century Of Self
Justice
Sometimes the very relationships that are supposed to nurture and inspire us to new heights are the very same that keep you trapped in a quagmire of frustration and resentment. Since the critical pinnacle of ‘Source, Tags and Codes’ in 2002 this has been a fair assessment of the feelings between …Trail of Dead and their ex label Interscope. This push me pull you confrontation ended in 2007 when the band finally cut off their association with Interscope off at the head and embarked into a brave new contractless world, with galvanising effect.
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Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Beware (Domino)
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy
Beware
Domino
It’s the 10th anniversary of the first time mercurial songwriter and artist Will Oldham adopted the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy moniker on the sublime ‘I See A Darkness’. Oldham marks an industrious decade as the ‘Prince’ with ‘Beware’, an expansive and ambitious journey into the fractious nature of human connection and relationships that marks Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billys 7th full length outing.
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Condo Fucks – Fuckbook (Matador)
Condo Fucks
Fuckbook
Matador
In a wicked teenage prank to expose the kid in school that claimed to have heard every unreleased demo or b-side by any band you could name we once invented an obscure US garage band. had we attended the same school Yo La Tengo and I may have been fast friends.
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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Album Reissues
From Her to Eternity
The Firstborn Is Dead
Kicking Against The Pricks
Your Funeral… My Trial
Mute
In the quarter century since Nick Cave first stepped out from the fold of his seminal band The Birthday Party and into the heart of musical consorts The Bad Seeds, he has gone on to become one of the most prolific, prodigious and prominent artists working today. Cave is the ultimate chameleon, flitting between artistic habitats and adapting with disquieting authority. Yet it is still with the Bad Seeds that he conjures his finest work, as last years ‘Dig,Lazarus, Dig!!!’ confirms.
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The Brute Chorus – Freedom Studios, Roundhouse, 28th Feb
It’s not for the faint hearted. The prospect of recording your debut album infront of a live audience of baying fans would send most bands, used to the insular privacy of the recording studio, fleeing to the hills.
Not so The Brute Chorus though. The Whitechapel boys have packed out the Freedom rooms in the bowels of The Roundhouse in order to add a little soul to the conception of their debut opus. It could have been a suicidal move, but what transpired over the dying moments of February 2009 was something just a little bit special.
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The Fratellis – Jon
‘We really haven’t achieved anything yet, we’re just getting started, so it’s flattering to be compared to bands that have really meant something, but we haven’t earned it yet.’ So muses John Lawler (Jon Fratelli) of Glaswegian tunesmiths The Fratellis when asked if he feels part of a new wave of Scottish bands that have come to the fore over the last 2 years including Biffy Clyro, Glasvegas, The View and more. He is reflecting as the band pause before launching into a December headlining tour that will see the band sign off 2008 to a packed SECC crowd in Glasgow a few days before Christmas, and though his initial statement may seem dismissive of a Brit award winning band who this year released their second album and who’s doo doo de doo refrain from breakthrough single ‘Chelsea Dagger’ still reverberates along terraces the length and breadth of the nation, it is not that surprising of a man who takes most of his notes on how to be a band from that small beat combo from Liverpool, The Beatles.
