CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Prior to the UK dance music explosion of summer 1988, house and techno were American micro-scenes, geographically restricted to Chicago, Detroit and New York. Small coteries showed interest in the UK, but few thought of making the stuff. Mancunian producers 808 State, however, were early adopters, recording an album that year and later charting with iconic 1989 hit “Pacific State”, a futuristic, Balearic instrumental. 30 years on, their seventh album is both forward-looking and a tribute to old analogue technologies.808 State, once a four-piece, is now the duo of long-term members Graham Read more ...
joe.muggs
When he arrived on the scene in the mid Noughties Mika – yes his name is Michael Holbrook – flew the flag for grandiose pop classicism. He had The Feeling as fellow travellers, and to an extent The Killers in their first wave of success and Muse entering their imperial phase channelled these same impulses. Now, of course the songwriting and production values of ELO, Queen, Abba, Wings, Hall & Oates are all good and noble things to aspire to. The love of studio as instrument, the ability to cram whole concertos and movies into three minute pop songs is nothing to be sniffed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy has been pondering how to react to oppression, and his own music’s obsolescence. What use is a rock band’s eleventh album at the best of times, he’s wondered, let alone in these worse ones under Trump?Wilco’s response is not to mirror their President in futile, raging protest. Instead, Ode to Joy is mostly gentle, built on acoustic strums of Tweedy’s toy guitar, and the relentless crunch of Glenn Kotchke’s percussion, which hammers against the protagonist’s self-deceit in “Everyone Hides”. Though static crackles at its margins, the music rises with purposeful optimism, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Punk rock, more so than any other genre, comes with a built-in age limit. There’s only so long you can play weeknights at basement venues for a share of the door and travel expenses; only so many years your back can withstand so many nights on strangers’ sofas. Those that don’t age out, sell out: their youthful excesses repackaged to shill hatchbacks and low-fat spread. Thank god, then, for The Menzingers: a four-piece born in the Scranton, Pennsylvania punk scene who opted to channel their 30s into roots-rock with a latent edge, capturing the free-fall into adulthood proper with a certain Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Bassist Dan Berglund was a founding member of the highly influential euro-jazz Esbjörn Svensson Trio (e.s.t.) until the accidental death of Svensson, while diving, in 2008. The first Tonbruket album appeared the following year, with Berglund joined by guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Johan Lindström, keyboardist Martin Hederos and drummer Andreas Werlin, the music stretching into prog-rock territory, some distance away from e.s.t.’s supple euro-jazz dynamics.Since then, four further albums have come, including last year’s live set, Live Salvation, with each musician bringing their Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Darkness have become something of an institution in British rock music since exploding onto the scene with their 2003 debut album, Permission to Land and its breakthrough single “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”. Over-the-top stage costumes and Justin Hawkins’ falsetto vocals may have been their trademarks for almost 20 years, but their humorous take on hard rock continues to raise smiles everywhere. Easter is Cancelled, needless to say, does little to change their somewhat individual take on a genre that is not usually renowned for having a sense of humour.Hawkins’ dramatic singing Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There comes a time for reflection in everyone’s lives – perhaps for Canadian indie-pop duo Tegan & Sara this is it. Harking back to the 1990s, they have found and re-worked tracks written in their teenage years, taking grains of truth from their own once lost lyrics and melodies, trussing them up with fancy production values and a new wave retro-pop sound.The album is launching just after the twins’ memoir, “High School” – a coming of age story of growing up in Calgary. Hey, I’m Just Like You feels like the musical accompaniment that should have been tucked into its sleeve.Created with an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Since the mid-2000s, Anders Trentemøller has been a major part of the European live circuit. A long time indie rock musician in his native Copenhagen, he had actually come to prominence as a fairly commercial electro-house remixer, but it was his 2006 album The Last Resort that cemented his position. Blending a subtler version of his dance production tricks with British shoegaze guitars and a bleak and eerie widescreen sweep, it was the perfect encapsulation of a particular kind of Nordic noir aesthetic: hints of dark doings in bleak forests and the cold sublime of unpopulated Read more ...
mark.kidel
65daysofstatic, the instrumentals-only post-rock experimental band from Sheffield, have suffered from the obsessive need to brand every supposed sub-genre of music when, in their case, they are much more than a math rock or glitch band. They are instead just courageous and adventurous, searching for new ways to put sounds together. Their strength and originality lies in the fact they escape categorisation and, as the good artists they are, re-invent themselves at every turn.With their latest album, the band have come a long way from their first outing The Fall of Math (2004), which rather Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The canonical town-taming Western High Noon brought Gary Cooper the 1952 Academy Award for Best Actor (his second). It also won Oscars for Best Editing, Best Score, and Best Song, Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’” – throbbingly sung by Tex Ritter, whose voice combines with ticking clocks and real-time pacing to make Fred Zinnemann’s film unbearably tense.But for the rabid anti-Communist campaigning of Hollywood hawks like John Wayne and columnist Hedda Hopper, High Noon might have also claimed Oscars for nominees Zinnemann, producer Stanley Kramer (Best Read more ...
Nick Hasted
New Pornographer-in-chief AC Newman grew up enraptured by how much and how little pop could be: from David Bowie shucking skins to the rush of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”, to Pixies' boiling down of a song to three chords and a scream. Eight albums in, and Newman’s Vancouver art-power pop veterans retain the capacity of a tightly edited musical thesaurus, spinning out compacted melodies and metaphors and challenging the listener to keep up, ideally with a code-book.The New Pornographers’ sometimes contentious personnel equation, always amorphous in their typically Canadian rock commune, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Rachid Taha, sadly felled by a heart attack just over a year ago, has come back from the dead! He could not sound more lively than on this vibrant posthumous offering, definitely not something cooked up from tasty leftovers, but a well thought-through album, which, in his usual vein, draws together the sounds of the Maghreb and rock’n’roll.At his very best (and he could be erratic) Taha, born in Algeria, having lived the difficult childhood and adolescence of an Arab immigré in Lyon, was a volcano of energy, pacing around the stage with fury and joy. Inevitably, only a fraction of this can Read more ...