indie
Kieron Tyler
Encountering a debut album this good is a rare thrill. Nonetheless, the case isn't made instantly – "Simpatico People”, the opening track of W.H. Lung’s Incidental Music, takes 127 seconds to bed in and the vocal arrives after another minute.During that lengthy intro almost everything which needs to be known is disclosed: this is an assured band, one so confident that clear references to the New Order of “Temptation” are overridden and soon left behind. The testifying vocal is akin to that of first-album Stone Roses and there’s also a suggestion of John Squire’s circular guitar six Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Edwyn Collins is in a good mood. Perhaps it’s his 2014 move back to his native Scotland where he now lives and records on the wild north-eastern coast. Perhaps it was finding a sheaf of inspiring old lyrics as he packed up to make the move. Or perhaps it’s just his joy at making music 14 years after two debilitating strokes nearly finished him off. Whatever the reason, his ninth solo album (and fourth since the strokes) is as full of beans as a young collie in springtime.As the frontman of Orange Juice and co-founder of Postcard Records, Collins was a key figure in the genesis of indie music Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Oasis have so far resisted the temptation of the big pay-off that a Gallagher family reunion would ensure, plenty of other Britpoppers have been considerably less coy about getting back together since the heady days of the 1990s. We’ve already had reunions from Blur (albeit temporarily), Suede, Dodgy and even Shed Seven. Now though, it is the turn of Louise Wener’s four-piece, Sleeper.Slipping easily back into their old sound with New Wave guitars and bitter-sweet, spoken-sung vocals, The Modern Age could easily be a reissue from Sleeper’s first time around. However, while the sound is Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Every so often, an album reminds you that, done properly, the art form is more than just a collection of songs. Barely 35 minutes in length, Lucy Rose’s fourth release No Words Left is a beautifully sequenced work in a time when track listings have come to mean little; its songs, and the spaces between them, something of a late-night reverie. Rose describes the album as emerging from a particularly difficult period in her life, but rarely has a dark night of the soul ultimately sounded so uplifting.This is an album for the loneliest of sleepless nights – ironic, really, for one that opens Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Groove Denied’s keeper is “Ocean of Revenge”, a drifting Syd Barrett-tinged contemplation with a structural circularity and edge setting it apart from the rest of what’s credited as the first solo album from Stephen Malkmus since 2001’s eponymous set. That, though, was an album he wanted co-billed to him and his band The Jicks. His label Matador had other ideas.Plus ça change. The former Pavement man wanted Groove Denied issued in 2017 before the release of last year’s Sparkle Hard, a Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks album as such. The ten tracks out now are solo for real (despite being listed Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Laura Gibson’s songwriting was always that of a storyteller but her newest album, Goners, ups the ante still further. Her first album to be made after completing an MFA in creative writing, the album explores weighty themes like grief and the persistent march of time with a spellbinding elegance.“I wanted to write a fable song,” she says, introducing “Domestication” to the Glasgow crowd as “a song about a wolf that tries to live as a woman”. What is, on the album, something frantic and wild turns haunted in this stripped back, solo setting: “you let me lie in your bed, saw my hunger, called Read more ...
Owen Richards
Compared to Scotland, Welsh independence has yet to hit the mainstream. The idea has been mostly supported by the Welsh-speaking population, with opinion polls hovering around 19 per cent. It’s fallen to Super Furry Animals keyboardist Cian Ciaran to change this with the Yes is More campaign. On Friday night, Cardiff’s Tramshed played host to a mini festival of music, food and discussion, with the aim to engage the public in its political and social future.As line-ups go, it was a hell of a launch event. Mainstream appeal was clearly the target, with self-proclaimed “prosecco socialist/dank Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Full marks for shoehorning-in the names of city’s two major football teams into the title of Manchester - A City United In Music. But this spiffy double-CD compendium roams further than the boundaries of the titular metropolis. Leigh, Salford, Stockport, Timperley and Warrington are in the mix too. “Manchester-area” or “Manchester-region” wouldn’t be such snappy designations but the point is made – Manchester is suffused in music.The period covered is covered is 1963 to 1994 with a couple of outliers rounding-out the picture. What’s dealt with is from the Beatles-dominated beat era up to and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let’s cut straight to the chase. Here are reviews of 48 records, running riot across genre boundaries and categorizations, from preposterous pop metal to woodland-themed classical piano pieces. It’s the wildest vinyl ride in review-land, an adventure for the ears. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHVula Viel Do Not Be Afraid (Vula Viel)To describe this record is not to do it justice: Vula Viel are a three-piece investigating the possibilities of the Ghanaian xylophone (the gyil), using it to explore minimalist Afro-jazz potential of the traditional music of Africa’s Dagaaba people. So far so dusty and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Ladytron appeared in 1999, at a time when electronic music was glutted with pop-trance, Mitsubishis and superclubs, they drew instead directly on the post-punk synth-pop explosion of 20 years before, The Human League and the like. While all about revelled in warmth, hedonism and groove, Ladytron embraced the android: crisp in appearance, dry and enigmatic of lyric, symmetrically stylish. Coming back now from a five-year break, it’s their own music of 20 years before they may be defined against, a striking back catalogue they often match.When I first heard Ladytron all that time ago, I Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Jimmy Hendix’s Greenwich Village studios are the venue for LCD Soundsystem’s third live album, which features the most recent touring line-up playing a set heavy with songs from 2017’s American Dream album along with a smattering of covers. Live albums often come with the promise of dynamic abandon – the chance to see a band communicating directly with their fans and pushing emotional dynamics and song structures to the limit, but here, in a closed studio, there’s none of that – so what is the point? The answer for most bands would be “not much”, but LCD Soundsystem aren’t most Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Delta Sweete was Bobbie Gentry's second album. Issued in February 1968 six months after her single “Ode to Billie Joe” topped the US charts, it did not make the US Top 100. Nonetheless, it is classic southern-gothic country and a peerless concept album about her roots. Of its 12 tracks, eight were written by Gentry.Mercury Rev’s Pledgemusic-supported homage Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited employs 12 singers – one for each track. Their frontman Jonathan Donahue crops up in brief supporting vocal roles. The core line-up is Donahue, band-mate Grasshopper and former Midlake Read more ...