Album Reviews
Album Review: Girlpool – Before the World Was Big
When The World Was Big, the debut album from lo-fi duo Girlpool, is one of those albums that welcomes you in, makes you feel happy and keeps you pleasantly engrossed right to the very end. As the title suggests, many of the songs take you back to the time we were growing up, a time …
Album Review: No Joy – More Faithful
I can’t remember the first time I heard No Joy. I know it was sometime in 2013 when they had just put out their excellent Wait To Pleasure. Something about that album was immediate and in-the-moment so I was compelled to have it. The guitar and vocal interplay between Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd has a very …
Album Review: Dar Williams – Emerald
Dar Williams’ music professes a great deal of heart; there’s little doubt for the listener that this songwriter sees and feels keenly, and wants to communicate her observations and conclusions. On her most recent release, and my first brush with her since 1996’s ‘Mortal City’, the most noticeable change is in Williams’ voice which seems to …
Album Review: Everything Everything – Get To Heaven
Everything Everything’s third album Get to Heaven thankfully does not veer far from their first two witty, dark records. This time around they feel very confident about their work and rightly so. In fact, it contains probably their hookiest pop song yet, the first single “Distant Past” and other flashes of danceable despair. Bass player Jeremy …
Not Forgotten: Harry Nilsson – Son of Schmilsson
Having a hit with “Without You”, the power-ballad that still out power-ballads all other power-ballads, had left Harry Nilsson in a uniquely enviable position of being a vastly talented singer songwriter who enjoyed his biggest hit singles with cover versions of material by other world-class songwriters. Oh and to sweeten the deal he didn’t even …
Album Review: The Fratellis “Me And The Devil”
It’s been over two years since “We Need Medicine” but Glasgow’s favourite indie trio The Fratellis are back! They’ve got a brand new song “Me And The Devil”, an upcoming album “Eyes Wide, Tongue Tied” and have just announced a few live dates in the UK followed by a US tour in September. It is …
Album Review: Other Lives – Rituals
There’s no doubt there’s something to Stillwater, Oklahoma trio Other Lives, just ask endorsees Radiohead and Bon Iver, and Rituals, the bands third album, certainly has plenty of moments where their balance of the ambitious, the cinematic and the (at least previously evident) earthy folk strands pull together to make something that reminiscent of, well, …
Album Review: Young Guns, Ones and Zeros
From absent fathers, a discontent with the places that have remained the same since childhood, as well as having much woe to channel into a creative form, all resulted in Young Guns’ debut album; the effortless, flowing and poetically weighted All Our Kings Are Dead. After that came Bones; slightly mellower but far bigger, it …
Album Review: 10 000 Russos – ’10 000 Russos’
Photograph by Betânia Liberato 10 000 Russos, pronounced “dez mil russos” are the latest spell-weavers to join the illustrious Fuzz Club Records banner. I recently commented that Casper was perhaps a descendant of the renowned 16th century alchemist John Dee – that he continues to conjure these latter-day “Nuggets” seemingly at will, suggests I may not have been …
Not Forgotten: Aphrodite’s Child – 666
Every now and again I encounter an album which seems to exist in its own bubble. Aphrodite’s Child are a band I had certainly heard of, but I couldn’t name you any of their songs, although realising that following their split, half of them would individually achieve international mega-fame as Vangelis and Demis Roussos is …