Album Reviews
Classic Compilation: A Testimonial Dinner – The Songs of XTC
By the mid 90s XTC must have felt distinctly unloved. Neither critical darlings, nor a massive commercial success, they’d had a career-stalling set-to with their record label and had no choice but to down-tools and go one strike. What Virgin records didn’t take into account was the fact that although XTC’s fanbase was small, it …
Album Review: The Dodos : Individ
The Dodos have been doing their thing now for a few years. It seems like we’ve gone from their 2008 album Visiter to their new album Individ in the blink of an eye. I know that’s not the case, as Meric Long and Logan Kroeber have put out some truly great music in the years that followed that defining 2008 …
Not Forgotten – ZZ Top – Tres Hombres
The couple of previous albums had been an effective run-up, but Tres Hombres is where the career of ZZ Top really took flight. This is the album that saw them morph from solid but unspectacular Southern-friend boogie rockers, to one of the finest rock bands on the planet. Of course, “La Grange” remains a staple …
Album Review: Public Service Broadcasting – The Race for Space
The Race for Space is the much anticipated follow up to Public Service Broadcasting’s May 2013 debut ‘Inform – Educate – Entertain’, which reached number 21 in the UK Album Chart and garnered rave reviews and award nominations in it’s wake. Public Service Broadcasting are pseudonymous musical duo J. Willgoose, Esq and Wrigglesworth who weave samples from …
Album Review: Troyka – Ornithophobia
Ornithophobia is the third album from experimental jazz trio, Troyka. Following on from their last recording, Live at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, which showed they could adapt their wilful experimentalism to other formats, the trio – keyboardist Kit Downes, guitarist Chris Montague and drummer Joshua Blackmore make their first outing for Naim Jazz, the sound of …
Album Review: Jonas Munk – Absorb Fabric Cascade
Jonas Munk has very few contemporaries exploring aural landscapes in quite the same way that he does. He seems to create musical canvases that are labyrinthine in scope; yet still as intimate as a warm embrace. His first solo outing, Pan, was warm and bubbling. It floated along a cloud of analog synth chugs and phased …
Not Forgotten: Crowded House – Woodface
The career arc of Crowded House through their initial phase was really rather odd. Over four albums they recorded some of the finest pop songs of the era, the first two being hits and successful in North America, while their profile in Europe was negligible, their last two were huge hits in Europe, but barely …
Album Review: The Wave Pictures – Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon
With a name like Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon, you would expect The Wave Pictures’ incredible 14th studio album to be quite exuberant. But really, Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon is less bells and whistles and more straight talking Bluesy Rock. The Wave Pictures have taken a modernist blues sound and mixed it with lyrical …
Not Forgotten: 10CC – 10CC
Formed by a quartet of individually proven hit writers, multi-instrumentalists, singers and producers, 10CC boasted an enviable pedigree and with an opening salvo of top ten hits that included “Donna”, “Rubber Bullets”, “The Dean and I” and a miss in the overlooked “Johnny Don’t Do It”. Everything pointed to the band’s debut album being a …
Album Review: John Carpenter – Lost Themes
John Carpenter colored at least two generations’ dreams in burnt fall hues. Faded browns, oranges, yellows, and reds, topped with gray, overcast skies bled into our psyche and made us re-imagine Halloween in a whole new way. In a way where the fear we felt walking down the sidewalk in our Darth Vader costume holding a …