album review
Album Review: Jim Clements – A Failure
Every so often Jim Clements puts out an album and not enough people cop on. It’s kind of understandable. There’s very much music to be heard and no shortage of downbeat blokes doing a broadly Americanaish thing with guitars, keys and strings. There’s definitely a temptation to think that life might be too short to …
Album Review – Gregory Alan Isakov – Evening Machines
Charles Spano’s review of Damien Rice’s “O” on All Music Guide has a fantastic description of the ‘special sauce’ that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary and takes seemingly simply songs and makes them soar: “Rice is master of what critic/ranter Richard Meltzer called “the unknown tongue” – basically the musical equivalent of the “punctum” in …
Album Review: Battery Operated Orchestra – Snare
Battery Operated Orchestra might hail from Brighton but, in a previous incarnation as Katsen, they emerged on Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation. Which seemed very appropriate even then given the quality of their Kraftwerk-inspired synthpop, which would never have been out of place in the Steel City at any time over the last 30-odd years. Now …
Album Review: Web Sheldon – Fingerprints
There’s no shortage of music falling into the Backseat Mafia mailbox from new male singer-songwriters. Ever since Ed Sheeran achieved world domination, there as been an influx of young male artists reaching for their guitars and trying to replicate the sound and success of their idol. And there’s a lot of talent out there, all …
ALBUM REVIEW: Arctic Monkeys – Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino
Before I say anything at all, I think it’s best you and I agree: nothing the Arctic Monkeys could have produced would have been enough. They are simply too loved – and for that, they are damned. We can take a look in that rose-tinted lens of retrospect, through each fleeting, transitory era: from ‘Whatever …
Album Review: Shinedown – Attention Attention
American anthemic rock titans Shinedown are back in 2018 with their pulsating new album, Attention Attention. It’s been a hot minute since the band released new music so fans and reviewers alike are desperate to hear what the intrepid, emotionally charged rockers have to say three years after 2015’s Threat To Survival. The first track …
Album Review: christian fitness – Nuance-the Musical
Andy Falkous seems to be immune to the law of diminishing returns. Nuance -The Musical is the fifth of his christian fitness outpourings. Interleaved with Future of the Left albums, that’s a lot of music in the last few years. Practice seems to be making perfect though -both of his guises have been going from …
Album Review: Adam Stafford – Fire Behind The Curtain
Oh bollocks. I lack the vocabulary to do justice to this record. Any knowledge of minimalism I have is, well, minimal. That BBC4 documentary a few weeks back was enough to whet the appetite and draw out the musical and historical threads between things instinctively liked over the years. From the more direct lines running …
Album Review: Band of Gold – Where’s the Magic
I’ve always had a quiet regard for Scandi-pop. Maybe it’s the to do with the enunciation, something which can give a sense of cool detachment from the lyrics. Whatever the case, Band of Gold’s second album, Where’s the Magic, comes across as well executed smart art pop. Band of Gold consist of Nina Mortvedt and …
Album Review: David Byrne – American Utopia
Can you hear the name David Byrne without thinking of the super-sized suit or humming ‘Once in a Lifetime?’ Me neither. The Talking- Head-in-Chief moved to New York years ago. Like so many of us in recent years, he felt the urge to despair and hide whenever he watched the news. But he made a …