album reviews
ALBUM REVIEW: Skinshape – ‘Umoja’: a fine interweaving of Afro-Anglo guitar pop
DORSET-born Will Dorey is a man with a far-reaching, eclectic musical vision, which he gives to the world via the medium of his recording alias Skinshape. He’s a fellow traveller alongside artists such as Ninja’s Romare and Albert’s Favourites’ Huw Marc Bennett (whose debut album comes next month) in that Skinshape actively embraces the beauties …
ALBUM REVIEWS: Andrew Elaban – ‘Variegated Tributary’/Claire Rousay – ‘Tuufuhhoowaah’: by turns, handsomely dronesome and fiercely plunderphonic
WHITED SEPULCHRE is one of those loving little curators of out-musics that play nuanced and important roles in our lives: their guiding light is that these creations are out there, finding the ears of those who are receptive, who will swoon, who’ll gather little aural treasures to their chests. The label has been operating out …
EP REVIEW: Black Marble – ‘I Must Be Living Twice’: a quintet of diverse covers receive a fine marbling
THE cover version. It’s a weird strand in music, really; an appreciation, a deconstruction, an act of utter iconoclasm. But don’t you love one; don’t they just appeal? Think of covers that have been more successful than the original. Think the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee”, made a global soul hit by The Four Tops; …
EP REVIEW: Devendra Banhart – ‘Vast Ovoid’: bursting with ideas
DEVENDRA BANHART was one of the main beneficiaries of the American acid-folk explosion just after the turn of the century. He came in as part of that movement with bands like Vetiver and Espers and became almost the George Best of the movement: piratically handsome with that dusky hair and huge hoop earrings, a brace …
ALBUM REVIEW: Quest Ensemble – ‘The Other Side’
THE TRIO of pianist Filipe Sousa, cellist Tara Franks and violinist Preetha Narayanan, who record as Quest Ensemble, are far from your vanilla classical trio. Drawing on backgrounds in which they individually explored western and Indian classical, jazz and improvisational technique, and all alumni of the Guildhall School of Music, they have brought these multidisciplinary …
Album review: Sofie – Cult Survivor
STEEPED in music and musicality for most of her life, Viennese chanteuse Sofie Fatourechi has been quietly working away in the industry in various guises for a long while; but now, after a paradigm shift in her life, it’s time for a little limelight for herself with her first album of songs, Cult Survivor, on …
ALBUM REVIEW: bdrmm – ‘Bedroom’
A DEMO recorded on a smartphone, and a paucity of vowels: from such humble seeds Yorkshire’s bdrmm have flowered into probably the most hotly tipped band on the rejuvenated shoegaze scene. So how did it all begin for bdrmm? Frontman Ryan Smith details the moment. “I remember being in my bedroom before a 12-hour shift …
ALBUM REVIEW: McCarthy – ‘The Enraged Shall Inherit the Earth’
IF YOU’RE an old-skool, proper indie kid (and full disclosure, I count myself among that number), with campaign medals from the C86 wars – you saw action on the Creation, Midnight Music, 53rd & 3rd and Subway front lines, clutched fanzines with the finest, sipped snakebite during a set by Mighty Mighty – then Optic …
ALBUM REVIEW: Built to Spill – ‘Play the Songs of Daniel Johnston’
DANIEL JOHNSTON’S story is, of course, one of the saddest, yet heartening, to come out of the US indie underground. Taken from us too soon last year at the age of 58, he’d actually begun his recording career at home in the 1970s; by the 1980s, resident in Austin, Texas, fashioning tapes and handing them …
Album Review: Suede — Night Thoughts
Suede* is the band that many forget actually kickstarted (or possibly hotwired) Britpop. Night Thoughts is Suede’s seventh album and only the second since their welcomed reunion in 2010, a bit close on the heels of 2013’s Bloodsports. For fans who started to lose interest after Coming Up, this may well be the album to …