indie albums
Album Review: Stornoway – Bonxie
Oxford four-piece Stornoway are back with a new album called ‘Bonxie’, released on 13th April through Cooking Vinyl. It’s the first of Stornoway’s albums to take the services of a producer, their previous releases being very much DIY efforts, but not DIY in quality I hasten to add. The producer in question is none other …
Album Review: Mark Lanegan Band – A Thousand Miles of Midnight
Since forming the Screaming Trees in the mid-1980s Mark Lanegan has been viewed as a welcome figure on the alternative rock periphery. He has collaborated with everyone from Queens of the Stone Age and Greg Dulli (the Afghan Whigs/Gutter Twins) to Belle and Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell. For about thirty years, his prolific output has varied in …
Album Review: Bombay Heavy – Bombay Heavy
Reinvention of the self in the music world is nothing new. It’s been done, ad infinitum. Lennon, Bowie, Bono and Beyonce have all adopted alter egos at some stage in their careers. Reasons vary, as do results. Blur’s Damon Albarn was the unmistakable voice behind Gorillaz’ frontman “2D”, an inspired direction for Albarn heralding a …
Album Review: CHAMPS – VAMALA
VAMALA is a word used by Isle of Wight fishermen for a certain type of dangerous storm that comes in suddenly off the sea. It is also the name of the new album from Isle of Wight siblings CHAMPS. released on 23rd February 2015 by Play It Again Sam. Thankfully for Michael and David Champion, their …
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 …
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: 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 …
EP: Emmy The Great – S
Out yesterday was the new EP from singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss, aka Emmy the Great. Moving on from her two albums to date, First Love and Virtue which showed her to be a master of the one liner, although not for comic effect, more as a spokesperson for broken and lonely hearts. Although the new EP, …
Album Review: Sumner – Sumner
Two years ago, there or there abouts Kristina Sarkisova arrived in London, via Moscow and Valencia with one suitcase and a guitar. Her intention, beyond seeing out the little money she had for a couple of months, was to give the ‘music thing’ a try. If she didn’t get a sign that it was worth …
Album Review: BC Camplight – How to Die in the North
Okay, confession time. Prior to hearing How to Die in the North, I was utterly ignorant of the work of BC Camplight. Simply put, his was not a name that I was familiar with and it was the fact that he was signed to Bella Union that caught my eye more than anything else. Home …