Records :: Album Review 03 Dec 2008
Chris Buckle: London’s Burning, the track which opens Haunts’ self-titled debut album, begins dreadfully with a rotten mix of faux-goth posturing and Rocky Horror theatricality. Less than a minute later and it’s a bouncy slice of irrepressibly catc...
Records :: Album Review 02 Dec 2008
Billy Hamilton: Much like the vino of their French regional namesake, Edinburgh's Meursault have been on a lot of lips recently. So, after establishing a fervent following with a string of spellbinding live shows over the past six months, the quartet's decision to giv...
Paul Mitchell: Word of mouth sensations Rodrigo y Gabriela have been playing to increasingly large venues over the past few years. There’s no doubting the fretboard (or indeed any part of the guitar) mastery of their expertly performed flamenco but they’v...
Records :: Album Review 01 Dec 2008
Gillian Watson: On the third single from her acclaimed second album To Survive, released this summer, Joan Wasser (better known as Joan As Police Woman) duets with contemporary and former bandmate Rufus Wainwright on To America, a simple ballad driven by an uneasy pia...
Records :: Album Review 28 Nov 2008
Dave Kerr: If you thought that the return of acid house in all its Global Hypercoloured glory made for an unlikely renaissance, a second coming of ‘shoe-grunge’ (© Swervedriver, 1991) and a record like Fire on Corridor X shouldn’t throw you...
Euan Ferguson: Apparently, Jono McCleery lives in a barge on the Thames. It’s a very pastoral, romantic choice of accommodation, one which chimes nicely with the undertones of Nick Drake running through his self-recorded first album. Darkest Light is a darkly m...
Ally Brown: Kanye West's fourth studio album 808s and Heartbreak must not be approached as a Kanye West album. It’s not hip-hop: it’s claustrophobic electro-pop, entirely sung with Auto-tune; and it’s pretty depressing. In fact it’s so shoc...
Ewen Millar: It's a cruel fact of life that some people's pain is a marketable commodity, whereas others just sound like they're whinging crybabies. Jherek Bischoff, a musical collaborator of Xiu Xiu and The Dead Science, had to be coaxed into embarking on this mou...
Lauren Mayberry: In the perhaps already over-populated world of mellow female singer-songwriters, Esther O’Connor is maybe not a name you have heard. Latest LP Right Here is full of sweet, assured pop songs that are just a little bit country. The Irish-tinged title tra...
Records :: Album Review 27 Nov 2008
Gillian Watson: Scottish indie rockers Glasvegas round off a successful year with their own bleak and distinctive take on that most pointless of concepts, the Christmas mini-album. Instead of taking an opportunity to cash in and desecrate well-loved carols (although t...
Billy Hamilton: Fascinating to Freudian theorists it may be, but the parental urge to achieve vicariously through one's offspring is often doomed. All too frequently, natural ability is stunted by the presence of a misguided father, hitting pitches from the sidelines ...
Ewen Millar: The problem with playing in a genre that's all about mood is that you're listener has to be in the right one in order to really appreciate your craft. Post-rock, of course, is an especially difficult beast: Mogwai have written many tracks that sound un...
Euan Ferguson: In their previous incarnation as arch sleep-rockers Galaxie 500, Damon and Naomi carved an interesting niche for themselves in the 80s Sub Pop scene. 17 years after striking out together, the duo have re-released their debut More Sad Hits. Reminiscen...
Euan Ferguson: The Pocket Gods claim to sound like nothing else on this planet, but in reality they don’t have to look that far back into the musical history of Earth to find a fair few reference points. Lo-fi Sci-fi calls on variations of classic rock, soundin...
Records :: Album Review 26 Nov 2008
Gillian Watson: Hip-hop legend Q-Tip returns with The Renaissance, his first official solo release since 1999 debut Amplified. In the face of false starts which have frustratingly hampered his career for nearly a decade, Tip has lost none of his calm bravado, declarin...
Austin Tasseltine: Is there a post-rock band in the world that doesn't resent that tag? Fact is, those two words conjure some pretty vivid notions and, in this case, if that notion is early Mogwai you're very close to the mark for opening track Pacific Coast Highway. It'...
Chris Buckle: These days ‘twee’ may have become a euphemism for bed-wetting and sensitive simpering, but it was once so much more. Je Suis Animal remember those days: the days of The Wedding Present and blissed-out guitar fuzz, of C86, rough edges and Talulah Gosh. ...
Ewen Millar: First impressions of The John Henrys are of a band desperate to be authentic: a matt-finished album cover adorned with a simple line-drawing of wheat, and framed with the band's moniker in a Wild West font, signposts a country act concerned with tradi...
Lauren Mayberry: Water and Light, the fifth album from singer-songwriter Gareth Davies-Jones, is full of the traditional sounds you might expect of a record inspired by scenery and history of the sort considered here. Delicate yet confident guitar-picking, violins and ...
Records :: Album Review 25 Nov 2008
Billy Hamilton: To a pigeon-hole pushing hack, Sans Trauma are a cantankerous swine of a band to pin down. The Edinburgh quartet’s debut mini-LP Rushing your Dragon transcends myriad genres to arrive at something that roughly translates as a medley of shoe-gaze, post-...
