indie
Kieron Tyler
On first pass, Beautica comes across as an exotic hybrid of 1991 school-of-Slowdive shoegazing and the fidgety music pre-Stereolab outfit McCarthy had perfected around 1989. But there’s something else; a lilting characteristic to the vocal melodies suggesting an inherent melancholy. Yet although the album’s makers were not bouncing with joy, the hymnal sense of reflection running throughout Bizarre’s Beautica is, contrastingly, uplifting.The timeline just-about fits. Beautica, reissued this week, was first released in 1994 after shoegazing’s first flush, when those still pursuing the music Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There was a time, a decade or so ago, when US indie bands would adopt such idiosyncratic names it almost felt like a ploy to stop them selling out. No band epitomised this trend more than Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. But whilst CYHSY managed to avoid crossing over into the mainstream, their self-released debut did become a cult hit. A biggish one. Big enough cast a shadow over the band's career. And 12 years on, fans are still asking whether they can escape it.The Tourist certainly makes a good fist of gently moving things on. More impressively it does so whilst Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The keeper on Burning the Threshold is “Around the Axis”, a glistening, three-minute instrumental rooted in the finger-picking of Davy Graham’s classic 1961 arrangement of “Anji”. Building from its inspiration, “Around the Axis” deftly interweaves three guitars, suggesting where Graham and other contemporary solo stylists such as Bert Jansch may have gone early on if they had not been lone instrumentalists. It also suggests one aspect of where Pentangle were at in 1969 and a familiarity with the 1966 Bert Jansch/John Renbourn album Bert and John.Burning the Threshold though is not entirely an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brit singer Rose Elinor Dougall is best known for her various associations with Mark Ronson and her time in the polka-dotted girl band The Pipettes. Ten years into her solo career she’s well-liked by much indie-centric music media but has yet to carve herself out a recognisable larger profile. Her second album, co-created with London producer Oli Bayston – AKA Boxed In – is sweet-natured, an electro-poppy extension of her 2010 debut, but, unfortunately, lacks real impact.Stellular has the trappings; it’s lushly produced, roves around a variety of 1980s musical tics, and is riven with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At September 2010’s MTV Video Music Awards, Lady Gaga took the stage in a dress made of stitched-together cuts of meat. The outfit, she said, was a political statement worn to draw attention to the aspect of the US military's don't ask, don't tell policy preventing anyone who "demonstrate[s] a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from joining the forces. The first female singer to wear a meat dress on stage, though, had less of a profile.Lady Gaga’s prototype was Liverpool-born art-rock provocateur Linder Sterling who, on 5 November 1982, was playing Manchester’s Haçienda with Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Christmas came, and brought with it the usual silly-season headlines. "Vinyl outsells digital downloads" came the cries, bringing with them a vision of a plastic phoenix rising from the ashes. The truth was, of course, much more prosaic – digital downloads are falling faster than Icarus as more people take to streaming services and abandon even the most ethereal physical things for an internet full of stuff.Meanwhile, in the real world, a rather wonderful release by Laurie Shaw, a ludicrously prolific 22-year-old, Ireland-based singer songwriter, passed by with barely a mention. That’s the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oczy Mlody is so weak it’s a wonder it makes the finishing line. The album’s 58 minutes are taken up with unfocussed songs, fragmentary arrangements, moments of grating novelty and such a lack of sense of purpose, it’s hard to figure out why they bothered.The Flaming Lips' etiolated 15th album baffles. Lead Lip Wayne Coyne makes no effort to sing in an engaging way. No wonder everything else is as anaemic. Fronting up the songs with a voice this feeble leaves little to latch onto and little to lead the listener in.Recognisably a Flaming Lips album, Oczy Mlody meshes keyboard wash, clichéd Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1996, the NME ranked Super Furry Animals’ debut album Fuzzy Logic as the year’s fourth best. It sat between Orbital’s In Sides (number three) and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. Beck’s Odelay took the top spot and Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go was at two. Fuzzy Logic was on Creation Records and the Oasis-bolstered label’s only other album in the run down-was The Boo Radleys’ C’Mon Kids (15). A run through the list suggested Britpop was over (Suede’s Coming Up was in there, but they were hardly Britpop) and grunge was on the shelf (Screaming Trees made the cut though they, like Suede Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the final night of Iceland Airwaves 2016, Polly Jean Harvey and her band are ranged in a line just inside the edge of the stage constructed inside Valshöllin, a sports hall south of Reykjavík’s city centre. The festival’s five days have climaxed with a diamond-hard performance drawing heavily on this year’s Hope Six Demolition Project album. The venerable “50ft Queenie”, “Down by the Water” and “To Bring You my Love” are played, but this is about the PJ Harvey of now and 2011’s Let England Shake: the PJ Harvey engaged with and aghast at a world which appears to be wrecking the lives of its Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It was 2008 when The Early Years went into the studio to begin work on the follow-up to their impressive self-titled debut. Having pretty much set out the blueprint for many, if not all, of the kraut-esque bands who followed in their wake, there was disagreement on where to go next: further down the same path or sideways onto softer, more experimental ground? Songs or structures? Klaus Dinger or Michael Rother?It was a disagreement that led to the abandonment of the project, until now, almost a decade later: the result, released on Sonic Cathedral, is such a beautifully balanced feat that it’ Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's an eeriness about this record that comes of it being so very perfectly anachronistic. TOY have formerly mined various parts of experimental rock history, notably Krautrock, and on their collaboration with Natasha “Bat For Lashes” Khan, some wild psychedelic rock from all corners of the planet. And certainly you can hear the chug of 1970s Dusseldorf sublimated into the grooves here on their third album – but the overwhelming sense is that this record exists somewhere around 1988 or 1989, back when indie truly meant indie.Yes, that does mean there's a feyness and reticence to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What should a band called Les Panties sound like? Melodic, Ramones-like pop-punk? Dirty garage rock a la early White Stripes? From the name, either surmise seems reasonable. In the event, what reverberates through this incongruously named Brussels band is a love of cold wave, the Gallic take on post-punk. In the early Eighties, Les Panties would have been at home on Les Disques du Crépuscule, the Factory Records-related Belgian label which issued records by Antena, Josef K and Section 25. Fittingly, Cold Science is released by the reanimated Crépuscule.Over 40 minutes, Cold Science collects Read more ...