indie
Kieron Tyler
A disembodied, wispy female voice declares “this is not true”, the only emotion left a resignation so acute she may as well be contemplating her imminent demise. On Soft Metals’ “Tell me”, her deliberation is accompanied by electronic music drawing from the pulse Giorgio Moroder created for Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, 20 Jazz Funk Greats-era Throbbing Gristle, French cold wave and the drifting vapourousness of the early Orb. On the next track, “When I Look Into Your Eyes”, she sighs “we all die”.Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks, the Portland-formed and now Los Angeles-based duo who operate as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Hurley: Armchair Boogie / Hi Fi Snock UptownWith songs about werewolves, penguins, the English upper classes, trains, the police and more werewolves, these albums from surrealist folk maverick Michael Hurley are charming and occasionally disconcerting. His ramshackle delivery seems a little offhand but it brings an intimacy that can’t fail to worm its way in. Armchair Boogie (credited to Michael Hurley & Pals) was originally issued in 1971; Hi Fi Snock Uptown in 1972. Both originally came out Raccoon, the label run The Youngbloods.Armchair Boogie was the belated follow-up to Read more ...
Simon Munk
Just go and buy it and download it right now, OK? Gunpoint is fantastic for so many reasons. But primarily it's fantastic because it plays fantastically. It's easy to lose sight of that fact when you learn the back story behind the game, when it's put in context. But let's not lose sight of this – Gunpoint is great fun to play.This stealth puzzle game sees your intrepid industrial espionage agent/hat-and-coated gumshoe breaking into a series of side-on buildings to investigate dodgy murders, steal corporate secrets and eavesdrop on intriguing conversations. These buildings are full of armed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The default word for these films, made by the band Saint Etienne with their collaborator and former guitarist Paul Kelly, is "poignant". As elegiac visual poems which capture the always-evolving environment of London, they certainly are expressive. They are also often described as nostalgic, as they cast a lens across businesses and buildings, proprietors and townscapes that are now gone. The mood they evoke is one of longueur: a figurative sigh. Fine as far as it goes, but that’s passive wallowing. What they generate from my viewpoint in north London is a tremendous anger, one born from a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drawing connections between the far margins and the relative mainstream always leaves you in a difficult position, as it invites judgement from different groups with very different criteria. And the duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power put themselves in that position more than most.For all the outré edginess of their name, their occult imagery, their presentation of their music as 10-minute noise-drone epics and their claims to be “aggressive, malevolent, apocalyptic,” it was not as great a surprise as it might seem that they were selected by Danny Boyle and Underworld to soundtrack Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton StoryWithout Shadow Morton, Amy Winehouse could not have made Back to Black. The songs the enigmatic sonic wizard wrote and produced for The Shangri-Las in the mid Sixties were integral to what made Back to Black tick. Amazingly, Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton Story is the first career-spanning collection of Morton’s work. For that alone, it would be, at the least, exciting. But with its massive, well-illustrated booklet, the involvement of and interviews with Morton – who died in February this year, before he Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Watching Adam Stafford at work can only be described as magical. Thanks to his ingenious use of loop and effects pedals, the Falkirk-born songwriter can spin intricate, layered compositions using nothing but his voice and a couple of bars on guitar. At last week’s Glasgow launch show for his latest album, he ended the night with a ten-minute monster from Awnings, a 2009 experimental a capella album. Cue an audience literally stunned by a noise as wild and intense - and yet, as strangely controlled - as that from a full orchestra.It stands to reason that some of the immediate impact of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Like a child’s crude drawing of a crime they’ve witnessed, the cover image is of two adults: one female, one male. The female is bent forward, holding what looks to be an axe. Below waist height, the male is holding a linear object spewing something towards her. It may be a gun, it may be his penis. Phrases strew the image: “psychiatric shopping mall”; “I don’t think you should be around people”. Whatever’s inside the sleeve of Nadine Shah’s debut album isn’t going to be cuddly-wuddly tomfoolery.On Love Your Dum and Mad’s highlight “Runaway”, Shah sings “I still have that red silk dress, Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is not an easy record to get a handle on. When I first got it, I bounced through a couple of tracks idly, and it felt like it was coming from the messy genre fusions of the mid-90s – somewhere between trip-hop, indie-dance, rap-rock and mildly crusty festival-dub. There are growling guitars, indie-rock basslines, anthemic reggae horns, and frontman Joshua Idehen's voice, which lies somewhere between rapper, poet, singer and orator, all making it sound like a livelier take on Tricky, or maybe Roots Manuva fronting a rock band.But idle listening is not enough for this record. For one thing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Darren Hayman isn’t a chap who stands still. The former Herfner frontman’s last-but-one album, Lido, was a series of mood-music compositions inspired by open-air swimming pools. In 2011 came The Ship’s Piano, a collection of piano pieces. Rather than being a follow-up to his most recent album The Violence, Bugbears complements it. While researching East Anglia’s Civil War-era witch trials for The Violence, he was compelled to dig further into the 17th and 18th century’s songs. Bugbears is the result.Instead of being a straight folk album, or even trying to recreate the sound or ambience of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It could be Katie Crutchfield's voice: in the moment, its ragged timbre packs the punch of a cross-my-heart whispered secret. It could be the songwriting itself: stories half-told in two minute bursts, frank and funny and even contradictory the more you listen to the album as a whole. Or it could be some combination of the two that makes Cerulean Salt feel like an undiscovered treasure, a 33-minute mystery between you and your headphones.Only it's not like that at all, because Crutchfield grew up fronting enough girl-punk bands for this to be old hat to her and this album is in fact her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Scared to Get Happy – A Story of Indie-pop 1980-1989It’s a good thing this box set has the hedge-betting sub-title A Story of Indie-pop. Making the definitive statement on a whole decade of pop’s undergrowth is probably impossible, but being so equivocal from the off sets up Scared to Get Happy as not bold enough to nail its colours to the mast.Compiling and licensing the material on Scared to Get Happy must have been a nightmare. Spread across the five CDs of this first large-scale collection of the era are 134 tracks, beginning with The Wild Swans’s 1982 single “ Read more ...