Smooth-edged melodic independent pop music of the kind which America seems so proficient, this CD is almost defiantly removed from the ongoing vogue for violent, aggressive and dissonant underground music. The eleven tracks on the album chime and twinkle, with upbeat, clean guitar lines skipping across soft drum patterns at odds with the wistful and […]

I fear change!
APPROACHES TO LITERATURE - my first foray into teaching at UniversityBEER - I drank too much beer with the result that I am stick thin, with a beer belly. Ugh!COUNTRY/JOHNNY CASHDENMARK - much better than I expectedELLIOT SMITH- for some reason I got into Elliot Smith big-time this year.FREIBURG - I love Germany.GIGS! […]

You know I’ve been waiting all year to do this again.
ALASDAIR - for patiently re-introducing me to Fun, amongst other thingsBUNNIES - I have spent way too much of 2005 stalking bunny rabbitsCHANNEL 4 - Damn you, I wasn’t supposed to get addicted to TV againDATA PANIK - my favourite new band of 2005ELEPHANTS - […]

I can’t confirm and apologise if wrong but it seems guitarist Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day. My good friend Luke posted the news and a couple of sites seem to know too so unless a bad mistake has happened it looks like the original skronker has gone.I heard Bailey before I heard Beefheart even […]

It must be tough to be an electronicist nowadays, it being a genre that’s entered a kind of adolescence. Older forms have a long and fruitful past to draw upon. A guitar-rock band can easily flourish and become massively successful while sounding much like another guitar-rock band that was around thirty years ago, […]

Make no mistake, this is nasty stuff. Trenchant, massively-distorted basslines, an entire Luftwaffe squadron of hissing guitars, sing-song Liars-style vocal snippets and The Locust’s misanthropic approach to melody - and that’s just in opening track ‘War Course’. ‘The Night The Rope Broke’ is relentlessly bleak, with some David Yow-style vocal acrobatics weighing in against an […]

The theme for this offering is pretty obvious, so I’ll tackle each track on it’s own. I’m afraid to say that the bribe of chocolate coins has done little to sway me, even if I recognise it as a nice gesture.
Mistys Big Adventure - Have Yourself A Psychedelic Christmas
Pretty unispired stuff from a band who’s […]

This is an incredibly bleak, but incredibly beautiful CD. The perfectly-chosen cover photograph of a blurred electrical structure sitting in its environment, reproduced in monochrome, reflects the music within. Heavily reverbed, simplistic piano and guitar melodies are enveloped in found, effected naturalistic sounds to create a windswept intimate music. A little like the more abstract […]

As a result of hearing this album, in my mind the collective record collection of The Mutts is made up of nothing but New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Hellacopters, Black Sabbath and Cramps records. Not that that’s a particularly bad thing, as it’s resulted in this set of barnstorming rock and roll songs which rarely […]

This is a very good single which could have been great but for the fact that it’s packed with just a few too many ideas. A very breezy pop tune, “Staci Stasis” would benefit from a clarity of approach that often eludes punk/ska/pop bands like this.
Personally I find all three tracks offered here pretty toe […]