Since their early days as Dustball, Dive Dive have always maintained a certain steady handed reliability, and been a super-tight live band with a knack for a certain familiar type of poppy indie rock. As a recorded prospect, however, they’ve left me slightly cold in the past, and it’s been hard to think of them […]

Just heard about this on the radio. ‘Ballads of the Book’ is a new project featuring collaborations between a variety of Scottish musicians and writers - Idlewild, Norman Blake, King Creosote, Sons and Daughters, Ian Rankin, Edwin Morgan and lots more. A good idea? A vaguely-famous-people vanity project? An affirmation of Scottish culture and originality?
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Catchy, goodtime, hi-hat-riding guitar pop, with many of the Current Indie Vogue boxes ticked (Stop-start guitar lines? Break for handclaps? Sounds a bit new wave? Tick, tick, tick). ‘Once, twice, again!’ hasn’t done much to advance the Dartz! sound since their previous release, but it’s still a perfectly get-up-and-go slice of infectiousness that would, if […]

I never heard Million Dead, Frank Turner’s previous band and a reference point that seems unconditionally attached to any mention of his name. Regardless of what they sounded like, on Sleep is for the week Turner’s music comes across as a blend of straightforward indie rock and folky strum, with a certain Celtic tinge to […]

The album version of ‘You Don’t Know Me’ is the second track on this 12″, having been usurped by Howie B’s more-than-twice-as-long remix. This makes sense to me, as the short original album version from Mumbai-based Mukul is a heavily Tricky-influenced slice of loping trip-hop, with sleepy beats and gravelled vocals. It seems unfortunately relegated […]

Find Copy Haho CD under pile of other CDs. Think ‘why do I still have this in my review pile? I am obviously never going to listen to it’. Read press release and spot words “members of Hookers Green No.1″. Think ‘ooh, I must listen to this’. Put back in pile. Repeat. This is what […]

San Franciscans The Weegs have got that whole New-York-early-80s-no-wave-mayhem thing going down, not least in terms of vocal delivery - the lyrics are presented in the form of yelps and exclamations that evoke skinny weirdos contorting around microphones whilst self-harming in the centre of the (slightly afraid) audience.
Musically, they’re more sedate and melodic than the […]

The Davidians were featured on the excellent Psychedelica Volume One compilation with the reverb-heavy, swooning ‘Getting By’. This is included here on this twelve-track album, which follows similar stylistic themes to that track: blissed-out shoegazing guitar music with one foot in the dreamy Californian desert of the late ’60s, the other in the introspective, effects-drenched […]

The genre that pops up whenever I put this into the changer reads “General Blues.” That sums it up. Very generic sounding and I can’t help but think I am shopping in some high end clothing store when the album plays. Open mike night gone horribly wrong, this is what this record sounds like. “Hey […]

This record was reviewed favourably last month by my fellow Diskanteer pascalansell, but I wanted to have a go at it since I’ve been following Antifamily since the British-based Difficult Fun was a fledgling label with a few hand-printed CD-Rs and a dream. Plus, it’s not even out here and I had to go and […]