Peter Wild Ryan Adams has already said that Elephant is the greatest rock n roll album ever recorded (laying to rest, once and for all, his spat with “cissy boy” Jack White). Jack White himself – well, Jack White thinks this is where The White Stripes get off. Nobody is going to buy Elephant. Or […]
UFO : V
John Edwards Gunn Not the 70s heavy rock outfit, this UFO is United Future Organisation from Japan, specialising in future jazz of astonishing clarity and detail. Listening to this album is like viewing a beautiful panoramic scene on a cool, clear day up in the mountains. Close attention is repayed in spades as ever more […]
Orlando Cachaito Lopez : Cachaito
John Edwards Gunn I’ve never quite got into Latin music. Too often it seems overcooked, too spicy. Those fiery syncopated rhythms are made only for wild dancing in steamy Caribbean nightclubs. Nothing cool about it. But this music, led by bassist Cachaito, from Cuba, is more subtle. Here we have careful arrangements of percussion and […]
Mum : Finally We Are No One
John Edwards Gunn I’m not all that interested in the biography of bands, but it seems essential to the character of Mum’s music that they’re Icelandic, and of course a big part of their appeal to the likes of style-mag editors, now that Iceland is – for some reason – the epitome of cool. Well, […]
Studio One Scorcher : Studio One Scorcher
John Edwards Gunn These Studio One compilations by Soul Jazz are much more coherent that the ramshackle 100% Dynamite series that made its way to 500% before running out of steam a couple of years ago. Plenty of great tunes on the latter discs, but the way they mixed and matched tracks from various eras […]
El-P : Fantastic Damage
Edmund Hardy There’s something bleak and claustrophobic brewing in the beats and rhymes of New York City, and here it boils over into a seventy-minute scream of anger, apocalypse and funkiness, shot through with a menacing surrealism. The music is manic, pushed into extremity because that’s how El-P can express himself in a perceived world […]
Sonic Youth : Murray Street
Chris Byrd enjoys the reflective mood of Sonic Youth’s Murray Street During the first half of the ’90s, Sonic Youth capitalized upon their reputation as one of the preeminent groups born in the wake of the post-punk scene. Signing with Geffen Records’ DGC subsidiary, the band released Goo in 1990. Arty and intelligent but catchy […]
Half Man Half Biscuit : Trouble Over Bridgewater
Gary Marshall If there was any justice in the world, it would be illegal to own Simply Red albums and Half Man Half Biscuit would be worshipped as gods. Unfortunately, the vagaries of the music business mean that the band who brought us the immortal lyric “God, I could murder a Cadbury’s Flake, but then […]
Crowded House : Afterglow
Gary Marshall In a decade where most music was aimed at eight-year-olds, Crowded House were a band out of time. The unassuming Antipodeans had no image to speak of, no manifesto or world domination plan. Instead, they created album after album of resolutely adult songs. Few bands cite them as an influence, yet you’ll find […]
Metallica : S&M
Gary Marshall Rock and classical music make uneasy bedfellows. Whether it’s heavy metal bands performing with ‘real’ musicians, orchestras tackling the hits of the day or rubbish Britpop bands trying to be taken seriously, the results are usually uninspiring. While S&M avoids most of the common traps, it’s still a flawed effort. S&M teams the […]
Kruder And Dorfmeister : The K&D Sessions
Chris Mitchell Despite the rise of dance music in the 90s to the point where it’s arguably overtaken rock’n’roll as the defining sound of popular music, remixing is still something of a dirty word. It’s unsurprising given the way pedestrian remixes are continually used as filler on singles and even albums when an artist has […]
Supergrass : Supergrass
Gary Marshall I never liked Supergrass. “Alright” was cheerful to the point of inanity, and the band always seemed to have more facial hair than actual talent. Now, though, I want to join their fan club, follow the band around the world and tattoo the band name on my buttocks. Supergrass is a masterpiece – […]
Feeder : Yesterday Went Too Soon
Gary Marshall We like Feeder round these parts. Their single Suffocate is seldom off the SPIKE stereo, and we were pleasantly surprised to see the band supporting REM on their recent tour. The band’s recent string of singles has been spectacular, too, throwing a range of different influences into the mix and giving them all […]
David Bowie : Hours
Jake Eyers finds David Bowie still playing with paradoxes in his introspective new opus hours… The real problem people have with David Bowie these days is contextualising him. Most of us under 35 see his previous body of work as a whole, complete with its mythology and its deserved place in the history of the […]
Happy Mondays : Greatest Hits
Gary Marshall At the very beginning of the 1990s, the Happy Mondays were one of the most exciting new bands around. At a time when Indie music consisted largely of floppy fringes, effects pedals and a complete absence of charisma or tunes, the arrival of a band that understood the power of the “last gang […]
Travis : The Man Who
Gary Marshall The album cover is a photograph of Travis standing in the snow wearing big coats, reminiscent of U2, but if you’re expecting an album of breast-beating stadium rock then you’ll be surprised. Fran Healy may have announced “All I Wanna Do Is Rock” on the band’s first album but “The Man Who” is […]
Jeff Buckley : Grace
Gary Marshall Grace was Jeff Buckley’s first fully-fledged album. It also turned out to be his last as, on 29th May 1997, he drank some wine, went for a swim and didn’t come back. As anyone who pored over “All Apologies” in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide will attest, whenever an artist dies young […]
Will Oldham : I See A Darkness : Songs Of The Human Animal
Stephen Mitchelmore on the music of Will Oldham Who is Will Oldham? Well, maybe he’d like to know first of all. As if in search of the proper one, he’s released LPs under several different names. Made famous by the Palace name (Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, Palace Music), he then reverted to plain Will Oldham […]
Portishead : PNYC
Chris Mitchell Having nearly imploded thanks to the success of Dummy, Portishead seemed to be trying to avoid attracting any attention whatsoever to themselves, as shown by 1997’s low-key self-titled second album. But unlike the deliberate attempt at fan alienation a la Nirvana’s In Utero, Portishead’s second album went deeper and darker than Dummy, repaying […]
UNKLE: Psyence Fiction
Chris Mitchell UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction has been the UK’s most-eagerly awaited album of 1998. So eagerly awaited that virtually all of the UK music press published previews rather than reviews of the album, so keen were they to get in there and proclaim UNKLE the new saviours of British music. Which is particularly strange in […]
Stereophonics : Performance And Cocktails
Gary Marshall “WOOOOOOAAAAARGH! GNAAAAAAAH! BLEEEEEEEURGH!” If you’re one of those people who finds Kelly Jones’ “I eat gravel, me” voice about as aesthetically appealing as nails on a blackboard, you’ll loathe this album. If on the other hand you like driving like a maniac and bellowing at the top of your lungs to whatever’s on […]
Blur : 13
Gary Marshall There’s a theory that this is a terrible time for music. Everything’s been done and all that’s left for us is pale imitations of what’s gone before, an Orwellian vision of Beatles-influenced nonentities stomping on human ears for all of eternity. Blur, I think, would disagree – after all, there are very few […]
Underworld : Beaucoup Fish
Chris Mitchell Over here in the UK, few albums have been so keenly expected as the new musical opus from Underworld, the oddly named Beaucoup Fish. Most famous for their track “Born Slippy”, which was featured prominently in the film of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting a couple of years ago, Underworld nearly didn’t survive long enough […]
Spiritualized : Live At The Royal Albert Hall
Chris Mitchell When bands release double live albums, it’s usually a cause for consternation rather than celebration. Notorious for being very much less than the sum of their parts, live albums tend to be the last refuge for heavy metal bands who ran out of ideas long ago and want to milk every last cent […]
