To describe something as ‘interesting’ is to effectively damn it with faint praise and while one can certainly admire the intricate, difficult compositions contained within U & I…, on the whole it is a difficult album to love. Half of the tracks feature guest appearances from Matt Sims or (Mt. Sims) whose vocal melodies

The PR description of Bjork’s Biophilia… shows as a celebration of “natural phenomena from the atomic to the cosmic” slightly overstates the reality of these performances. This celebration is played out by Bjork singing some tunes about the universe while video screens show some rather rudimentary footage of planets and cellular structures. Hardly jaw-dropping stuff,

Yeah, yeah, yeah they wear their influences on their skinny-wristed sleeves. With the first record, it was goth and garage rock. The second album channelled the spirit of Kevin Shields, as he can’t be bothered to channel it himself. For Skying…, their third album, The Horrors have taken to sporting the sounds of Psychedelic

Sweaty, tense anticipation drips from the smoke-stained ceilings. Throngs of teenagers in second-hand shirts with over-sized collars. A crowd who have clutched this band’s three singles to their bosoms, their hearts and their undernourished waists. In two day’s time, their debut eponymous album will be unleashed; a chance to prove to their Irish audience what…

If there were prizes being awarded for the most beautiful-sounding record of recent times, Smother… would be a shoo-in. Opener ‘Lion’s Share’ is Wild Beasts stripped down to the proverbial loincloth. It’s minimalism blown up and projected across a desolate night cityscape. Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto croons tenderly about the comfort to be found in the

Carol Smilie and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen accompany a yellow sweat-shirted couple into their newly re-decorated room. The couple are allowed to remove their hands from their eager eyes, to discover that their shambolic dusty living space has been transformed into a glossy sparkling thing. With early-90s décor.
Belong… is the refurbished makeover of The Pains Of

Bandwagonesque, Loveless, Screamadelica…. Three albums any independent record company would be proud to release. For Creation Records to release them all within the space of three months is nothing short of miraculous. Creation, at the time, was a label on the verge of bankruptcy, mostly due to the eccentricities of Kevin Shields and

A cannonball is fired across an expansive battlefield. A quietly confident woman, bedecked in a regimental uniform, strides across the field strumming an autoharp. Following her, a band of similarly garbed musicians carry bugles and enormous marching bass drums. The woman chronicles the brutal events, recounting stories of having seen “soldiers fall like lumps of…

When Seefeel originally appeared, they were mistakenly lumped in with the shoegazing bands of that era. And while there were similarities between Seefeel and a band like My Bloody Valentine, Seefeel had as much (if not more) in common with artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin.
The self-titled new album Seefeel… appears 15 years since

Despite The Fool… being one of the best albums of the year, Warpaint as a live proposition are something else entirely. While on record they may have the tendency to walk on the tame side, their live show is nothing short of explosive. This hitherto hidden rockingness can mainly be attributed to the tight as

Innerspeaker… is a record that’s not just indebted to the late-sixties/early-seventies, but seems to have taken up permanent residency there. This is a long-player (as opposed to an MP3 download) that’s been reared on the records of Zeppelin, Sabbath, Cream, The Doors, Pink Floyd and, well, you get the general idea. There is not one

This isn’t going to be a proper scientific explanation, and it’s allegedly a hot topic amongst egghead boffin-types, but every seven years or so the body kind of replicates itself. What we end up with is a kind of photocopy of ourselves – everything, more or less, is new but the quality is slightly reduced.…

State Social #4 takes place this Wednesday and the night will see Twinkranes take command of the decks for what is sure to be one of the more interesting DJ sets we’ve hosted so far. The past 12 months have been great for the band, which saw the release of their debut album Spektrum Theatre …

‘Style meet Substance. Substance meet…Shit, where did she go? You’ve got to meet her. She’s rad – it takes a while to get to know her but when you do she’s totally awesome, like, real deep, y’know. I know you might not really be into that, Style. You like flashiness and sparkles and shit but…