Liam Mclean is no joke. Not musically, nor when discussing his slick RnB.
READ MOREThere’s almost no doubt that the quintet of roused Australian youngsters that make up Boy & Bear are comprehensively nice.
It’s hard to fathom that British Sea Power now have five albums under their belts.
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Tony Da Gatorra vs Gruff Rhys
The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness
[Turnstile]6/10
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After twenty years in ‘the business’, Gruff Rhys can do pretty much whatever he wants and still be respected for it. And what he wants just now is to collaborate with a mildly crazy-sounding Brazilian chap who builds odd sounding instruments he names after himself, then make an experimental album of buzzsaw guitara, anti-rhythms and blindly insane noise, some of which is sung in Portuguese. Sound good? Well, some of it is. ‘O Que Tu Tem’ is a cacophonous yet coherent piece of angry protest music, sounding like a reconstructed Fall song played in a phone box. Elsewhere there’s more conventional but no less energising fare, while Gruff taking vocals on some tracks lends the album a smidgen of accessibility it wouldn’t otherwise have had. There’s some self-consciously ‘crazy’ and pretty dismal tracks here too, but overall you have to say ‘respect’.
By Chris Watkeys
Your worst fears about ‘Nothing’ are probably right. The late-year, post-album extended-play sounds like the runoff of a few constructions that didn’t make the cut for ‘Dedication’.
Milagres are a Brooklyn-based quintet fronted by a certain Kyle Wilson, whose soaring vocal style sits somewhere between Thom Yorke and Chris Keating of Yeasayer.
On first encounter, ‘Bad Dream Hotline’ is your standard emo-goth release – black on black cover art, tracks called things like ‘A Handsome Stranger Called Death’ and ‘Dance & Weep’.
‘Out of Sight, Out of Town’ is an album that concerns itself, in the main, with casual sex.
When LA Vampires first released ‘So Unreal’ on a limited vinyl run in 2010 it sold out in a flash, perhaps because of its superbly kitsch artwork by Spencer Longo.
Dan Mangan is a husky-voiced, melancholic Canadian singer-songwriter who does all the things you expect husky-voiced, melancholic Canadian singer-songwriters to do.
Favourite Sons is the most recent project of Ken Griffin, formerly of nineties outfits Rollerskate Skinny and Kid Silver.
Synth enthusiasts must have been veritably jumping with joy of late (would a synth enthusiast do that sort of thing?).
A long lasting member of the American garage rock scene since the late Eighties, Mark Sultan has cooked up a hotpot of a new album.
Some very big noises are being made in the mainstream press over this Swedish duo, and their calculated pop sensibilities go a long way to explaining that.
This week we’ve been listening to new music from The Proper Ornaments, The Weeknd, Electricity In Our Homes, Sunless ’97 and Ceremony [pictured].
LISTEN HEREDropping his iPhone was the best thing that ever happened to Reef Younis.
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