Hifi Pig

Drummers have a hard time of it. You’ve all heard the jokes: How do you know when a drummer is at the door? The knocking speeds up. Or alternatively: How do you know when a drummer is at the door? He doesn’t know when to come in.

It’s fair to say that, generally speaking, solo albums by drummers are only of interest to other drummers. That certainly isn’t the case with Cheating The Polygraph. Gavin Harrison drums with The Porcupine Tree and is currently one of three drummers in the latest incarnation of King Crimson. For Cheating The Polygraph , Harrison has taken eight Porcupine Tree tracks and reimagined them in a jazz big band style. More »

You know, whatever your thoughts of Björk, what you really can’t knock is the quality of her recordings.  As the first track on ‘Vulnicura’, Björk’s ninth solo album draws to its close, I really can’t help feeling that it sounds – well – fantastic.  The string arrangements are just sublime.  In fact, there are several moments when I momentarily forget that I’m listening to a Björk album at all. More »

Out now on the Esoteric Recordings label, Now We Have Light is the third album from Oxford’s Sanquine Hum.
It’s a double concept  album in the finest “prog” tradition with its roots going back over a decade and the days of Antique Seeking Nuns, which was the first project guitarist Joff Winks and keyboardist Matt Barber collaborated on.

The core of Now We Have Light is based around tunes and concepts developed as far back as 2002 and, inspired by more recent Sanguine Hum material these have been revisited, developed, reworked and rewritten. More »

It’s thirty years since the first release of An Inward Revolution on MCA, an album that scored The Big Sound Authority three single releases.

The band came together after a competition in Smash Hits (a British pop magazine) had vocalist Julie Hodwen singing backing vocals with The Jam. The Jam’s Paul Weller put Hodwen together with songwriter Tony Burke and so The Big Sound Authority were born…I vaguely remember them. More »

Whilst it’s been getting progressively more difficult to describe a ‘typical’ 4AD artist in recent years, as a label it has delivered some genuinely superb albums during this time – notably including Daughter’s ‘If You Leave’, Serena-Maneesh’s ‘#2: Abyss In B Minor’ and of course Purity Ring’s 2012 debut ‘Shrines’.

I guess the first – and most obvious – thing to say about ‘Another Eternity’, Purity Ring’s sophomore album, is that it’s ‘business as usual’ – with one or two caveats.  If you enjoyed their debut, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re going to enjoy this one too.  Let’s break it down…  More »

Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin returned last year after a break of 13 years with a cracking new album “Syro”. Less than 6 months later he follows this up with a horse of a totally different colour. Here we find this incredibly creative artist concentrating more on texture, ambience and mood. Similar in many ways to Selected Ambient Works 85-92, here he is  exploring an entirely different avenue to that of Syro. More »

Matt Hales, aka Aqualung, had all but given up his recording career and moved across the pond into production & songwriting.  It’s to our benefit that he had a change of heart along the way.  ‘10 Futures’ is Aqualung’s fifth album (not counting compilations) – and also Hales’ first for five years.  Things are somewhat different for this outing though – something immediately obvious from the track listing and also during the first listen of the album.

What Hales has essentially done is invited a number of the people he’s worked with over the past few years to perform guest vocals on tracks which he’s been baking.  It’s a nice idea.  For those of you who don’t know Aqualung, it’s fair to say that their sound sits somewhere between Coldplay, Guillemots, Keane and possibly even Radiohead.  If you’re new to them, look up the tracks Brighter Than Sunshine or 7 Keys.  Over the years, I’ve recommended the band to a fair few friends and pretty much all of them told me that they couldn’t believe that they hadn’t heard of them and also that they couldn’t stop playing their albums.  More »

On her 2012 album Glad Rag Doll, Diana Krall covered a selection of 1920’s and 30’s jazz standards, inspired by her father’s collection of 78-rpm records. Wallflower, her latest album, takes a similar approach; this time with some of the songs that Krall discovered on vinyl while growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s.

Krall maintains what has become her signature style, a mix of intimate jazz ensemble playing and lush orchestration, bringing in other instrumental elements and production touches to suit the individual songs. If you grew up in the 60’s and 70’s yourself, the bulk of the material here will be instantly familiar to you: there are songs made famous by The Eagles, The Carpenters, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Elton John, 10cc and The Beatles. More »

In Modern Blues, the 11th studio album by The Waterboys, Mike Scott sums up his career to date in a single phrase: “I’m not bitter and I’m no quitter”. Right from their 1983 eponymous debut album, Scott has used The Waterboys as a vehicle to explore his own particular vision – The Big Music. By 1985’s This Is The Sea, Scott had honed The Big Music to a widescreen, anthemic sound that with a just a little bit of compromise could have morphed into arena rock and taken over the world. Instead, Scott hired a fiddle player, decamped to the west coast of Ireland and left world domination to Simple Minds and U2. More »

When deciding which albums to place in my top ten of last year (2014) there were a number that deserved a place without any doubt nor discussion. Mark Kozelek, under the pseudonym Sun Kil Moon, released one of the most emotionally demanding and yet fulfilling albums of the year. On this album Benji, Mark’s 6th solo release, the loves, lives, fights and deaths of a series of people are faced head on. He does not mince words here and the 11 songs are personal tales of all that makes us human in the true sense of the word.  More »

Occasionally, when asked to review a reissue of an album, one discovers a band that failed, for one reason on another, to show up on the radar the first time around. Some of these discoveries are similar to opening a treasure chest that has been gathering dust in a dark corner only to reveal a wealth of (musical) gems. This is definitely the case with this The Woodentops, Before During After Reissue on the One Little Indian label from May 2013.

This 52 track 3CD set includes their first album ‘Giant’, the follow up album, ‘Wooden Foot Cops on the Highway’ (both remixed with additional rarities) and a 3rd CD of other Remixes and Rarities. So all in all an abundance of treasures to explore. Treasures whose value was recognised at the time by such fans as David Bowie (who invited them to support him), Morrissey and Noel Gallagher.

In 1984 Morrissey is reported to have said, “Anyone sane living in this world will realise on hearing ‘Plenty’ that The Woodentops bring with them a new age of enlightenment.” In September 2011 Noel Gallagher curated the cover mount CD for Mojo magazine and elected to include the Woodentops single ‘Why Why Why’. More »

There are those who regard the Lowell George era Little Feat as one of the greatest American bands of the 1970s. Their musical chops and deep soulful funkiness meant that they were as much a live phenomenon as they were a 5 star recording unit.

Some would say that it all came together in the studio on the classic Dixie Chicken album that preceded this one. With Lowell’s idiosyncratic and wildly surreal lyrics and some of the finest songs he had ever written, Dixie Chicken was Lowell’s masterpiece. Feats Don’t fail Me Now is more of a band effort and in many ways is more accessible and enjoyable as a result. More »

You may very well not have heard of this band let alone seen or heard their 1971 album Satori. I feel obliged to put that situation to right because hand on heart this is one of those stellar overlooked gems that ought to be in every rock music collection.

The band formed in Japan in 1968 and are part of the Proto Metal genre that included Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Cream etc. These bands used a combination of blues-rock with psychedelic rock which would later evolve into heavy metal.

Whilst the names of bands like Cream, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf are mostly well known to us there are other lesser known and overlooked groups that demand an appraisal. Without a doubt the Flower Travellin’ Band and especially their first original album Satori demand attention.

Recorded over one day and mixed in another this album is now being re discovered and regarded as an influential album by those fortunate enough to have heard it.  More »

Released in April 2014 by two seasoned lads from Nottingham, Divide and Exit, as the title alone suggests, is akin to musical Marmite – love it or hate it – this will divide the audio marketplace. It is not something you play when Great aunt Maud or the Vicar call around for tea. On the other hand I cannot remember reacting so strongly or positively to anything else since the day I first heard “Neat, Neat, Neat” by the Damned tearing out of a cheap transistor radio back in 1977.

On that occasion my musical world imploded, like that of so many others, and this exciting new music we called Punk caused an essential musical appraisal – the rest we say is history. More »

Millions Like Us is « The Story Of The Mod Revival 1977 -1989 » and it’s a wonderfully exuberant blast of tunes, many of which I know from my teens and some which are new to me. I was ten in 1977 but the mod revival was in full flow by the time I was in my second year or so of senior school. Along with the mod revival came two tone, ska and these were heady days indeed…my first proper gig was at the Wakefield Theatre where I went to see The Beat and it was rammed and perhaps one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Soon after I went to see The Jam at Leed’s City Hall and then I was all Oxford bags, Harrington jacket, Fred Perry shirts and pointy shoes…I wasn’t allowed a fishtail parka, would have looked daft in a mohair suit and my take on the “look” was very much garnered from what I read in the music press and what I was allowed to get away with. It was a brief love affair as far as I remember lasting a couple of years or so, but it’s brilliant to hear some of the tunes I played on my parents’ music centre and eventually my Amstrad set up getting a fresh airing on this 4CD collection. More »

The music media in the early to mid-sixties were alive with talk of a « folk boom » in the UK and indeed there was a burgeoning number of folk clubs open every night of the week, to the point that pretty much every town of any size had one. I remember as late as the early seventies as a young child there being a popular folk club in Wath-Upon-Dearne where my parents had a pub…and even they had a music room where folk music was the order of the day. A folk boom is a bit of a misnomer if we go by record sales, but, as Colin Harper’s excellent sleeve notes to The Eve Folk Recordings suggests, the folk “stars” of the day made their living not through record sales but through live performances and a life “on the road”. Harper also suggests that this movement was a true underground movement and the pressure on the performers not to sell out was huge. More »

14 covers (10 on the normal version) and two original tunes, one penned in partnership with Jim Vallance and the other with Gretchen Peters ( this only on the Deluxe Edition) on this, the twelfth studio album from Canadian rocker Bryan Adams has tracks from writers such as Lennon and McCartney (Any Time At All), Bob Dylan (Lay Lady Lay), Chuck Berry (Rock and Roll Music) John Fogerty (Down on the Corner), Bobby Hebb (Sunny), Brian Wilson and Tony Asher (God Only Knows) plus a handful of others. More »