Tejada is a 41 year old producer and Dj based in LA who joined the Kompakt imprint in 2011 with Signs Under Test following his previous album The Predicting Machine and a load of 12 inchers. This is very much in the bleep and beats techno category with Tejada working the machines at his disposal […]
Simon Lomax is predominantly known as a producer of music for film and television, but his self released A Glimmer Of Memory sits firmly in the ambient and atmospheric category. The six tracks on this album are sparse, with pads ebbing and flowing to produce an album that is quite beautiful in its textural quality […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Unthanks brought their UK tour in support of new album, Mount The Air, to a close in front of a sell out crowd at The Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. Departing from tradition, not for the first time tonight, The Unthanks eschew the time-honoured format support band followed by main act. Instead, The Young Uns […]
Somewhere in the deep, dusty archives of the BBC television centre lies an unseen episode of Dr Who in which Rumer becomes the Doctor’s assistant and travels back to 1975 where her new album Into Colour becomes the best selling album of the year.
If I required yet another reminder that The Supreme Being does not evenly distribute his gifts, I need look no further than Steven Wilson. Let’s have a think about this: Does he have a back catalogue spanning more than 20 years, covering a diverse variety of genres? – He does. Can he sing and play […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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), […]
Caroll Vanwelden is a Belgian singer and a graduate of the London Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but only after having passed her engineering degree in Brussels. Shakespeare Sonnets 2 is, needless to say, the second album of Vanweldens where she puts the bard’s sonnets to music. It’s out now on Jazznarts and my […]
Well, Pink Floyd’s The Endless River has certainly been a long time coming… in fact it’s some twenty years since we were treated to a studio album from the Floyd, the last was 1994’s Division Bell. It’s no surprise then that this record was eagerly anticipated by the band’s legion of followers. This copy comes […]
The Pop Ambient series of albums from Uber label Kompakt has been delivering the chilled goods since 2001 and never fails to deliver. As the title suggests the style of music herein is accessible ambience and it works very well indeed. Label boss Wolfgang Voigt is the guy that puts the collection together and he does […]
Released in mid-September on Interscope records and Columbia Records and downloaded here from HIRESAUDIO this one was a bit of a surprise for me not least because it’s not that often you get a record put together by an eighty eight year old crooner and someone famed as much for her outrageous dress sense (take […]
In 2011 Chicago resident Sarah Marie Young won the Shure Montreux Vocal competition judged by Quincy Jones and used the prize, a week at the Balik farm Studio in Switzerland, to record her first album of original material, but now she’s signed to Dutch label SnipRecords and has just released her new album Little Candy […]
I must confess that I missed out on the first wave of punk, but I do distinctly remember seeing a copy of the Sniffin’ Glue fanzine, for which Alternative TVs Mark P was the founding editor, brought into school by one of the cool kids. I also had a couple of Sex Pistol records. Mark […]
