I first saw Peggy Sue perform in the days when they were Peggy Sue and the Pirates, wearing fancy dress and singing funny, irreverent songs about Superman and wasted teenage girls. Their powerful voices and stage presence were already blindingly…
Category: Records
Singles Round-up | Treetop Flyers, Dark Captain, Marcus Foster, Channel Cairo
Treetop Flyers – It’s About Time (Communion) 2011 has been good to the Treetop Flyers to the extent that the buzz surronding them has accelerated so fast their recorded body of work can’t keep up. Winning Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent competition…
Album | The Bandana Splits – The Bandana Splits
Alright, so you might say that the last thing the world needs is another post-ironic retro girl band – even if Dawn Landes is involved. That sort of thing exhausted the patience a long time ago. Remember the Pipettes? Anyone…
Album | The Jayhawks – Mockingbird Time
I’ll be the first to admit that this is the first time I’ve listened to twin cities survivors The Jayhawks. Eight albums in may be an unfair time to form a first opinion of a band, but then it may…
Album recommendation | Middle Brother – Middle Brother
First things first, this is not a review of a new album. This collaboration between Deer Tick’s John McCauley, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Delta Spirit’s Matt Vasquez came out all the way back in February. It never got a proper…
Album | Dawes – Nothing Is Wrong
As the only Californian on the For Folk’s Sake writing roster, I felt it was my duty to grab Nothing Is Wrong by Dawes. Not only are they from Malibu, an oceanside haven near Los Angeles, but they sound more…
Album | Luke Temple – Don’t Act Like You Don’t Care
Don’t Act Like You Don’t Care is Luke Temple’s third solo album, which only goes to show I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do. I first heard about him through his band Here We Go Magic, and…
Album | Richmond Fontaine – The High Country
A simple but profound truth of gambling is that when you play for big stakes, the potential to lose heavily is sometimes obscured by the possibility of winning big. On Richmond Fontaine’s 10th album, frontman Willy Vlautin has set the…
Album | Other Lives – Tamer Animals
If you like at least some music, it seems unlikely that you could possibly dislike Other Lives. It’s just a fact. Tamer Animals, their second album under this band moniker, is a record satiated by generic influences, gracefully pirouetting from…
Album | Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Mirror Traffic
There’s something about the men behind boring band names. Just as the blunt mundaneity of Elbow’s name belies their swooning instrumentation and the wry lyrics of Morrissey served to emphasise the irony in The Smiths everyday moniker, Pavement were always…