Despite what anyone says, despite all the distinctly average albums since, Ryan Adams is a genius. Let’s go back nearly ten years to September 2000 and Heartbreaker, his un-missable, un-skippable debut album. Fourteen — well fifteen if you include the…
Category: Reviews
Album: Midlake – The Courage of Others
Realising one’s role in the world is a seminal point in life that is too often underestimated, ignored. I doubt that Tiger Woods remembers the exact moment he picked up his first golf club, or the first time he saw…
Album: Communion Compilation
Look, the clue is in the name – this offering from the burgeoning club night established by Ben Lovett (Mumford & Sons) and Kevin Jones (Cherbourg) is a bringing together of musical souls and a testament to the talent that…
EP: Lissie – Why You Runnin’ (Fat Possum)
So I have been trying to figure out where I have seen this angelical face of Lissie, with this profound and roaring voice like a storm; and I can’t, for the love of me, remember at all. It is one…
EP: Caitlin Rose – Dead Flowers
Nashville’s Caitlin Rose sings and sounds like June Carter. She’s part of a new generation of country folk singers but her debut EP Dead Flowers could have been lifted straight from the late 1960s. It’s full of catchy little country-esque…
Album: First Aid Kit – The Big The Black and the Blue
Callum Mitchell says: “First Aid Kit have made an album way beyond their years; their sound evoking an image of a couple of worn out, world-weary housewives sat on their Kentucky porch strumming away and singing songs of lost lovers and meetings with the dead”
Album: Get Well Soon – Vexations
The recurring theme throughout Get Well Soon’s music is a constant contrast between light and dark; good and bad; heaven and hell. The first clue is in the dark connotations behind the bands name, an illness not yet treated, no…
Album: Owen Pallett – Heartland
In this day and age, labels and radios and whatnot are trying so hard to come up with the best new thing, the latest emerging sound, the never-heard-before band, that marvellous break-through act. And in assonance, there are musicians trying…
Single: Liam Frost – Your Hand In Mine (feat. Martha Wainwright)
‘Your Hand In Mine’ is a hard-hitting track that is interjected with a fantastically infectious barbershop backing vocal from Martha Wainwright. The song’s pelting rhythm pushes it forward, whilst Frost and Wainwright’s combined vocals provide an intoxicating harmony for the…
Album: Broadcast 2000
Gemma Hampson says: “Broadcast 2000 is a fitting name for this London-based indie-folk what not. Although it’s the first full-length album from the group, it will most definitely not be the first time you have heard them. Even without the discovery of their 2008-released EP ‘Building Blocks’, their sound is getting around. A film here (Yes Man), a soap there (Hollyoaks), even an ad blasted into every front room in the land.”