Category: Reviews

South Africa isn’t renowned for providing us with too much music. In fact I couldn’t name you two that have broke these shores. Not even Wikipedia could shed much light. One South African act I can name, though, is Dear Reader – and now so can you.

Dear Reader is actually the Jo’Burg four piece’s new name. Originally, they were called Harris Tweed until the Scottish cloth company of the same name complained despite agreeing two years previous. A stolen laptop and one letter later, Dear Reader finally emerged. Anyway, petty name issues aside, Replace Why With Funny is their debut album, and you will fall in love with it.

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It stands to reason that as a band ages their popularity should take that natural ascension up into the stars. It’s exactly what all their fans hope for, to see the band with all that talent finally getting the kudos they always deserve. But the trouble is that when the band reaches that level of adoration from so many people they automatically lose some of that magic that made them so precious in the first place. This is the perilous ledge that TV on the Radio find themselves on as they take to the stage for their biggest show in the UK, following the mammoth success of their last album ‘Dear Science’.

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Surely one of the most unique and original ‘bands’ releasing music in the UK today, Tinariwen are a group of musicians out of Mali who came together in the 1970s to play traditional Touareg music. They formed around Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who spent his early life in a Malian refugee camp and made his first guitar as a young child after seeing a cowboy playing a guitar in a Western.

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Catherine Maclellan has done the folk world a bit of a favour by not only releasing her third album Water in the Ground but by also including her first album Dark Dream Midnight- two great and very different albums for fans to take in.

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Fans of The Rumble Strips will have been shocked when they heard the hornless first release from the new album Welcome to Walk Alone. Given the band have teamed up with producer Mark Ronson, you might be forgiven for expecting it to sound like Grimethorpe Colliery Band covering the back catalogue of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Instead it opens with the majestic ‘Welcome to the Walk Alone’ which is reminiscent of Scott Walker’s saturnine best.

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If you don’t like Bluegrass then you might as well stop reading now.

Hello…(hello)…(hello). This here internet sure has a mighty big echo when it gets empty. Well, since you’ve stuck around I’ll keep on reviewin’:

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Hooting and Hollowing is the latest musical gem from the Wild Beasts. Although the four piece from Kendal still ooze theatrical charisma, the absurdly fantastic quirks that defined their first album are slightly diluted and replaced by mystical guitar echoes, layered arrangements laced with understated funk and a deep bass that punctuates the song.

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On first listen to Pocketbooks debut album there is one band name that pops into your head that you fear will be haunting this young group for their whole artistic career. This album sounds so much like Belle & Sebastian you wonder if they would have a leg to stand on if taken to court for plagiarizing by a furious Stuart Murdoch. The vocal tune structure is the biggest give away, rising and falling melodies that continue for longer than groups think to try (maybe this is because B&S made it their own), and that steamroll through each song almost pulling the rest of the instruments with it.

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