Also on the decks:
Nick Mitchell turns his regular attention to a range of new-release singles.
Records :: Review 21 Aug 2008
Nick Mitchell: Like their contemporaries Frightened Rabbit, Y'All Is Fantasy Island are a band who seem to take the conveyor belt approach to music production: write, record, and repeat. But that's where the factory motif ends, because just three months since produci...
Records :: Single Review 20 Aug 2008
Ally Brown: It's become a backhanded compliment to say a band is "big in Japan," but Bis really were much bigger in the Far East than they ever were in Scotland, despite that incredible 1996 appearance on Top of the Pops while they were still unsigned. Manda Rin, ...
Jason Morton: If this record had a scent, it'd be pine or lemon - while perhaps not the number one aroma for many, a large cross-section of the populace can agree these two to be pleasant, and indicative of some effort on the part of the staff to keep things tidy. A...
Jason Morton: Every once in a while, life hands you little reminders that those old proverbs we hear so often aren't completely hackneyed. In the case of Dawn of the Dead, that proverb is 'don't judge a book by its cover' - with the depictions of the band as flesh-...
Music :: Records :: Feature :: Album Review 18 Aug 2008
Ally Brown: “It’s a very confusing time for musicians,” Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning told The Skinny late last year in the bowels of Glasgow’s Arches. There to play with his BSS buddy Kevin Drew, then promoting his first solo...
Records :: Single Review 18 Aug 2008
Paul Neeson: Opting to side with the emerging crop of exponents of realist Scottish rancour, rather than run with the long-standing trend for whippy university quirk, Popup’s thick regionalism and jabbing beats set them up as an interesting prospect when they...
Jason Morton: Hailing from Tuscon, Arizona, and naming themselves after a California border town, Calexico has long had a distinctive Southwestern style. Still evincing a strong folk/Americana influence, Two Silver Trees continues that tradition, though largely mis...
Records :: Review 15 Aug 2008
Michael Slevin: You don't really hear an awful lot about Scottish hip-hop these days, but if the output from Capitol 1212, the production duo consisting of Edinburgh-based DJs Fly-T and Professa Fresh, is anything to go by, that should change. This mix, featuring trac...
Records :: Album Review 15 Aug 2008
Paul Neeson: Fables of lost art buried under the rubble of an industry blinkered against true genius always hold the attraction of mysticism. Liam Hayes' second album, Fed, it has been claimed, is a long lost masterpiece, and is the result of an obsessive project ...
Records :: Album Review 13 Aug 2008
Emma Smith: Between playing in the Lanegan/Campbell tour band, Jim McCulloch (Soup Dragons) has found time to release a third solo album under his Green Peppers moniker, Adventures in the Slipstream. Accompanied by the vocal talents of four songstresses, most nota...
Records :: Single Review 13 Aug 2008
Jason Morton: Breaking It Up is essentially an incredibly silly pop song done very well. At the core is a soft kick-drum embellished with handclaps and Lykke Li's velvet-soft voice cooing over the top. Schoolyard-shouted backing vocals on the chorus give the track ...
Records :: Album Review 12 Aug 2008
Chris Buckle: Returning with their sixth album, Earlimart continue to craft Death Cab-lite songs heavy on oh-so-sincere soporific sensitivity but light on anything with the spark necessary to rise from Hymn and Her's sludgy swamp of cloying niceness. The breathy emo...
Chris Cusack: As sultry and understated as the obscure collages adorning the sleeve, Hymns for a Dark Horse rises gently from nothing on the back of Phil Moore's wistful guitar. Like much of the album, opener Hooves winds its way through a faintly Slavic wilderness,...
Darren Carle: ‘Soundtrack’, it seems, is the operative word for this second album from antipodean electro-garage rockers Pivot. Opening duo In The Blood and the title track bluster in with all the menace of a John Carpenter theme tune pulled apart by Bat...
Records :: Album Review 11 Aug 2008
Chris Cusack: Why the hell anyone ever told Johnny Whitney it was a good idea for him to sing is a mystery. The former front-man with Blood Brothers genuinely sounds like Alvin (of The Chipmunks fame) and he does the otherwise fine instrumentation on this debut albu...
Chris Cusack: Hands up if the idea of a concept album documenting a year of post break-up recriminations and misery via the medium of some fairly MOR rock music sounds like a good idea. Well, as it turns out, the 12 fairly routine chunks of primitive reflection on s...
Sylvia Higgins: Franti and cohorts make no bones about how accessible they want their music to be. They don’t do small scale either: this is an album targeting as large a worldwide audience as possible. Celebrated reggae producers Sly and Robbie have been enlist...
Jason Morton: After seeing this band perform, I came into this review with a bit of bias: The band takes the stage in matching vintage-store garb (think the look of Sufjan Stevens, Danielson or a Wes Anderson flick on the cheap), and the only lyrics I could pick out...
Records :: Album Review 08 Aug 2008
Emma Smith: Journeying from Leeds to Minnesota in order to record their first full length, five piece Vessels then doubled this distance through the roving passages and epic voyages musically depicted in White Fields and Open Devices. Opener Altered Beast is exhau...
Records :: Single Review 08 Aug 2008
Chris Buckle: For many, the term 'folk' will always evoke scenes of cardigan-clad hippies, perhaps explaining the propensity for critics to regularly weld on a prefix and announce a new 'movement'. Freak-folk, neo-folk, anti-folk, psych-folk, counter-folk (for folk'...
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