Errors - It’s not something but it is like whatever

Rating: ****
With the daft, verbose album title, Errors are presumably launching a pre-emptive strike at the music journalists who will try to categorise their sound in the coming weeks and months. The point being that the Glasgow band are too disparate for the old name-that-genre ploy. Sure, they’re electro, but they’re also post-rock, math rock, [...]

Spiritualized – Songs in A&E

Rating: ****
There was always a neat symmetry in the pharmaceutical-themed packaging of Spiritualized’s coruscating late ’90s output: music as drug, drug as music. But the hospital theme of Spiritualized’s long-awaited new album, Songs in A&E, has taken on a more sober resonance since founding member Jason Pierce’s 2005 spell in intensive care, following an attack [...]

Liquid Liquid – Slip In And Out of Phenomenon

Rating: *****
Despite only releasing three EPs in their brief existence during the first years of the 1980s, the influence of New York’s Liquid Liquid has proven surprisingly pervasive with the passing of a quarter century. Google them and the most common piece of trivia you’ll find is that they supplied the music to one of [...]

The Mae Shi @ Cabaret Voltaire, 18 May

Talking Heads and Pavement comparisons are ten-a-penny in the blogosphere, and Edinburgh’s Jesus H Foxx must be getting sick of ‘em; if it wasn’t for the fact that they’ve clearly paid close attention to both indie supergroups. But the Foxx also have a madcap, unhinged sound that is all their own, and surfaces in the [...]

The Twilight Sad, Frightened Rabbit, Dirty Summer @ Carnegie Hall, 15 May

Dunfermline’s Carnegie Hall isn’t your usual gig venue. It’s a provincial theatre with cushioned seating, suited ushers, pinned-up notices of stage times and a drinks ban in the auditorium. It’s a comfortable yet contrary setting, and local trio Dirty Summer (**) don’t do anything to assuage any tension with their relentless noisecore onslaught. Wilfully unconventional, [...]

Classic album: Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues

Twenty-five years have elaspsed since Speaking In Tongues gave Talking Heads their biggest commercial success, but the passage of time hasn’t diminished the influence or freshness of the New York band’s first post-Brian Eno record…
It’s 1981. Talking Heads have just released the wildly ambitious Remain In Light, but the band’s future is far from assured. [...]

The Charlatans - You Cross My Path

Rating: * *
The Charlatans, along with the Manics and Oases of this world, are a band content to plough the same musical furrow ad infinitum. And while perseverance should be celebrated when it reaps consistently good produce - such as 2001’s Wonderland - it’s very easy to become indifferent to such Britpop survivors when the [...]

May in singles: new music from New York, Norway and… Dundee

Most agree that the indie-fication of pop has been a change for the better. Except, that is, when bands like The Pigeon Detectives bring their knuckle-dragging post-Libertine shtick to the table with new single This Is An Emergency (**, 5 May). A rush of equally naff computer beeps heralds the debut single of Philadelphian electro-rock-bots [...]

Clinic, Errors, RememberRemember @ Cabaret Voltaire, 27 Apr

 
RememberRemember’s (***) Graeme Ronald chose his new musical moniker wisely, because by the end of every ’song’ (in the loosest possible sense) the minimalist sequences and percussive noises are not live but recorded, looped, the stuff of memory. He may not be the first to compose and perform in this multi-layering manner, but with his [...]