The Blakes - The Blakes (album review)

Rating: 2/5
It’s easy to get an idea of what to expect from The Blakes by citing their apparent influences: early Strokes in the playful kick of ‘Modern Man’, ‘Country Girl’-mode Primal Scream in the bluesy ‘Magoo’, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in the loose, grungy sway of upcoming single ‘Don’t Want That Now’. And the [...]

XX Teens - Welcome To Goon Island

Rating: 4/5
Some bands have no luck in the name game. After being threatened with legal action by a copier corporation under their previous guise of Xerox Teens, this London quintet settled on the dubious-sounding XX Teens. (And they’re not even teenagers.) Never mind all that though, because their debut album Welcome To Goon Island is [...]

Jakob Dylan - Seeing Things

Rating: 2/5
Jakob Dylan is either immensely brave or immensely foolish. To pursue a solo career in the shadow of Dylan senior - and in an acoustic, country-blues style at that - must require great self-belief or gross ignorance of the implications. Because, let’s be frank, under the family name the Wallflowers frontman is always going [...]

T in the Park: Sunday roving report

So much for Saturday. Sunday was all set to be the great day, with the clouds clearing and a glut of exciting bands to enjoy. The only problem was how to take it all in…
After a brief sojourn in the Media Village that proved uneventful (no ‘celebs’ to watch being slobbered over by the Daily [...]

T in the Park: Saturday roving report

With memories of a litter-strewn airstrip and 80,000 dancing, drinking, singing, colliding, wretching, cavorting, exposing, stumbling, pissing people fading as fast as my sunburn, it’s time I posted my second annual T in the Park roving report…
Straight off the trusty shuttle bus - via the bar, of course - we decide to sample some sounds, [...]

Interview: Hot Chip

This is a feature I wrote back in February for The Skinny, the week before Hot Chip released their third album. It all came together too late to tie in with the album release, so here it is on the eve of their T in the Park set…
Interviews with Hot Chip often begin with the [...]

July in singles: a bored actress, Pammy’s ex, and the next Arcade Fire?

[Attic Lights: recipients of July single of the month]
To look at bespectacled Glaswegian Ross Clark, you might expect him to be a modest, sensitive, home-spun folkster. But, au contraire, Silversword (****, Out Now) is a raucous, joyous, full-band-with-horns blitzkrieg, taking the populist bent of The Fratellis and filtering out all the bad stuff. Paul [...]

Interview: Ratatat

Ratatat may still be a lesser-known name on this side of the Atlantic, but it’s a name you’re unlikely to forget after a first introduction. That introduction may have arrived via a whimsical purchase of their 2004 self-titled debut, or 2006’s superior follow-up Classics, or their warm-up show for CSS at last year’s Triptych. Perhaps [...]

Will someone make Mark Ronson disappear, please?

The first time I heard the name ‘Mark Ronson’, I think it was a radio play of his cover of Radiohead’s ‘Just’. It was one of those times when you take a mental note of the name and check their MySpace later.
Ronson’s funked-up version of ‘Just’ may be a stoke of genius, but his current [...]

Albert Hammond Jr – ¿Cómo Te Llama?

Rating: 3/5
You can’t really begrudge Albert Hammond Jr his solo career. The Strokes aren’t exactly prolific, Julian Casablancas does most of that band’s songwriting, and with their Lower East Side hipster image to keep up, it’s easy to imagine that private universe becoming an exceedingly cramped place for someone as individually creative as Hammond Jr. [...]