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 [...]

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. [...]

Ratatat - LP3

Rating: 4/5
During their four-year-old recording career, Ratatat have proven themselves true explorers; not always striking gold, but taking risks nonetheless. For the creation of LP3, the intrepid duo decamped from their native Brooklyn to the Old Soul studio in the Catskill Mountains, a dusty musical playground of Wurlitzers and harpsichords. It’s unsurprising then, that LP3 [...]

N*E*R*D – Seeing Sounds

Rating: **
One wonders why Neptunes duo Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo felt the need to revive their shot at rap-rock stardom that is N*E*R*D. It’s been four years since the modest success of second album Fly Or Die, and the world hasn’t exactly been waiting with anguished impatience on their return. But here we have [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]