indie
Jo Southerd
In recent weeks, you may have noticed signs for the Better Oblivion Community Center, from billboards to park benches, all displaying a mysterious helpline telephone number. This was not some new community support project, but a surprise collaborative album from premier sad songwriters Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst. Though Oberst was releasing music before Bridgers was born, their partnership is not unexpected: they share a heart-on-sleeve outlook and a mutual respect for each other's music, and have toured and appeared onstage together. Now on this new album, they elevate each other’s Read more ...
The Dandy Warhols, O2 Institute, Birmingham review - a silver jubilee jaunt with plenty of new tunes
Guy Oddy
This week, the Dandy Warhols rocked up in Birmingham to begin the UK leg of their 25th anniversary tour with a gig in the Institute’s shabby but beautiful main hall, with its dusty neo-classical alabaster reliefs and almost comically antiquated balconies. It was indeed the perfect venue for a band that have spent so many years taking the psychedelic and adding their own twist to create something fine but far from mainstream. Needless to the say, the almost capacity audience lapped it all up, even though not too many seemed to have come out on this cold winter night with the intention of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Few bands have grown up in real time in quite as interesting a way as Girlpool. It’s partly a question of timing: Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker were barely old enough to play bars around the release of their precocious 2013 debut EP, with its sing-song harmonies and cover like a child’s painting. And it’s partly a reflection of how their musical world has expanded with each release, each new album showing off a fuller sound yet still perfectly reflecting the internal and external chaos of figuring out your place in a confusing world as a young adult.This evolution has never been more Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There is an inevitable change that comes with moving from the realms of self-produced bedroom blubstep to slickly-produced West Cali smoothness that will cause chaotic realms of loss of self, fans and at some level, originality. But let’s not forget – this is surely what Blake has always been aiming for. Yes, Assume Form has a degree of soullessness that is a stark contrast to his self-titled first album – but that’s part of the journey from angsty, bleak, indie-dubstep to successful, Mercury Prize-winning musician.The level of collaboration on this album (Metro Boomin, Travis Scott, Moses Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Russian trio Gnoomes have created small waves over the last couple of years with their woozy psychedelia. One of its defining factors is the way the band have utilised Soviet-era synthesizers. During the Cold War it wasn’t only weaponry and the space race that defined the endless competitiveness between the United States and the USSR; the technologies of sound were also an area of rivalry. For those seeking to make strange and wonderful analogue electronica using kit many miles away from brand names such as Korg and Moog, then, there are rich pickings. One such is Gnoomes drummer Pavel Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The disappearance of a band for a while calls for a re-set. A reminder, perhaps, of why you fell for them in the first place. "[10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs]", the four minutes of minor-key chaos that opens the new album from The Twilight Sad, is exactly that reminder: a title written by a computer programme, a sound like an air raid siren, and James Graham’s raw, tender, aching voice, screaming “I see the cracks all start to show” in a tone at once unhinged and pure.It Won/t Be Like This All The Time arrives with its own mythology, the band’s staggeringly intimate records and live Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s hard to see the first album under the Pedro the Lion name in 15 years as anything other than a homecoming. There’s the title, Phoenix, for one thing: a dual-purpose nod to both songwriter David Bazan’s hometown and the mythical bird, reborn from the ashes of what came before. There’s the lyrical time traveling to childhood: favourite toys, fickle friends, a litany of street names, fading out like a prayer, at the end of a long desert highway. There’s even, on the relatively upbeat “Clean Up”, a brazen nod of a lyric to the albums under his own name on which Bazan wrestled, to a more or Read more ...
Barney Harsent
De Facto is the fifth album from Mexican duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete and the first to be recorded in the home studio of core members Lorelle (Lorena Quintanella) and The Obsolete (Alberto González). The change has certainly served them well, seemingly freeing them up and giving them room to move. Movement is what De Facto is all about, you see. Whether it’s the shifting dynamics of the psychedelic instrumentals or the proud, propulsive wallop of the hypnotic grooves, Lorelle Meets the Obsolete have taken a bold step forward with this release. There is a densely layered structure Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This 11-tracker begins with 35 seconds of rhythmically bedded instrumental colour which opens the curtain for a lovely, folky slab of art-pop titled “Enough to Notice”. Odd touchstones surface: Skylarking XTC, Stackridge, Dirty Projectors. Yet there’s something else going on. During the album’s second track, it dawns. Field Music. This is who You Tell Me evoke. It’s all here. The clipped approach to melodies and rhythms, the dry production, the suggestions of a reined-in prog rock and the precise string arrangements.Unlike Field Music, the voice most often heard is female and crisply elegiac Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Are you tired of being pissed and confused?” opens the epic title track of Yak’s second album. Later on singer Oli Burslem brokenly croons, “For now I’m in pursuit of momentary happiness; it’s vacuous and a game gonna lose [sic]. Do you remember when we said it’d be easier if nobody felt a thing, no love, no loss, nothing…” The nihilistic lyrics belie an indie strum that blossoms into a sweeping explosion of melodically inclined space rock. Thus it is throughout. The lyrics are often gnarly but the tone triumphant.Three-piece Yak created waves amongst NME-orientated aficionados of guitar Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Moments into “Maker of me”, it’s evident that The Story of Valerie is special. A circular piano figure accompanies a disembodied female voice singing and speaking of a relationship that’s “greater than myself.” Punctuation from a bass guitar is sprinkled sparingly. The next track, “Golden Boy”, is similarly formidable but employs an electronic keyboard, a drum machine and features an even more intense vocal. The singer – Carola Baer – is striving for a form of ecstasy.The Story of Valerie’s third track “Love me” is doubly impassioned. A keyboard conjuring a pattern evoking Philip Glass meshes Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Capsule is the Birmingham outfit that is good enough to bring the avant-garde, the lairy and the down-right odd to the city every summer for the splendid Supersonic Festival. However, that isn’t the extent of their activities, as there are also Home of Metal events and one-off gigs to keep Midlands’ sonic explorers happy for the rest of the year. This weekend saw Capsule’s annual Christmas bash with sets from local psychedelic motorik-fiends, Matters; gentle free-jazzers, Yama Warashi; sharp and mischievous, high-speed punks, Youth Man; and sinister post-punkers Hey Colossus. All with between Read more ...