indie
Kieron Tyler
A trio from Halifax with a collective age of 56, Orielles aren’t shy about revealing their musical enthusiasms. References to A Certain Ratio. ESG, Happy Mondays, the Housemartins, Orange Juice, the Pastels and the Soup Dragons pepper their interviews. The band’s first rehearsal was dedicated to mastering The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks”. Much of the music they cite was made before they were born.The connections with the past go further than preferred musical flavours. The father of bassist/vocalist Esmé Hand-Halford and her drummer sister Sidonie was in the indie band the Train Set, who were Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are two types of people - those who are fans of Belle & Sebastian and those who are too ashamed to admit such plebbishness regarding musical tastes, that they won’t admit to not being fans of the Glaswegian band.Unfortunately I fall into the latter camp. I wish I got this band, I really do. I wish I was one of those cool-kid superfans. So I’m trying my darndest with this triplicate mini-album release – a hark back to their 1997 album of the same order.“Sweet Dew Lee” hearteningly opens with a duet that promises the filmic soundscapes of earlier albums, but ends up being try-hard Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What does a band do when it loses a key member? Pack it in? Carry on as if nothing has happened? Execute a radical change of direction? Nick McCarthy, Franz Ferdinand’s rhythm guitarist and keyboard player, left the band last July and their new album Always Ascending answers the questions.Obviously, Franz Ferdinand have not packed it in after the loss and two new members replace McCarthy, a keyboard player and a rhythm guitarist. Before his departure, McCarthy had co-written all the band’s songs. The last record Franz Ferdinand contributed to was their hugely successful 2015 collaboration Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Transangelic Exodus is a roller-coaster ride. Songs twist, turn, have sudden shifts in tempo, are punctuated by unexpected instrumental interjections, and come to a dead stop after which they resume their unpredictable course. Although Ezra Furman's musical touchstones of late Fifties pop and The Modern Lovers are still apparent, the follow-up to 2015’s Perpetual Motion People comes across as nothing less than a vigorously shaken-and-stirred take on pre-Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen.Furman says the narrative thread running through the frenzied Transangelic Exodus is his being “in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
On paper Django Django seem a perfect band. The four-piece, half Scottish, quarter English, quarter Northern Irish, boast an indie songwriting sensibility, but filtered through a natural pop suss, an engaging sense of psychedelia, a desire to rave it up, and a ripe capacity for harmonisation. Their third album is fat with melody and interest, right from its ballistic opening title track, yet in the end, why is it eminently likeable rather than loveable?See, I keep trying to have a love affair with Django Django’s music. Their last album, Born Under Saturn (2015), sounds luscious but in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How much of someone else’s despair is it possible to take? What are the limits on putting a sense of desolation or isolation into a song? Can such naked expression be mediated by a glossy production or crowded instrumental arrangements which distract from the core essence of the song?All three questions are raised by the new Television Personalities archive release Beautiful Despair. Rather than being an unreleased album, it is a collection of 15 previously unheard home recordings taped in 1989 and 1990 between the albums Privilege (1989) and Closer to God (1992). This was a period of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The third album from Thomas White under his Fiction Aisle moniker is a match for its delicious, under-heard predecessors. White remains best known for his output with The Electric Soft Parade and Brakes but the prolific Fiction Aisle (three albums since 2016) deserve to gain wider purchase. This time round the mood is more tentatively upbeat than previously, and White’s Pink Floyd-ish tendencies are on the back burner, but, at its core, cosmic easy listening is still the game.The Fiction Aisle aspire to John Barry’s cinematic orchestrated scope, but tinted with hints of Morrissey’s vocal tics Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The critic Simon Reynolds characterised Butterfly Child’s debut album Onomatopoeia as the sound of “vitrified everglades in J.G. Ballard’s The Illuminated Man, where some kind of entropy has slowed down time, so that living creatures are literally petrified, encrusted and crystal.”Such circumlocution was unsurprising as Onomatopoeia was originally issued by Rough Trade in August 1993 during a between-time moment for independently minded pop. Britpop hadn’t yet taken off, grunge was a clichéd bandwagon and the first flush of shoegazing had run its course. It hit shops around the same Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a prime example of high-end Gallic art-pop, Triomphe pushes the right buttons. The mid-tempo opening cut “Senga” sets the tone. A motorik rhythm and a shuffling counterpoint are complemented by bubbling bass guitar, insistent single note guitar lines and subtle keyboard stabs. The French-language vocal line is hooky, minor key and delivered in close-miked yet distant voice. It exudes class. Krautrock and Air are in there. A smidge of Stereolab too. As is – with the way the song builds and builds – a suggestion of stadium-rock dynamics.It’s the same throughout Triomphe, where a sense of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Five years might not, at first, seem like a long time between albums, certainly when you consider that even tectonic shift left the Avalanches in its wake while they were creating Wildflower. But a lot has happened to Californian indie rockers Black Rebel Motorcycle Club during that time. Not least, drummer Leah Shapiro has undergone surgery – crowdfunded by BRMC devotees – for a serious brain condition, and her road to recovery has been mapped out for her by a surgeon who also happens to be a fan of the band. There is, it's fair to say, a lot of love in the room.As well as showing Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
The Go! Team have been unrivalled in the world of euphoric hip-pop after their samplerific debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, blasted its way onto the 2005 Mercury Prize shortlist. Since then, founding member Ian Parton has utilised everything from typewriters to gospel choirs to songs about milk in his quest to be a “cheerleader for a better world”. Their new album, Semicircle, takes this tradition of innovation and fun to new heights.One of the most striking things about the album is the instrumentation. Parton and his merry band of musicians (including Sam Dook, Simone Odaranile, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French stylist Gaspard Royant has recorded at London’s garage-rock-central studio Toe Rag and been produced by Edwyn Collins. Both fit a worldview which encompasses collaborating with Eli Paperboy Reed, who crops up here on “Christmas Time Again”, a cover of Reuben Anderson’s wonderful, soulful 1966 ska single. Drawing a line between garage rock, Sixties urban R&B and soul with dashes of blues and nods to Lee Hazlewood, Royant is a Gallic cousin to Richard Hawley. Unsurprisingly, his first Christmas album is a knowing affair.Scooping up tracks from Royant’s seasonal singles and marrying Read more ...