indie
Nick Hasted
Johnny Marr’s second single as a solo artist, New Town Velocity, describes his youthful propulsion by pop music in grey late Seventies Manchester towards a bright, boundless future he duly reached with The Smiths. It surely also describes the renewed energy he’s drawn from being back in his home city after five years in Portland, Oregon. Manchester certainly inspired this year’s debut solo album The Messenger, with its resourcefully melodic rock rooted in local inspirations such as Magazine and his own past with The Smiths, so often disavowed till now.Born in Manchester in 1963, the teenage Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s a shame God is dead” sings Jamie Lee on “So Long”, the opening track of his band Money’s debut album The Shadow of Heaven. With a melody rooted in gospel and a musical backdrop ecstatically imbued with the grace of the devotional rather than the level-headedness of the non-spiritual, it’s hard not to wonder whose God he’s singing of. The Shadow of Heaven feels reverential – the band have played in churches – but it’s an adoration fashioned on their own terms.The Shadow of Heaven also feels important, yet it’s an album where statements are made so elegantly that it's only when it’s over Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The prettiest-sounding album so far this year, the glistening Moon Tides evokes the ghostly atmosphere of The Cocteau Twins and the intimacy of Eighties melancholia fashioned by Liverpool’s Black. But it’s more than a revivalist album, since it’s firmly rooted on Earth and its melodies are fresh. Pure Bathing Culture are neither spaceheads nor nostalgists.Pure Bathing Culture are the Portland-based Daniel Hindman and Sarah Vesprille, a duo who have previously surfaced in Vetiver. The only sonic link between that incarnation and Moon Tides is the muzzy, Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Characterising a country’s music by its most successful exports or what seem to be typical local styles is inevitable. With Iceland, the home of Björk and Sigur Rós, it’s easy to assume that ethereality, otherworldliness and plain oddness rule the roost. Of course, that’s not the case. The artists awarded the Kraumur prize for the best albums released in 2012 testify to Iceland’s broad musical palette. On the next page, our look at the Kraumur winners ranges from the hotly-tipped Ásgeir Trausti to, among other surprises, home-grown reggae.Scandinavia as a whole doesn’t always escape similar Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A disembodied, wispy female voice declares “this is not true”, the only emotion left a resignation so acute she may as well be contemplating her imminent demise. On Soft Metals’ “Tell me”, her deliberation is accompanied by electronic music drawing from the pulse Giorgio Moroder created for Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, 20 Jazz Funk Greats-era Throbbing Gristle, French cold wave and the drifting vapourousness of the early Orb. On the next track, “When I Look Into Your Eyes”, she sighs “we all die”.Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks, the Portland-formed and now Los Angeles-based duo who operate as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Hurley: Armchair Boogie / Hi Fi Snock UptownWith songs about werewolves, penguins, the English upper classes, trains, the police and more werewolves, these albums from surrealist folk maverick Michael Hurley are charming and occasionally disconcerting. His ramshackle delivery seems a little offhand but it brings an intimacy that can’t fail to worm its way in. Armchair Boogie (credited to Michael Hurley & Pals) was originally issued in 1971; Hi Fi Snock Uptown in 1972. Both originally came out Raccoon, the label run The Youngbloods.Armchair Boogie was the belated follow-up to Read more ...
Simon Munk
Just go and buy it and download it right now, OK? Gunpoint is fantastic for so many reasons. But primarily it's fantastic because it plays fantastically. It's easy to lose sight of that fact when you learn the back story behind the game, when it's put in context. But let's not lose sight of this – Gunpoint is great fun to play.This stealth puzzle game sees your intrepid industrial espionage agent/hat-and-coated gumshoe breaking into a series of side-on buildings to investigate dodgy murders, steal corporate secrets and eavesdrop on intriguing conversations. These buildings are full of armed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The default word for these films, made by the band Saint Etienne with their collaborator and former guitarist Paul Kelly, is "poignant". As elegiac visual poems which capture the always-evolving environment of London, they certainly are expressive. They are also often described as nostalgic, as they cast a lens across businesses and buildings, proprietors and townscapes that are now gone. The mood they evoke is one of longueur: a figurative sigh. Fine as far as it goes, but that’s passive wallowing. What they generate from my viewpoint in north London is a tremendous anger, one born from a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drawing connections between the far margins and the relative mainstream always leaves you in a difficult position, as it invites judgement from different groups with very different criteria. And the duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power put themselves in that position more than most.For all the outré edginess of their name, their occult imagery, their presentation of their music as 10-minute noise-drone epics and their claims to be “aggressive, malevolent, apocalyptic,” it was not as great a surprise as it might seem that they were selected by Danny Boyle and Underworld to soundtrack Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton StoryWithout Shadow Morton, Amy Winehouse could not have made Back to Black. The songs the enigmatic sonic wizard wrote and produced for The Shangri-Las in the mid Sixties were integral to what made Back to Black tick. Amazingly, Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton Story is the first career-spanning collection of Morton’s work. For that alone, it would be, at the least, exciting. But with its massive, well-illustrated booklet, the involvement of and interviews with Morton – who died in February this year, before he Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Watching Adam Stafford at work can only be described as magical. Thanks to his ingenious use of loop and effects pedals, the Falkirk-born songwriter can spin intricate, layered compositions using nothing but his voice and a couple of bars on guitar. At last week’s Glasgow launch show for his latest album, he ended the night with a ten-minute monster from Awnings, a 2009 experimental a capella album. Cue an audience literally stunned by a noise as wild and intense - and yet, as strangely controlled - as that from a full orchestra.It stands to reason that some of the immediate impact of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Like a child’s crude drawing of a crime they’ve witnessed, the cover image is of two adults: one female, one male. The female is bent forward, holding what looks to be an axe. Below waist height, the male is holding a linear object spewing something towards her. It may be a gun, it may be his penis. Phrases strew the image: “psychiatric shopping mall”; “I don’t think you should be around people”. Whatever’s inside the sleeve of Nadine Shah’s debut album isn’t going to be cuddly-wuddly tomfoolery.On Love Your Dum and Mad’s highlight “Runaway”, Shah sings “I still have that red silk dress, Read more ...