indie
Northern Winter Beat 2025, Aalborg review - The Courettes, Dungen and Lubomyr Melnyk confront ideas of how to playWednesday, 12 February 2025
The exhortations don’t seem necessary as the audience is already letting off the steam which has built up in anticipation of a full-bore show. Nonetheless, The Courettes’ Flávia Couri knows higher levels of excitement are there to be tapped, that it... Read more... |
Album: Manic Street Preachers - Critical ThinkingWednesday, 12 February 2025
Manic Street Preachers’ earnest and literate pretentiousness is both their Achilles Heel and their superpower. Their greatest songs are amped by full investment in whatever awkward path they’ve cussedly marched down. At these times, their ever-... Read more... |
Album: Squid - CowardsSaturday, 08 February 2025
Brighton band Squid are not in the business of straightforward. Combining jazz chops with a sensibility that’s at once post-punk, prog and avant-garde, their music is wilfully tricksy. Yet it does groove, upon occasion, it does funk. Tunes do pop in... Read more... |
Album: Rats on Rafts - Deep BelowFriday, 07 February 2025
Deep Below’s first track is titled “Hibernation.” “A winter breeze blows through my mind,” intones a colourless, dispirited male voice. The ensuing lyrics are similarly bleak. “Trying to warm myself with the memories you’ve left behind, Deep inside... Read more... |
Album: Inhaler - Open WideMonday, 03 February 2025
You could be easily forgiven for thinking that the young indie rockers, Inhaler, would stick to the formula that has already served them so well for album number three. The Dublin lads had soared to success with their first two albums, seeing them... Read more... |
Formal Sppeedwear, The Windmill review - Stoke-on-Trent trio reinvigorates the new wave eraThursday, 30 January 2025
As Stoke-on-Trent’s Formal Sppeedwear immerse themselves in what turns out to be their penultimate song, they become lost in the music. What they are playing takes over. Revolving guitar motifs spray forth like light reflected from a glitter ball.... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 88: Violent Femmes, Ringo Starr, ARXX, Dexter Gordon, Black Star, Dennis Bovell and moreTuesday, 28 January 2025
VINYL OF THE MONTHBuñuel Mansuetude (Skin Graft/Overdrive)This is a balls-out punk rock’n’roll mess, grunge that’s eaten the hash-cake then swigged a pint of Bourbon at high speed. Buñuel is Eugene S Robinson of San Francisco noiseniks Oxbow,... Read more... |
Album: Tunng - Love You All Over AgainWednesday, 22 January 2025
This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by... Read more... |
Album: Kele - The Singing Winds Pt. 3Friday, 17 January 2025
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way... Read more... |
Album: The Weather Station - HumanhoodThursday, 16 January 2025
Four of Humanhood’s 13 tracks are short, impressionistic mood pieces. Between 48 seconds and just-over a minute-and-a-half long, they mostly lack singing. Instrumentation is jazzy, leaning on piano and wind instruments. Drones and white noise evoke... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004-2024Sunday, 12 January 2025
Yeti Lane’s second album The Echo Show was released in March 2012. The Paris-based duo’s LP was stunning: holding together overall, as well as on a track-by-track basis. There were obvious influences: Kraftwerk, late-period Spacemen 3, motorik, My... Read more... |
Album: Franz Ferdinand - The Human FearFriday, 10 January 2025
Travel back in time to the mid 2000s and you would be hard pressed to escape "Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand on the air waves. On the radio, music channels, in discos and clubs, what felt like overnight, the track catapulted frontman Alex Kapranos... Read more... |
