indie
Kieron Tyler
In 1966, David Warner assumed the title role in Karel Reisz’s satire Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment. The film’s Morgan Delt was a fantasist with a communist family background married to the posh Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave. When she seeks a divorce, he campaigns to win her back but ends up in an asylum where she reveals she is pregnant with his child. As a depiction of class clashes, thwarted aspirations and unmediated behaviour, it was a very Sixties confection.Phase Zero is the second album by a California native who has assumed the name Morgan Delt. Fittingly, it is shot- Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I don’t really care about reviews because if someone slags it off, they’ve missed the joke. How can they slag off a fictional character? It’s win-win. It’s pain-free. It’s bulletproof – commercially and critically.”Ricky Gervais there, talking about the album tie-in with his new film David Brent: Life on the Road. In many ways, he’s right: the songs, written in the guise of Gervais’ best comic creation, are meant to be bad, but entertainingly so, like, say, Spinal Tap. It's a comparison that Gervais doesn't shy away from: “Once you know the context, you can enjoy the songs without jokes, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Water has featured prominently in Lisa Hannigan’s work since striking out solo on 2008’s Mercury-nominated Sea Sew: water that caresses and relaxes; water that turns deadly and drowns. The water in At Swim is the water that the singer finds herself adrift in; the water that she had to cross between her home in Dublin and a new love in London as she pulled her third album together; and - yes, let’s go there - the water, murky and all-consuming, that typifies Aaron Dessner of The National’s production, and makes him Hannigan’s perfect foil.Like her previous work, the songs on At Swim perfectly Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If you’re still searching for a summer soundtrack, look no further. Blossoms will make you want to immediately take a road trip around Devon, cruising at sunset, musing over easygoing lyrics and having a bit of a hum while appreciating a good strum.The synth-heavy "Charlemagne" drags you immediately into a beautiful journey, with a cruising rhythm and gratifying melody. It’s cheerful indie, with none of the tormented whinging we experienced the first time round in the 90s (and with some of the more recent "nu-retro" stuff). "At Most a Kiss" keeps the pace, driving and persistent before " Read more ...
joe.muggs
In the early 2000s, a club called Trash in London, run by DJ Erol Alkan, introduced a wave of indie teenagers to the joys of electronic music, giving them a way into club culture that was all theirs and not beholden to the superstar DJs of the acid house generation. A generation of bands would form directly or indirectly influenced by it – and by the end of the decade, there was a mini wave of bands like Friendly Fires, Late Of The Pier and Wild Beasts, who integrated electronic sound into a rock band format, and brought a bit of disco glitter and androgyny to their image to boot.It felt like Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A Venn diagram connecting the diffuse, distanced and drifting, The Amazing's Ambulance is hard to latch onto. Its first five tracks are etiolated cousins of the Midlake of Antiphon, while also calling to mind Sydney dream-popsters The Church circa Heyday and Starfish, as well as fellow Australians The Moffs. Although beautiful, their vaporousness makes it difficult to keep them in focus. Then, as the seven-and-a-half minute “Through City Lights” progresses, any hold on the ear dissipates. The subsequent pair of acoustic guitar-centred tracks feel tacked on and, as attention has already Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Familiar words pepper the lead item on the 9am radio news: "Brexit", "Theresa May", "Boris Johnson". Yet the bulletin is delivered in the first language of the 49,000-population Faroe Islands. The self-governing region of Denmark may be a remote cluster of 18 North Atlantic islands, but the Britain-watching contagion has spread to a place which has never been a member of the EU. Denmark is. The Faroes aren't.The Faroes do it their way. How much so is apparent at the annual G! Festival, hosted by Syðrugøta. At the west end of the Gøtuvik fjord, the village of 416 looks classically Nordic and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was somewhere around the third posthumous Jeff Buckley compilation that I realised that my love for an artist, and my completist nature, would never quite compensate for the general ickiness I felt about the nonconsensual release of their works in progress. It may not be the fairest of comparisons to draw – this collection of nine Viola Beach songs, released just five months after the deaths of the four bandmates and their manager in a car crash in Sweden, comes with the backing of their families and on the back of this weekend’s charity festival in their home town of Warrington. But there Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For a self-made band that found success via the creation of quirky, imaginative YouTube videos spread via social media, there's a level of expectation regarding the same kind of creativity in their live shows. But in fact Canadian indie band Walk Off The Earth's REVO tour experience is a very simple one. Starting with "Rule the World", the band seemed understated, even a little unsure. But then came "Walking Off the World Tonight", a song containing lyrics that talk you through the building of a song – rusty old guitars, a shaker and a uke, being that’s all that’s needed to create Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Completed from scratch in seven days, The Magic features 15 songs veering from spindly, fidgety No Wave excursions to tuneful yet harsh pop-New Wave nuggets and headache-inducing bangers. In short, Deerhoof’s 13th album proper encapsulates everything they have done to date from 1997’s debut album The Man, The King, The Girl.The prescriptive approach is nothing new. Its predecessor La Isla Bonita was similarly speedily tracked live in a basement, and the album before that, 2013’s Breakup Song, was collated from digital files each band member had made separately. Seemingly, Deerhoof are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last May, Malmö trio Death and Vanilla issued the To Where the Wild Things are album and it seemed they had arrived as a fully formed post-Broadcast proposition, harmoniously fusing vintage influences like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Italian giallo soundtracks and The United States of America. With its cover imagery evoking the British Ghostbox label, To Where the Wild Things are could have been dismissed as havng thumbed a ride on a musical excursion begun by others. But the album was so assured and stuffed with such dreamy melodies it transcended the inspirations. Death and Vanilla were Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We’ve been visiting libraries on this tour and it’s a lot of fun learning people still read.” The words of The Burning Hell’s main man Mathias Kom before launching into “Give Up” stress he and his band are not typical rock‘n’rollers. “Give Up” itself is the rollicking song-story of a call-centre worker who goes to a library, finds inspiration in Herman Melville and then meets a mysterious woman who rings in. She gives him a poster of a kitten captioned “Never Give Up”. In the song’s pay off, Kom’s protagonist declares “when the going gets tough, I give up.”Canada’s Burning Hell don’t Read more ...