indie
Kieron Tyler
After opening with a flurry of wobbly, woozy, Durutti Column-ish guitar, A Different Life travels through nine distant, foggy ruminations which suggest dissociation. Titles like “Far Apart”, “It’s Getting Better”, “Dive” and “Drive-by” posit Olivier Heim as a songwriter displaced from the day-to-day. And, atmospherically, his debut album reinforces the impression. With his sigh of a voice, it’s clear Heim’s music mirrors his moods. Indeed, on “Ocean”, he sings of a sleepy feeling he thought was left behind.A Different Life makes its case with sparse instrumentation: the treated guitar to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The attack is relentless. Its power pummels like a gale. The 2015 model Mercury Rev begin their set at Iceland Airwaves as they meant to finish. Never has this band been so forceful, so kinetic. Yet their trademark balance of filmic drama and delicate melody was not sacrificed during this convincing revitalisation. On stage at Reykjavík’s Harpa concert hall on the festival's second day, Mercury Rev set a bar so high it sowed seeds suggesting nothing could top this. If they are playing, see them.Mercury Rev were performing in the wake of the release of The Light in You, their first album for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Levitation: Meanwhile GardensIf Meanwhile Gardens had been issued as it was meant to be in 1993, it would not have had an easy ride. The band itself was falling apart. Founder member and former House of Love guitarist Terry Bickers had said on stage that May that the band was “a lost cause” and “we've completely lost it”. He left, the album was not released and, with a reconfigured line-up, Levitation limped on before splitting in autumn 1994.That wasn’t their only problem. The contemporary context in which they operated was changing and also unforgiving. The weekly music press were Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On record, Cat aka Chan Marshall is the quintessence of hip. From art-rock to blues, her vocals are cool and effortless. Live, however, things have been notoriously inconsistent. Google “Cat Power live”, and you will find a catalogue of stage meltdowns. Even her Wikipedia entry tells tales of drunken rants and abuse of fans. And yet for every gig disaster, there’s another rave review. When it comes to a Chan Marshall gig, it seems you pays your money and you takes your chances. As I queue up outside the huge Victorian St John-at-Hackney Church the moon is shining and fans are chatting in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back when this was the plain old Brixton Academy, before Britpop, before New Labour, before the world wide web had weaved its way into our homes, before the war on terror, before the nebulous notion of ‘content’ had yet to ruin everything and devalue everyone, I saw Ride play a gig here. It was ace.Tonight, it seemed as though everyone who had been there that night was back: older, wider and balder perhaps (the ratio of men to women was roughly that of a pre-suffragette parliamentary cabinet), but with the anticipation of a child on Christmas Eve. It’s a heritage gig of course – let’s not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Tape Hiss instantly telegraphs a dissatisfaction with today’s digital world and, fittingly, the all-analogue second album from Rotterdam’s Rats on Rafts could soundtrack a half-remembered Eighties evening taking in a bill of Britain and New Zealand’s most singular post-punk survivors. Their musical inspirations ring through loud and clear. But – and it's a massive but – these Lownlanders do it better and more ferociously than any of their forebears.Most prominent in the mix are the two-step swing of early “Pink Frost” Chills and the unwavering rolling crescendos of “Going up” and “ Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If there was any doubt as to the musical preferences of BBC4's commissioning arm, consider this: the whole history of funk got an hour. Meanwhile, indie music – a niche, artistic movement that somehow ended up drinking champagne while wallowing in its own mess by the mid-Nineties – gets a three-part series. Just thought I’d mention it.With time on its side, as we began part two, Music for Misfits was up to the Eighties. Following last week’s implication that punk was some kind of year zero for privately pressed records (it wasn’t), this episode started with the claim that, in the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The three-toed sloth moves at a maximum – that’s maximum – of 10 feet per minute. It’s thought to be the slowest animal in the world. While on a train hugging the north Kent coast however, I reckon I could give it a, figurative, run for its money. I’m on my way to a tiny venue in Ramsgate to see understated US rock band Sebadoh, whose album count is in double figures, on a tour that will see them joining Lemonheads in London for a high-profile gig. Well, at least that’s the plan.Jump forward about three hours and I’m in the back of a cab speeding towards home with a massive grin on my face Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An encounter with Hamburg’s Reeperbahn is akin to assimilation into a real-life kaleidoscope where bright lights, mass revellers and shills touting bars, night clubs or strip joints combine in a single multi-sense overload. The tumultuous thoroughfare is dedicated to excess.The Reeperbahn, the main drag of Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, approximates two garish, illuminated British seafront parades – maybe Blackpool and Southend – that have been elongated and then arranged face-to-face on each side of a street with emporia such as Amsterdam Headshop, beer halls and pole-dancing venues Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Light in You, Mercury Rev’s eighth studio album, is issued at the end of this week. It is their first for seven years, following 2008’s Snowflake Midnight. In the run up to its release, main-men and constants Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper (born Sean Mackowiak) took time to reflect on the new album, their attitudes to Mercury Rev's longevity – their debut album, Yerself Is Steam came out in 1991 – and their feelings about how music is heard and recorded.The Mercury Rev of 2015 is different to that of 2008. Although their sound is as affecting and ethereal as ever, and their songs as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s been worth the wait. There’s something about the affection Shane Meadows feels for his characters; the street action that doesn’t often (in this opener especially, though that may well change) tip into overt drama; the family elements that could, but don’t quite veer towards the soaps in style (if anything there’s a hint of parody?); and the sense of a period of time lovingly given its special details and intonations, that makes this latest instalment of This Is England feel almost like a reunion with old friends (plus a few sidekicks we haven’t quite got to know yet).The delay in the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Coming to Foals without the baggage – without knowing, for example, that they’re a British guitar band of mid-Noughties vintage – is a disconcerting experience, not least where fourth album What Went Down is concerned. Opening with a huge, heavy title track that – at least by its mid-section – appears to owe a heavy, screaming debt to the band’s recent association with Metallica, by its end the album checks off anthemic indie rock, beats-driven electronic experimentation and the sort of widescreen, cinematic sound beloved of contemporaries from the other side of the Read more ...