indie
Kieron Tyler
MGMT’s last album, 2010’s Congratulations, defined a modern psychedelia of the highest order. Bold of sweep, full of ambition and tinged with the airs of defeat and desperation, it set Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden up as ones to watch: a duo whose early electropop-inclined work had been left far behind. It’s unfortunate then that their self-titled third album does not take them even further out. Instead, MGMT is the sound of a band stuck in low gear.To a degree, Goldwasser and Van Wyngarden have had some of their thunder stolen by the rise of Tame Impala and their leader Kevin Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the half light of a small medieval church tucked behind London's St Pancras Station, a figure in white plays melancholy songs at a grand piano to the accompaniment of a cellist and violinist. This chamber ensemble had an audience of 84. The atmosphere of this special concert contrasted starkly with the close, humid and overhot day which led up to it.Denmark’s Agnes Obel had arrived in London to perform a month before the release of her second album, Aventine. Taking its name from one of Rome’s seven hills, the songs on the album – even in this live setting – already feel ageless. They Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Newcastle’s Lanterns on the Lake have quietly gone about the business of perfecting their mood music. Each time they surface, their music gains another level of intensity and assumes a greater focus. This progress suggests their second album, Until the Colours Run, won’t be the culmination of their journey, but it does take them to a stage where they could extend their audience to any size they wish.Until the Colours Run is reflective modern rock with roots in Mazzy Star and latter-day Sigur Rós. The glitchiness of their debut, Gracious Tide, Take me Home, has largely gone, replaced by a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There are few duller subjects in popular music than the relationship between Pete Doherty and drugs. I’d like therefore to be able to tell you that I have avoided all such references in this review. The truth is, however, I can’t: from the first slur to the last jangled guitar this still sounds like the work of a man who prefers his consciousness chemically altered. Yet, if Doherty's experimentation is unlikely to ever unlock the doors of perception, on this occasion his mindset is, thankfully, more lightly melancholy than those previous occasions when it was simply depressing and incoherent. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last album released by Iceland’s múm was Early Birds, an archive trawl from 2012 which unearthed previously unheard material recorded between 1998 and 2000. Before that was 2009’s Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know. Smilewound is a comeback, and a welcome one. It’s also a statement of who múm are and closer in sound to an early album like Finally We Are No One than the – for them – relatively grandiose …Songs You Don't Know.For Smilewound, múm’s core duo Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason are reunited with founder member Gyða Valtýsdóttir. Kylie Minogue also crops up. Despite Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Imagine an aural swoon of a song like a mermaid’s sigh preceding one which introduces Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals to free-jazz skronk. After that, Laurie Anderson pops along to take on the soft soul of the early Seventies Isley Brothers. An evening with Julia Holter encompasses all of that, yet knits it all together gracefully to make a whole like nothing else. Despite the fleetingly familiar elements, it couldn’t really sound ordinary: her chosen live set up supplements her own keyboard with drums, a violinist, cellist and saxophonist. Hardly a regular band.Holter can’t be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chicago’s Disappears aren’t playing it easy with their fourth album Era. Their name doesn’t appear on the front cover. Nor does the title. The song titles are only on the disc and can’t be referred to while the album is playing. No internet addresses are given. The band seem to be taking their chosen name literally and leaving the music to do the talking.Era was preceded into the shops by Kone, a 12-inch EP which centred on a 15-minute track. Although abstract, it was rooted in what the band had previously perfected: a stiff-backed, guitar-driven squall which underpinned singer Brian Case’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
R Stevie Moore: Personal AppealIt’s a brave person who whittles down the output of R Stevie Moore to one CD. Since 1969, he’s made at least 175 albums, a significant proportion of which he committed to cassette tape. There are also a similar amount of singles, live albums and collaborative efforts. Handily, the British label Care in the Community has taken up the challenge and, instead of releasing a compilation which darts off all over the place stylistically, has issued a disc which unfolds as a unified album. No mean feat considering that the tracks on Personal Appeal originally Read more ...
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 ...