indie
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Any concerns that Best Coast might have abandoned the sun-kissed California scuzz-pop sound that made their 2010 debut, Crazy For You, such a runaway success are answered in its opening - and title - track. “So leave your coat behind / We’re gonna make it to the beach on time,” Bethany Cosentino sings, and I sigh from a rainy Glasgow attic and keep on waiting for summer.It’s a little simplistic to call The Only Place a rehash, so perhaps in deference to producer Jon Brion we could call it a sequel. The album is full of the things that have always made Best Coast great - short, simple songs Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Choosing such a loaded name is wilful. Scottish trio Haight-Ashbury are going to be identified with psychedelic-era San Francisco whatever they do. Should they wish to extend their musical wings, diversions into drum and bass or metal aren’t going to be easily accommodated. It's just as well then that Haight-Ashbury are top-drawer practitioners of a terrifically attractive dark psychedelia.Their second album (released under the name Haight-Ashbury 2, but they still trade as Haight-Ashbury too) opens with hand percussion, a jangling sitar and a keening, modal vocal line. Rhythm is Mo Tucker Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gravenhurst is Nick Talbot, a Bristolian multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter who recently completed his sixth album, The Ghost in Daylight. Ahead of its release on Warp Records next week theartsdesk premieres the unsettling film made for its lead single “The Prize”. Directed by Jenny Coan, Talbot says the video “suggests a journey towards an unknown destination”.The pairing of Gravenshurst with Coan makes sense. Both a film archive curator and filmmaker, the director has worked with Damien Hirst, Adam Curtis, Julian Temple and the Victoria & Albert Museum to make films Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Poliça aren’t lacking support. Jay Z posted one of their videos on his blog. Prince turned up to check out their live debut. Bon Iver's Mike Noyce sings on a couple of Give You the Ghost’s tracks. For an outfit whose debut album is only just getting its UK release (it was issued in the States in February), Poliça have got the jump on most contenders. They’ve also got an added leg up by having their origins in hip Minneapolis collective Gayngs. Most importantly, Give You the Ghost is great.Like Gayngs, Poliça – Polish for policy – aren’t a band. Both are projects drawing together producers and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lost Harmony is the third album from Norwich to London transplants Sennen. Although they’re pretty much an under the radar band, it’s been made with David M Allen, The Cure’s long-term producer. Their songs have been heard on the soundtracks of One Tree Hill and True Blood. Obviously, they’re doing something right. Steeped in melancholy, Lost Harmony is defined by the insistent “Vultures”, which is about Nikolai Kondratiev, the Russian economist who evolved the concept that capitalist economies are defined by cycles of boom and bust.That the best entry point into Lost Harmony is “Vultures”, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Low don’t really look as though they’re given to ostentatious display. With their black shirts, polished footwear and sensible haircuts, they could be waiting staff in a formal restaurant. One with a lot of dark wood and banquettes. The Hendrix-like squall that preceded last night’s set opener “Nothing But Heart” quickly subsided. These flashes are enough to show how intensely Low’s hidden fires burn.On “Drugs”, Sparhawk sang “I was a child, I was on fire, I stayed alive while all else died”. The fundamental tension at the heart of Low is a battle between intensity and their self-defined Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s two songs into Port of Morrow, the Shins’ first album since 2007’s Wincing the Night Away (and the band’s first to be distributed by a major label, Columbia) and it hits me that what I’m hearing isn’t something I’ve heard before. Sure, the track - “Simple Song” - started streaming on the band’s website back in January with accompanying fanfare, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. It’s more that those first two songs sound like a continuation, and a surprising one at that.When you’ve had any level of investment in a band at all, news of a full-on line-up change never goes over well. While Read more ...
joe.muggs
A mea culpa from me: I never gave Sbtrkt's records the attention they deserved. I always thought they were a capitulation, a softening of the radical developments of the post grime and dubstep generation with more traditional musicality and indie affectations to reach out to a more generalist, NME reading audience... and in a way they are – but, I came to realise, that's not a bad thing, and certainly not cynically done.Having listened to last year's self-titled debut album more thoroughly, it became clear that there is a distinct and often deliciously absorbing character to Aaron Jerome's Read more ...