indie
Kieron Tyler
Spencer Krug must have problems knowing the name he should adopt. Over the past six years, he’s played with his main band, Wolf Parade, recorded as or with Fifths of Seven, Frog Eyes, Moonface, Sunset Rubdown and Swan Lake. Organ Music not Vibraphone Music Like I’d Hoped is his second release as Moonface, a guise he now reserves for his entirely solo work. Organ Music... is quirky, but worth hearing.
Wolf Parade (nothing to do with Wolf Gang) are often driving, anthemic indie rockers on a line between Animal Collective and Krug’s fellow Montréal dwellers Arcade Fire. Moonface, though, follows Read more ...
Russ Coffey
They’ve called the tour "The Hits - Stripped Back". But they weren’t all hits. More importantly, they weren’t merely stripped back either. They’d evolved. The band’s ability to write quality anthemic indie rock is undeniable. But so is the fact that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish them from a slew of other bands with awkward names and characterful voices, like Feeder or Embrace. Or Elbow. And Elbow have stolen the market share. So where does this leave Athlete? It leaves them taking a step back from the pop game, and getting excited about the sonic possibilities of making music together. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The nominations for the 2011 Barclaycard Mercury Music Prize were announced earlier today. Beyond PJ Harvey and Elbow having won before, nothing wildly surprising cropped up.Here they are:
Adele: 21Anna Calvi: Anna CalviJames Blake: James BlakeElbow: Build a Rocket Boys!Everything Everything: Man AliveGhostpoet: Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy JamPJ Harvey: Let England ShakeKaty B: On a MissionKing Creosote & Jon Hopkins: Diamond MineMetronomy: The English RivieraGwilym Simcock: Good Days at Schloss ElmauTinie Tempah: Disc-Overy
The prize will be announced on 6 September
Kieron Tyler
The French national holiday of 14 July might be marked by parades and fly-pasts in Paris, but here on the Atlantic coast it’s the central date for Francofolies, the annual festival dedicated to French music. La Rochelle hosted its first Francofolies in 1985. Twenty-six years on, the festival remains the premier showcase for Francophone music. This year the bill took in David Guetta’s dance-floor cheesiness, Gotan Project's overhauled tango, actress Mélanie Laurent plugging her recent album and all points in between. A window like no other on the French mainstream, it also showcases up-and- Read more ...
howard.male
Several of my favourite tracks of 2010 were on Tradi-Mods vs Rockers. This was a musically audacious project in which a bunch of Western pop and rock musicians dared to unpick the intricate fabric of some Congolese bands who were already making some definitively funky music of their own. The question that arose while I was reacquainting myself with this double CD yesterday, was how were these mostly cut'n'paste studio confections - made in the absence of the musicians that inspired them - going to be recreated live with the involvement of those very same musicians?I expected it would be a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s not so much cultural differences that have hindered Death Cab for Cutie’s UK profile, it’s more the difficulty of making a name when “there just couldn’t be less scandal surrounding the band”. Or so guitarist Chris Walla feels. In the States their beautiful, emotionally muted music goes platinum and is featured in huge shows like the OC. But just as US audiences were hard to persuade of the charms of Pulp or Suede, so Death Cab’s strangely moving introspection has been here, by and large, niche. You’d never have known it, though, from the legions of fashionably dressed devotees at the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French interpreters Nouvelle Vague have a seemingly unsustainable path. Reinterpreting Anglo songs of the post-punk and new wave eras in unlikely semi-easy-listening settings (bossa nova, reggae, country and bluegrass) would appear to bring diminishing returns. But on their last album, 2009’s 3, they went gently Gallic, covering “Ça plane pour moi”, originally by Belgium’s Plastic Bertrand. Fourth time out, it’s all Francophone.Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux’s first three Nouvelle Vague albums mainly featured lesser-known female Franco singers (notably Camille and Mélanie Pain – some original Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Montréal natives The Arcade Fire sing in English. Yet 65 percent of the Québec city’s population have French as their first language. Les FrancoFolies de Montréal is Francophone Canada’s annual celebration of non-Anglo Saxon music. This year, big draws include French visitors Jeanne Moreau and Etienne Daho performing Jean Genet’s Le condamné à mort with musical accompaniment. Local legend Jean-Pierre Ferland is reprising his seminal 1970 set Jaune, the first Québec album to - controversially - fuse Franco sensibilities with rock dynamics. More than a festival, FrancoFolies is also cultural Read more ...
david.cheal
Well, he’s certainly moved on from his log cabin. It’s three years since Justin Vernon’s group, Bon Iver, released For Emma, Forever Ago, the quietly powerful indie-folk album recorded during a bitter winter in his father’s remote Vermont cabin – an album that became almost as famous for the story behind it as it did for its actual music. Now Bon Iver’s palette has been broadened to incorporate instruments such as synths and a glossier, more layered approach to sound; the result is an album that’s sonically rich but seldom really engaging.Part of the problem lies in the fact that Vernon Read more ...
paul.mcgee
A potent combination of growling electronics, sub-bass frequencies and expressive vocals seems to have moved back to the centre of the UK's pop landscape in recent months, whether via the likes of James Blake, Magnetic Man or even the unlikely sound of Britney Spears appropriating dubstep signifiers on her new record. All of which makes the arrival in the UK of Canadian duo Bonjay seem very timely indeed.Having met at a Toronto club night in 2006, vocalist Alanna Stuart and producer/instrumentalist Ian Swain (aka DJ Pho) acquired a kind of inadvertent cult status through a succession of Read more ...
joe.muggs
They started as a band of hyper-accomplished musicians aiming to play fiddly electronica in a guitar-band format and thereby creating a rather witty new kind of progressive rock. Now, minus key member Tyondai Braxton but plus a few leftfield star guests, Battles are playing a neat line in chugging heavy metal calypso techno dub punk pop. No, the notion of genre in the 21st century doesn't get any easier, does it? But preposterous definitions aside, a lot of this record boogies along with a surprising amount of fun given its makers' conspicuous virtuosity and the hodge-podge of influences Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Music folklore has it that this band from Seattle changed their name from Pineapple back in the hazy days before their debut album went platinum because frontman Robin Pecknold thought Fleet Foxes sounded like a weird, outmoded English sport - a bit like fox hunting. Seeing them live at a teeming Hammersmith Apollo last night, the sense of something anachronistically older, somehow simpler and just a touch esoteric that their name suggests seems wonderfully appropriate. After all, the band’s success rides on their mellifluous Sixties sound. Every note they play feels familiar, like Read more ...