Introducing… Penguin Prison

Penguin Prison

Penguin Prison is New Yorker Chris Glover. He was first introduced to the world by influential boutique label Neon Gold who specialise in pop music. Bloggers gobble up Neon Gold’s blog posts and spit them out on their own sites perhaps partly due to laziness but mostly because the music they put out is just so good. Success stories include Marina and the Diamonds and Ellie Goulding who occupied the top spots on the BBC’s Sound of 2010 list showing how their influence had infiltrated the mainstream. … Continue Reading

The Stones… as you’ve never seen them before

From the beaches of Newport in Australia, there’s a new type of crooning cool that’s bound to grace the airwaves this season. Yet however fresh the offerings are, Angus and Julia Stone present a variation on a theme, that of an incredibly talented brother-sister musical team that brings its diverse stylistic strengths to the stage, working together to create hauntingly melodic pieces with effective acoustic compositions and minimalistic arrangements. Julia’s style has a distinctly fractured feel, one that draws listeners in and takes them for an enchanting ride; Angus, on the other hand, encourages one and all to kick back and let the waves of his by-the-beach drawl wash over them.

They didn’t initially realise that they were on to such a good thing though. Prior to their first collaboration in 2006, they each performed as solo artists and mainly doing so at open mike nights at beachside bars throughout the Sydney region. Following their first fruitful collaboration (the EP Chocolates and Cigarettes), they were launched on the Australian festival circuit, with performances most notably at The Great Escape Festival in Sydney and Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay, both two key Australian music events in terms of festival tickets sales and annual attendance figures.

A trip to London, a collaboration with UK band Travis, their first Australian national tour – and the rest is history. Subsequent years have seen the duo’s second EP, Heart Full of Wine, wide acclaim for the single “Paper Aeroplane” and the release of their debut album A Book Like This. Apart from other solo concerts and festival appearances where tickets have been hard to come by (including sold-out Scala shows in London), the group has furthermore supported Martha Wainwright, The Magic Numbers, Brett Dennen, Newton Faulkner and David Gray in various venues across Australia, the UK and Europe, and the United States.

So would Angus and Julia Stone be the type of music for you? If you’re into hauntingly beautiful creations that seem so fragile they could break at a touch, yet with an ephemeral delicacy that somehow endures time after time – then it would certainly be worth giving the Stone siblings a listen and permit yourself to be transported into their world for any amount of live or recorded time from the impressive duo.

Classic album: David Bowie’s Lodger

Bowie's Lodger

By 1977, the collaboration between David Bowie and Brian Eno was running out of steam, which is fair enough when the last two years had each produced a genuine masterpiece of ambition and invention. Their final work together, Lodger, a more blurred musical vision than either of the previous two, is seen to represent the duo veering away from each others musical trajectories. After it, Bowie would lunge again at the mainstream, at first cautiously with Scary Monsters, and then without abandon with Let’s Dance. Eno, on the other hand, was busy hitching his wagon to David Byrne’s jerky star, making albums every bit as experimental and impressive as Low and Heroes.

Lodger is indeed noticeably distinct from the duo’s previous efforts. The first track hints at it – an epic ballad, ‘Fantastic Voyage’, is driven entirely by a piano and Bowie’s beautiful vocal, crooning a lyric which has a clear narrative of Cold War-era paranoia (it even contains a clear threat, that Bowie would ‘never sing anything nice again’ if bombs were dropped. The Cold War ended a mere ten years after this song – coincidence?). Its coherence and traditionalism would not have got anywhere near the preceding albums. Nor would the three chart-friendly singles, ‘DJ’, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, and ‘Look Back in Anger’, all placed next to each other in the centre of the album for ease of picking. And following these, there are simply more songs  – no more long ambient tracks of harsh, isolated piano stabs. There are in fact no instrumentals on this album, and without Adrian Belew’s coruscating guitar continually turning songs on their head with layers of noise, it would be Bowie’s most accessible album for some years.

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Obituary: Rowland S. Howard

Influential Australian guitarist and songwriter Rowland S. Howard has lost his battle with liver cancer, dying at the age of 50 in the Austin Hospital, Melbourne.

Perhaps most famous as a member of The Birthday Party, Howard was involved in numerous musical projects, from his tenure with The Boys Next Door through to a latent solo career. His guitar playing was often at the forefront and an inspiration to many. … Continue Reading

Tip for 2010: Summer Camp

With a name as difficult to search for as 2009’s Girls, and the fact that we’re entirely unsure who exactly they/he/she is/are, perhaps-Swedish-and-now-living-in-London x-piece Summer Camp have done an incredible job of getting me to play their songs on repeat for days on end at the tail of 2009. That the photo on the left is one of a select few on their MySpace and seems to embody the notion of girls at a Swedish ’70s/’80s crossover summer camp so darn well is just part of the fun. … Continue Reading

Tip for 2010: Sleigh Bells

Sleigh Bells

So I found this amazing new band. They’re called Sleigh Bells, which is pretty seasonal, and they’re just incredible. … Continue Reading

Reviewface #4 with Cymbals Eat Guitars

Cymbals Eat Guitars

And so our hot, new, overly-innovative series continues! This week, we’ve employed one of our favourite bands of 2009, Cymbals Eat Guitars, to review the week’s singles releases. We’ve caught them on camera (as filmed by the ever-talented Tim Boddy) reviewing ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’ by Scottish amazings Frightened Rabbit, ‘Little Secrets’ by ball-squeeze-at-the-disco’ers Passion Pit and ‘Russian Roulette’ by seems-to-be-2009’s-Aaliyah, Rihanna. And without even a prompt, they invent an impromptu (and very un-Muso’s Guide) rating system quantified in peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

If you’ve been following this series, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been picking our very favourite bands to take part, and it’s a great honour to have Cymbals Eat Guitars in with us this week. Their debut album Why There Are Mountains wraps wild experimentation around a core of bombastic indie rock, and is certainly in my personal favourites of the year. Album-opener ‘… And The Hazy Sea’ is the finest opening track I’ve heard all year, drawing me all the way into Cymbals Eat Guitars’ passages of crashing guitars, noisy brass and quietly shimmering jangle. The mastery comes in the way they combine these sounds so fluently without ever sounding awkward, brash or ungrounded; very rarely has a debut album sounded so intense and bouncy at the same time. … Continue Reading

Muso’s Guide Introduces… We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists

We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists

Allow us to introduce to you Swedish favourites We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists. They’re situated in Gothenburg but have come there via Manchester – and you can certainly hear the fuzzy grey skies in their music. Here they are…

Muso’s Guide: How are you being received in Gothenburg? Do you find yourselves sticking out like a sore thumb in their love for indiepop/Balearic beats?

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Muso’s Guide introduces… Magpie Wedding

Magpie Wedding - image by Sonia Piedad Marinangeli

Well, to be honest, they introduce themselves. Like all good folk should!

We’re an indie folk quartet from Bologna who play enough instruments to supply a small orchestra. I sing, play guitar and accordion, and Magpie Wedding is my first ever band. It started in May 2007 with fellow songwriter Paolo (guitars, piano). I’d been writing songs for a few months having failed to find interesting songwriters to play with. My idea was to find folks to sing and play the guitar parts, then go back to playing accordion accompaniments, which was far more fun.

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Listen, Do You Want To Know A Secret? – thirteen under-appreciated Beatles songs

The Beatles

The coverage and discussion of The Beatles‘ re-issues this September carried with it the associated feeling that it marks the death of the CD-age in the same way the band helped to usher it in. Coupled with the sense that there’s very little that can be written about the greatest and most popular music of the 20th Century in the 21st, we decided to shine a light on a few of the Fab Four’s fabbest moments that don’t typically find their way onto compilations.

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