Altar Eagle – Mechanical Gardens

Altar Eagle - Mechanical Gardens

Mechanical Gardens is the latest release from husband and wife Brad Rose and Eden Hemming’s Altar Eagle. It’s a soft lit romp between warm, fuzzy synthesisers and glassy techno bathed in the saturation of a super 8 camera. It could be the soundtrack to some hazy evening lost to the corner of an ATP chalet, or a dusty field filled with summer time, hangovers and the peaceful slow motion of an over heated, relaxed mind.

Considering his other projects (The North Sea, ajilvsga, Alligator Crystal Moth) Rose isn’t the first name you would naturally associate with soft focussed alt-pop but Mechanical Gardens is a triumph of rich, flowing electronic dream pop that offers ease of access into its nine crumbling, colour-bled tracks without resorting to gimmickry or forfeiting its calm, ethereal qualities to po-faced demands for melody. … Continue Reading

Ten Kens – For Posterity

Ten Kens - For Posterity

Following a couple of personnel changes within their ranks the Toronto noiseniks Ten Kens locked themselves away from the world for a number of months to gestate this, For Posterity, their second album, and boy does it sound like it. Loud is definitely the word of the hour here whilst the sense of the frustration born of too much time in each others’ company is palpable throughout, so clearly they fed off the self-imposed studio confinement. … Continue Reading

Fan Death – Womb Of Dreams

Fan Death - Womb Of Dreams

We’ve all been there – wondered if Dave Grohl has died again this week and ended up three hours later stuck in a never-ending carousel of Wikipedia entries. Criticised for its lack of accuracy (although for reliability, the BBC has it only a gnat’s chuff off the Encyclopedia Britannica – but then, I found that factoid from Wikipedia itself), as “free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual, encyclopedia projects” go (again, lifted from Wikipedia’s entry on itself, which is already some fucked up feedback loop), when it comes to binging on pointless information, it’s a pretty cool resource to have. … Continue Reading

PVT – Church With No Magic

PVT - Church With No Magic

While being robbed of their vowels by similarly-named Yank band Pivot would present something of an issue on Countdown, it seems to have proved a blessing in disguise for Aussie electro three-piece PVT. Not only does their new handle sound more like a physics equation, sitting comfortably with their bleepy maths rock output, they’ve used it as an opportunity to start over. And from the title onwards, this is an exercise in spiritual rebirth.

Beyond the name, the most obvious new development is that they have literally found their voice on Church With No Magic. Rather than applying vocal noises as just another layer of instrumentation, the songs are increasingly shaped around frontman Richard Pike’s actual singing, and his talent is such that you wonder why he didn’t pipe up earlier. … Continue Reading

Dylan Leblanc – Paupers Field

Dylan Leblanc - Paupers Field

What Paupers Field does so beautifully is show that true anguish is weary and unhurried; heartbreaking in its resignation. Born-in-the-90s Dylan Leblanc, and indeed the album itself, are preceded by an impressively dramatic bio: dropping out of school to hang out with musicians, the murder of his grandfather, and his own drinking and depression all vie for pole position in his list of influences.  As he sings on the opening track, “Are you feeling alright? Are you feeling low?”, you can’t help wonder who he’s talking to – us or himself. … Continue Reading

Magic Kids – Memphis

Magic Kids - Memphis

I don’t know whether it’s jealousy mixed with sheer admiration but I’m always quite wary of good music made by kids and at the same time incredibly envious of their youthful optimism and wide eyed innocence, as yet uncorrupted by the fickle music world. A great example of one of those bands is Magic Kids, a young band from Memphis who are attracting huge online attention for their sunny update of the ’60s California pop/Beach Boys sound despite only having had a few songs hit the blogosphere over the past year or so. That’s all it takes these days though and it has secured them a signing with True Panther Sounds and a debut album, Memphis. … Continue Reading

Women – Public Strain

Women - Public Strain

Most bands create albums from the small to the large, using songs as component parts to build their long players, often without knowing how these constructs will turn out. Some bands, however, see the bigger picture from the outset. They know what they want to build and they know how each component must be shaped in a particular way to fit their blueprint. Women fall into this latter group and Public Strain, as silly as it sounds, is an album for album lovers.

Taken individually, each song offers only glimpses of what Public Strain is all about. There are a couple of highlights which may show off the album’s qualities better than other tracks but Women haven’t crafted this as an album to dip into briefly now and again – its intent is to wholly envelop you, seeping into your pores gradually like having a long soak in the bath. Each song flows into and compliments the previous one, and throughout the entirety of the album’s run time there is neither a single miss-step nor one second of filler. … Continue Reading

Everything Everything – Man Alive

Everything Everything - Man Alive

Here is a conversational exchange (done via The Email) between our Albums Editor Greg Salter and our Overlord-of-sorts Natalie Shaw, about the sparkly-fresh new album Man Alive by hot young things Everything Everything. It’s because we couldn’t contain our excitement in the space of a conventional one-person-to-a-reader format, so needed to gather heads and take a metaphorical trip to the sweet shop and back home via magic carpet. … Continue Reading

The Whiskey Priest – Wave And Cloud

The Whiskey Priest - Wave And Cloud

The Whiskey Priest is in fact Seth Austin, a singer songwriter with an impressive beard and a country outlook who makes his music in Austin, the San Francisco of Texas. As well as the beard, he has a fine moniker, culled from Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (although the ‘e’ he adds to ‘whiskey’ brings in curious Irish overtones). His first album, begun in a church attic on a four-track, arrives weighed down by a high risk press release from record label, Rainboot.  It declares, “It’s probably fairly unusual that a record label can, with any real level of honesty at least, suggest that they’re about to release a truly ‘classic’ album – one that could actually affect its audience to the point where it deserves the tag ‘life-changing’ – but we have that record.” Support for your artists is laudable, but probably only Blood on the Tracks, Here Come the Warm Jets and Kimono My House could live up to a billing like that. Rainboot sets Wave and Cloud up to be sinus-clearingly, mind-warpingly good.  And although it’s not so bad, it falls some way short of the standards unhelpfully set by excitable marketing types. … Continue Reading

Klaxons – Surfing The Void

Klaxons - Surfing The Void

If you can remember as far back as the summer of 2006, you might recall that Klaxons, for a few months at least, seemed like the biggest band in the country. Hyped beyond their wildest dreams and supposedly poised to deliver us into a “new rave” era (which was really just guitar bands with one guitar replaced by a synth) the band re-released the singles that got them big along with a load of filler and rushed it out as their debut album Myths Of The Near Future. It won the 2007 Mercury prize and then they disappeared. … Continue Reading