Kathryn Williams – Presents… The Pond

Kathryn Williams - Presents... The Pond

By Tom Bolton

Kathryn Williams is best known for carefully crafted song writing and a clear, beautiful singing voice.  Although floating around the edges of the folk scene, she is really more of a descendant of Joni Mitchell.  She is no political songwriter though, and her style kills with a smile, a soft edge marking out her best work and placing her a cut above a long list of others with a voice and a guitar but no distinguishing marks.  Her sound is close to that of the late lamented Kirstie MacColl, so it makes perfect sense that she has released an album with Neil MacColl, Kirstie’s brother. … Continue Reading

El-P – Cancer For Cure

El-P - Cancer For Cure

By Ben Dufton

Former Company Flow man El-P’s third/fourth (my research is inconclusive – do people include El Producto’s jazz album High Water in his general back catalogue?) studio album Cancer For Cure comes five years after its predecessor, the much vaunted I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead.

In the intervening years, a few things have changed – for one, El-P put his label Def Jux “on hiatus”, removing the previous platform for such releases and necessitating the move to Fat Possum Records.  Some things, however, have not changed. … Continue Reading

Saint Etienne – Words And Music By Saint Etienne

St Etienne - Words And Music By St Etienne

By Greg Salter

Saint Etienne understand pop music. They know that all the clichés about pop music are essentially true – that it soundtracks the most important, pivotal moments in your life, that hearing a particular song or melody can immediately take you back in time to those moments so that they never really leave you, and even become a part of who you are. In a way, Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs didn’t need to make an album like Words And Music By Saint Etienne for us to know this – the band began (even before Cracknell joined full-time) by fusing post-acid house dance elements with ‘60s and ‘70s pop and ‘80s synths and have, over 20 years, created albums that sound like patchwork, subversive, unrelentingly melodic histories of popular music. … Continue Reading

MV + EE – Space Homestead

MV + EE - Space Homestead

By Kenny McMurtrie

Oof! Rather like when you miss a downward step and have cause to make an involuntary noise upon reconnecting with terra firma, so un-met expectations can also force an audible reaction. Having very much enjoyed 2009’s Drone Trailer from these guys I was therefore left on the couch making something approaching said noise right from the off with this new release, Space Homestead (MV + EE‘s 32nd album since 2001 apparently). … Continue Reading

Smoke Fairies – Blood Speaks

Smoke Fairies - Blood Speaks

By Kenny McMurtrie

A solid and weightier release from the girls of Smoke Fairies this time and ‘Three Of Us’ is a fantastic track, with its swooning vocals and simple but effective guitar solos. Whilst the video for that song looks to have been filmed by the sea either in East Anglia or along the south coast, it is the flat, near featureless landscapes passed through by train in a few sequences within it that the album as a whole seems to identify with. A sense of being in between one thing ending and another beginning pervades the work viz the line “There’s a version of the future hanging close above my head, but I can’t get to it” in track number nine, ‘Version Of The Future’. … Continue Reading

One Little Plane – Into The Trees

One Little Plane - Into The Trees

By Richard Wink

Kathryn Bint has a voice that you can only fall in love with – fragile, beautiful, spellbinding, perfect for earnest Department Store advertisements and the first kiss scene from a film adaptation of the latest smash hit Young-Adult Fictional Novel. Into The Trees, the enchanting singer’s second album as One Little Plane, following on from 2008’s Until, is a real gooseflesh inducing moment capturer. … Continue Reading

Here We Go Magic – A Different Ship

Here We Go Magic - A Different Ship

By Matt Churchill

An incongruously industrial introduction to A Different Ship leads into an intimate folk track, singing about how it’s ‘Hard To Be Close’, with a gentle vocal positioning itself near enough to your ears to make it seem, in fact, quite easy. Building from an upbeat acoustic guitar accompaniment, the backdrop to this track gradually layers up to a plush landscape, continuing to grow in stature right to the end of the song. This broad sound then snaps us into a claustrophobic shuffle with ‘Make Up Your Mind’. Whilst the gentle build up of the album opener does take you away from the simple opening, it does not prepare you for this that would fill an intelligent dancefloor. Probably the most immediate track on Here We Go Magic‘s new album, with hushed, clipped lyrics and an enticing lilt of a chorus, it only disappoints when it ends without an ending. … Continue Reading

Simian Mobile Disco – Unpatterns

Simian Mobile Disco - Unpatterns

By Kenny McMurtrie

Album number four from Simian Mobile Disco and the duo have taken their feet off the pedals and decided to freewheel on this one it seems. Nary a decent hook throughout its length. Instead they’ve leant heavily towards the third word in their name and come up with a set of mid-paced background music which wouldn’t induce you to even tap your feet. So it’ll probably go down a storm live in a tent in a field when you’re off your face. Sans drugs, however, it’s all rather boring. … Continue Reading

Richard Hawley – Standing At The Sky’s Edge

Richard Hawley - Standing At The Sky's Edge

By Joe Bates

Hype can work in mysterious ways. More of a system in which all acts can exist than a force that lifts up certain artists, even the shiniest ‘undiscovered gem’ is not immune to it. Not that long ago, it was Elbow who benefited from not being hyped or over-exposed. ‘Elbow are doing this sort of thing but ten times better’, was the reaction when a particular Coldplay or Snow Patrol song became bafflingly ubiquitous, ‘so why is no one buying their records?’ When enough people began to voice variations of this, suddenly Elbow got massive. … Continue Reading

Beach House – Bloom

Beach House - Bloom

By Russell Warfield

2010’s Teen Dream was a colossal leap forward from what we’d previously heard from Beach House. Preserving the dream-like quality of their lauded nostalgia-laced ruminations, the duo refined their processes, tightened their structures and sharpened their melodies in comparison to the looser mood-piece feel of 2008’s (equally excellent in its own way) Devotion – a move which paid off to excellent effect. Hearing Teen Dream for the first time was enrapturing; a catalogue of quiet revelations – Legrand’s hooks hitting straight between the eyes with a previously unheard confidence, bolstered by a newfound clarity within the shimmering arrangements. Bloom, on the other hand, marks the first plateau in Beach House’s trajectory – not necessarily conceding a quasi-objective drop in quality, but undoubtedly signalling a stasis in their evolution; an album which sounds cut from exactly the same cloth as its predecessor. … Continue Reading