The Douglas Firs - The Furious Sound
By Kenny McMurtrie
The Furious Sound is album number two from the Edinburgh-based group The Douglas Firs and straight from the off you’ll realise the title’s a misnomer. Debut Happy As A Windless Flag hardly assaulted the eardrums like Slayer in their heyday when released last year but these 13 new tracks would barely register on one of those decibel reader thingys. … Continue Reading
Trapped Mice - Winter Sun
By Kenny McMurtrie
The debut album from the Edinburgh quintet shares a fair amount musically with the likes of Glasgow contemporaries Admiral Fallow, both in terms of the sounds produced and, vaguely, style. On Winter Sun, however, Trapped Mice, manage to plumb greater emotional depths as well as harnessing vocal abilities akin to those of both Nick Cave and Miles Hunt (circa ‘Welcome To The Cheap Seats’). … Continue Reading
John Cale - Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood
By Hayley Scott
It’s been forty-seven years since John Cale co-founded The Velvet Underground; forty seven years on and fifteen solo albums later, Cale has tried it all. It’s quite admirable, then, that Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood shows no jaded signs of apathy and is just as adventurous and diverse as all of his previous endeavours.
That’s not to say that this album is without its faults, however. As with any experimentalist, there’s always going to be room for failed attempts, and Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood has a seemingly trial-and-error approach. This is an album that is testimony to Cale’s avant-garde tendencies, and stays true to his adventurous ethos that was so pivotal in the spirit of the Velvet Underground; but it is also probably one of his most miscellaneous to date, with all 12 tracks being audacious trials in largely mismatched genres. … Continue Reading
Egyptian Hip Hop - Good Don't Sleep
By Richard Wink
“What you listening to, Richard?”
Egyptian Hip Hop, I reply. The band, not hip hop from North Africa.
I swear, these Mancunians have deliberately given themselves a name which puts the listener of their music in an awkward position. How do you describe what or indeed who Egyptian Hip Hop sounds like? … Continue Reading
Peter Dolving - Thieves and Liars
By Kenny McMurtrie
Having never thought much of Mary Beats Jane as a band name, I’ve never previously had a much experience of Peter Dolving’s work with that outfit or more recently with The Haunted. This new solo album, which at times sounds like quite a throwback to late eighties/early nineties industrial, featuring as it does elements of the sounds of Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke, is probably not, though, indicative of the styles he began his singing career performing. … Continue Reading
Patrick Wolf - Sundark and Riverlight
By Paul Faller
When it comes to the appropriate time to release a ‘best-of’ album, most artists would seem happy to simply collect their singles and other popular tracks, tack on a couple of new songs, and call it a day. However, as anyone who’s paid attention to Patrick Wolf at any point in the past ten years could tell you, he’s not ‘most artists’. So instead, we get Sundark And Riverlight – a two-disc collection of newly recorded acoustic re-workings of tracks from throughout his career. As such, it’s only natural to to cast our minds back to the original recordings and contrast them with these new versions. … Continue Reading
The Jim Jones Revue - The Savage Heart
By Matt Jones
The great Skip James once said “The peak season is extended, basically”. In a clichéd search for an inspirational quote from a blues legend to introduce The Jim Jones Revue’s latest album, this is the best I could find. It is not actually a quote from the great blues musician Nehemiah Curtis ‘Skip’ James, but from Captain Skip James, great only for his expert fishing advice and skipping along on the reputation of an (arguably) greater man. The Savage Heart similarly takes explicit influence from the blues, but unlike the Captain, The Jim Jones Revue have their own, more powerful engine, and are “exploring new musical and lyrical territory” with it. It is a new turn for these established rock and rollers, but fortunately, “The peak season is extended, basically” (sort of works…right?). … Continue Reading
Daphni - Jiaolong
By Jim Merrett
Daphni isn’t a girl. Then again, it also isn’t a boy in the ‘A Boy Named Sue’ sense, either. It’s the alter ego of Daniel Snaith, the brains (he has a PhD in mathematics, but if you heard this you could guess that) behind recent Radiohead-support act Caribou (also once known as Manitoba, but that’s a whole other story). And while Snaith is very obviously a man, this is him getting in touch with his feminine side, of sorts. Or slipping into something more comfortable, at least. … Continue Reading
This Many Boyfriends - This Many Boyfriends
By Kenny McMurtrie
Having never been that much of a fan of The Pastels (despite Stephen Pastel running a tight ship in the music department at the sorely missed Hillhead branch of John Smith’s bookstores), there was a good chance myself and This Many Boyfriends wouldn’t get on in person seeing as track six on this enjoyably energetic debut album of theirs is called ‘I Don’t Like You (Cos You Don’t Like The Pastels)’. Best to get these things out in the open early on. … Continue Reading
Moon Duo - Circles
By Kenny McMurtrie
Having caught up quickly with Moon Duo’s previous output earlier on this year (and finding it more appealing overall than ‘parent’ group Wooden Shjips’ work) it was with great satisfaction that I learned there wasn’t long to wait for new material by the twosome.
Preceded by the release of the video for opener ‘Sleepwalker’, wherein King Khan oversees an exercise class you’d not see Eric Prydz dead at, this time around there seems to be some disco creeping into the space-rock template on Circles. The underlying drone is still very present but the urge to groove about the place supplants the more usual one of just head bobbing. … Continue Reading
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