You’re always on safe ground with Helen Habershon, who writes music for people to enjoy, and not expend any energy “getting into”. This new album is lovely, the title perhaps giving a clue as to the gentle nature of the music. Her approachable sound is obviously onto something: this is...
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Published on: 07-12-2022
To be critical of this is a bit like taking a Doc Marten to a kitten; it just seems wrong. The Kut is Princess Maha, a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and PhD (positive schizotypy related research), a double award winner in the UK Songwriting Contest, and awarded Arts Council funding to create...
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Published on: 06-12-2022
Unusual name, unpronounceable album, gloomy cover: we weren’t expecting much from this but it’s great, and it’s her debut, too. She’s a working, touring musician and the album is inspired by her experiences on the road. At heart it’s rootsy Americana but she draws in other influences. Keyboards are provided...
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Published on: 05-12-2022
This is part of the Neil Young Archives Official Bootleg series and it’s excellent. The last album we reviewed was good but mostly interesting for the now-classic songs played early in their careers, the crowd mysteriously silent as Young rolled out future bangers. This new live release conversely is genuinely...
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Published on: 03-12-2022
Sons hail from Melsele, Belgium, a country that also produced one of our favourite bands, heavy blues rockers Triggerfinger. Like Triggerfinger, Sons play high-energy music with a lot going on, except Sons are more at the punk / garage end of the sound spectrum. We suspect the marketing will be...
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Published on: 02-12-2022
Surprise Chef are from Melbourne and play funky soul with some nods to jazz. It’s the kind of music you might find in a Tarantino movie, quirky but sharp, and with a real groove. But it usually makes us think of reggae dub plates, those sparse tracks made for other...
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Published on: 30-11-2022
This excellent album is melodic, loud, fast, punky and just the right length. Musically the sound is somewhere between the better end of early punk / indie and early Foals, when math rock was still a thing. There are some nice heavy rock riffs in places, maybe not Black Sabbath...
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Published on: 29-11-2022
This Belgian pop punk band channel NOFX a little (and only a little), from the sound to the jokery with nomenclature – Charlie Bit My Finger is a famous internet video (child bites another) – while Back and Fourth is their third album. The sound is solid, mosh-pit pleasing, sing-along...
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Published on: 28-11-2022
This is a nice EP, like really nice. Almost too saccharine, but not quite. It’s just about Americana / pop as opposed to folk, although Richy boy has a delicate voice and is often to be found on acoustic guitar; he adds other effects and harmonies to move away from...
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Published on: 27-11-2022
Young is churning out his archives at a prodigious rate, some of which are excellent, others for the completist only, as they say. This one is great and if you’ve got a Neil Young fan in the fam, this is one gift you don’t have to worry about for Christmas....
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Published on: 26-11-2022
Flevans is a multi-instrumentalist, DJ and, according to his Bandcamp, with an “accessible style” that straddles funk, breaks, soul and electronica. That really saves writing any review, because that’s about what it is. Still, we get paid by the word so … It’s a really good album, nudging in as...
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Published on: 25-11-2022
Percy are excellent. They’re billed as post-punk, but they’re merely old school punks, in the sense that they don’t really care about conventions and have a good sense of melody. Don’t expected Damned-style sonic assaults (which were, speak it softly, always a bit rubbish) or more modern punk with punch-in-the-face...
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Published on: 02-11-2022
We played this a couple of times before anyone hit the nail on the head, and that was (inadvertently) a grumpy chum, repeating the complaint of the elderly that old music is better, but like a stopped clock occasionally correct, specifically, of Radio Two: “Every song was a reminder of...
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Published on: 01-11-2022
We’re back in the 80s with this; it’s very much of the era when Madonna was big, and so we get walking basslines, Latin percussion, funk, soul and people blowing whistles, the music simply for dancing and not categorising. If you’re a fan of soul / disco from back then,...
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Published on: 31-10-2022
Bonus tracks can be a bit annoying, a classic album ruined by the bolting-on of outtakes and demos you don’t really care about – but not in this case, the bonus tracks adding gravitas to what might be seen as purely a pop/dance album. The Communards formed in 1985 after...
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Published on: 30-10-2022
We liked Luke Sital-Singh’s early material but found his last album a disappointment, something that in turn was itself disappointing, as he can be good. He said thank you on Twitter for the poor review, and we’re assuming he was not merely being sarcastic but had a wake-up call, and...
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Published on: 29-10-2022
The title is the most interesting thing about this largely forgettable new album from The Kooks. It’s surprising that they’re still going; most of the bands of their ilk (landfill indie being that ilk, the term coming from the fact that people joked that most albums would end up as...
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Published on: 28-10-2022
This album is so good we forgot to review it; we played it and played and got to know it so well we thought we’d written about, but we never did. It is, as one might expect, really good. Mary James is basically a country singer, leading on her banjo,...
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Published on: 27-10-2022
The works on this album range over 30 years of composing for Clarke. The sleeve notes say that Clarke was 15 when she joined the Lindsay Singers, a female-voice choir in Dublin and sang during her time as student in University College Dublin and her PhD studies at Queen’s University...
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Published on: 26-10-2022
Muse are one of the world’s best live bands but their albums leave us a little unmoved; they all sound like Muse. Whatever the varying degrees of theatricality, campness or volume it’s still just Muse. Feel free to disagree. We know that sounds a bit like the Labour activist who...
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Published on: 25-10-2022
