James Holden - DJ-Kicks: Review

The ever reliable DJ-Kicks series is a small bastion of hope for the compilation album. The abundance of music available online and the ability to drag and drop files into playlists may make the mix CD seem redundant, but there’s still value to be had in a well-constructed set that has been expertly chosen and seamlessly blended together. The esteem in which the series is held shouldn’t be underestimated either. With past sets from Carl Craig, Four Tet and Hot Chip to consider, not to mention an excellent upcoming mix by Kode9, producer, DJ and remixer to the stars James Holden was practically forced to up his game to maintain the impeccable standard of the series.

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Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today: Review

There’s a passage in Bill Drummond’s The 17 where he recalls traveling to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s, ostensibly to oversee the work of a hair metal band in his capacity as an A&R man for WEA. While trying to find the group in a labyrinthian studio complex, Drummond stumbled across a bloated Stevie Nicks, who was dancing eyes-closed to one of her own songs, lost to herself and the world. There are many styles covered on this, the first album by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti since signing to 4AD, but that glassy Fleetwood Mac production, which flourished on Rumours, gloriously saturated their sound on Tusk, and continued to be an obsession for Lindsey Buckingham on later hits such as ‘Big Love’, is glazed all over Before Today.

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Thee Oh Sees - Warm Slime: Review

Occasionally a band will rend open a prodigious black hole, an all-consuming void that sucks in their sound and spits it out with such righteous fury that it’s in danger of making the rest of their music redundant. It takes some nerve to push an act of such grand folly out into the world, especially when it tugs so many ideas to logical extremes, implicitly drawing a line under them in the process. Fortunately, former Coachwhips frontman John Dwyer appears to have been born into one of the Faraday cages built by scientist Michael Faraday in the 1800s to make machinery impervious to electromagnetic radiation. In short, he’s built Thee Oh Sees into a Teflon coated vessel that spews out countless records at a furious clip and plays live with such intensity that it feels like the band members have noticed the Doomsday Clock is about to strike midnight.

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Kelis - Flesh Tone: Review

Is there a more frustrating figure in the contemporary R&B scene than Kelis? She’s released a clutch of killer songs, including ‘Caught Out There’, ‘Milkshake’, ‘Bossy’, and arguably ‘Acapella’ from this, her fifth studio album to date. By now, Kelis should be a globe-straddling pop superstar, and while she has enjoyed a decent amount of hits (albeit, all of them eclipsed by the nova-like ‘Milkshake’), there’s always something missing from the finished product, something that stops her from blazing into the rarefied territory occupied by the biggest stars. She’s a singer who pioneered a slightly off-kilter brand of R&B infused pop, both in image and sound, but has been thoroughly eclipsed by people (Lady Gaga, Rihanna) who have enjoyed huge mainstream success with work that is clearly indebted to the space Kelis was mapping out for herself in the early Noughties.

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Javelin - No Más: Review

That pounding of hooves you can hear is the sound of impatient music fans charging toward their computers, demanding to hear new artists approximately 0.333 seconds after their names have floated out into the blogosphere. Take Javelin, for example. George Langford and Tom van Buskirk are two crate digging cousins from New York, who swiftly released an entire album of demos titled Jamz n Jemz in 2009 after their name bubbled to the surface. Now, less than a year later, we get their proper full-length debut, No Más, which includes many reworked versions of the Jamz n Jemz tracks. It’s almost as though someone sent back No Más in 2009 and told Javelin we needed to see how they sketched out the diagrammatical workings of the album before it was released.

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Sleigh Bells Interview

Sometimes the hype machine accelerates out of all control. Take Brooklyn based two-piece Sleigh Bells, for example. Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss formed the band with a love of pop structure, hip-hop oriented grooves and a heavily overdriven guitar sound in mind, all topped off with the ballsiest female vocals you’ll hear this side of a Bikini Kill record. The band was suddenly ubiquitous after a few CMJ shows in 2009, with blogs, print media and fellow musicians striving to be affiliated with the group—all achieved without Sleigh Bells actually releasing a record.

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Sweet Apple - Love & Desperation: Review

Sweet Apple’s Love & Desperation promises much. Firstly, there’s the fact that it’s the debut collaboration between J. Mascis, Dave Sweetapple from retro metalheads Witch, and Tim Parnin and John Petkovic from glitzy punk band Cobra Verde. Then there’s that album cover, which appears to be an attempt to recreate Roxy Music’s Country Life sleeve with a couple of Suicide Girls. Throw in the touching story of Petkovic writing much of this material while overcoming the death of his mother, add the excellent leaked first single ‘Do You Remember’, and it appears we’re onto a winner. Right?

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