Department of Eagles - Archive: 2003-2006: Review

The release of In Ear Park on 4AD in 2008 took Department of Eagles on a rarefied journey toward fully-formed band status after commonly being regarded as an endearing side project partially conducted by Daniel Rossen from Grizzly Bear. Naturally, every artist involved in a side project hates it being called thus, but the scattering of recordings that preceded In Ear Park never really gave any inkling that this was anything other than a couple of former college dorm mates messing around in their bedrooms for fun. Perhaps the pairing actually missed that status, because they’ve returned to their origins, ransacked various tapes, and put together this compilation of recordings from the early days of the band.

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Twin Shadow Interview

There are many fantastical stories about artists growing up in small towns in unconventional circumstances and then fulfilling their dreams by moving to the big city. George Lewis, Jr., who records as Twin Shadow, took the path to New York five years ago after being born in the Dominican Republic and spending his childhood in a small town named Venice on the west coast of Florida. His journey later included encounters with a circus, the Baptist church, stints in Berlin and Copenhagen and the pursuit of a woman.

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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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