Demob Happy

His lady story 8/10 Antony is an entirely singular voice, and if you aren’t the type who likes to have their expectations challenged then this isn’t the record for you. Somewhere between soul music and tortured folk, Antony is a troubled troubador to rank with the greatest. An androgynous cabaret singer and pianist, he sings [...]

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The best? 7/10 I am not a massive Talking Heads fan, but I love ‘Remain in Light’ and got this Best-of as well to sample all of their other albums at once. However, I am suspicious that this is not a truely representative selection because the three songs from ‘Remain in Light’ have been so [...]

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Try a little tenderness! 7/10 Now stripped to the core duo of singer Trish Keenan and multi-instrumentalist / programmer James Cargill, Broadcast’s thrid album places a greater emphasis on song-writing and lyricism, and less on sonic experiment. Whereas ‘Ha Ha Sound’ was a sprawling epic of icy lullabye and often abrasive rythmic and textural abstraction, [...]

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Scandinavian Dark Star 6/10 Much has been made of the atmospherics and wintery mood on this album but for me this was a dissapointment. The marriage of classical music and electronica is always an uneasy one – countless clinical, po-faced concept records have been made in this mould. What is missing from many of the [...]

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Superconnected 7/10 Broken Social Scene are a very unusual band. A huge cast of musicians participate on this record in a democratic process that leaves the producers with a lot of work to do, trying to make sense of what can often sound like two or three songs playing at the same time. The result, [...]

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Featherweight 5/10 This was a massive dissapointment to me. I took a gamble on this after buying (and loving) ooioo’s album from 2000, ‘Gold and Green’, which was only released in the UK in 2005. Oddly, that older album is far superior to this in every way. Of course, ‘Gold and Green’ has its moments [...]

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The Winter Hit Hard 7/10 I got into Hood through their most recent record, Outside Closer, which I still consider to be the better of the two. This is their more celebrated record, although its follow-up has clearly the stronger selection of songs in my opinion. This is a bleak, uncompromising album. Hood have mastered [...]

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