Demob Happy

Radio transmission 7/10 TV on the Radio aren’t as an immediate band to get into as some reviews might have you believe. I loved their first EP Young Liars but found their debut LP ‘Desperate Youth Blood Thirsty Babes‘ wearyingly oppressive and turgid and two-starred it in an unpopular Amazon review. I have given Return [...]

tvontheradio - wolflikeme [ 4:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Boy school 4/10 Nicholas Hytner’s film version of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys makes little attempt to furnish the play with much cinematic technique and serves only the rather meagre purpose of bringing it to a wider audience. Having Hytner – himself a theatre director by trade – direct this screen version of the play [...]

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Modest achievement 7/10 Modest Mouse don’t seem to attract the same admiration on this side of the Atlantic as they do in the indie press in the States, where they are mentioned in the same breath as the Flaming Lips and Arcade Fire. It seems they enjoy something of a cult status and a reputation [...]

Modest Mouse - The View [ 4:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The Autumnal Crush 7/10 Is electronica dead? Its certainly quite easy to trace the influences of Chris Clark’s Body Riddle. There are the tape-damaged keyboards patented by Boards of Canada; the rough jazzy breaks and dusty sampling of early DJ Shadow, whose influence over electronica has been understated; and the sped-up glockenspiels popularised by Kieren [...]

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Four-story tower of Babel 7/10 Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film follows in the footsteps of his previous works Amores Perros and, significantly, 21 Grams. It mirrors the latter film’s fundamental contrivance by interweaving several seemingly disparate stories operating on different timescales and, in this film, time zones. This is becoming almost a clichéd mini-genre in [...]

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The cutting edge of the knife? 7/10 Silent Shout finds The Knife trading in the industrial strength synths of Kraftwerk and sonorous clubland basslines that belie their origins in dance music rather than electronica. Some of the descriptions of the music on this album would have you thinking they might sound like Icelandic electronica stalwarts [...]

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Gnarly debut 7/10 Much of the reviews for St Elsewhere evaulate all the tracks in relation to its mindblowing single ‘Crazy’. While it is probably pertinent to mention that there are no other tracks that reach the sublime level of that song, it may also pertinent to say that Crazy is one of the best [...]

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“Hot Chip will break your legs, snap off your head” 8/10 Genre-bending Hot Chip have not only released some of the singles of the year but one of its best albums. As with Gorillaz and Gnarls Barkley recently, mid-way into the ‘noughties’ we are starting to see some real wit and invention in pop music [...]

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“The more you try to erase me, the more that I appear” 9/10 Thom Yorke’s Eraser is best viewed as a tangential companion piece to Kid A, in my mind Radiohead’s best album. It was that record’s Morning Bell that best married Thom Yorke’s bare, unprocessed vocals with electronic soundscaping and instrumentation. Those dissatisified with [...]

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