Demob Happy

Frequently enjoyed album 8/10 The term ‘slowcore’ doesn’t really do justice to this album, conjuring as it does images of painfully protracted, po-faced minimalist post-rock. ‘Frequently Asked Questions‘ is nothing of the sort. I bought this album on a whim on its release in 2001 and still find myself playing it periodically six years later. [...]

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No sex please, we’re British 7/10 Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach‘ is conspicuous in its brevity. It has the air of a quickly written novella, an act of catharsis to exorcise some thematic threads between novels. Sadly one is left with a feeling that more could have been made of this scenario and the characters, [...]

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Excellent mini-album 7/10 Iron & Wine and Calexico have collaborated well on this fine EP, which pits Samuel Beam’s alt-country credentials against the latter band’s widescreen musicianship. It is an easy match, since Beam’s soft, sometimes melancholic vocals are not dissimilar to that of Calexico’s Joey Burns. Whereas Iron & Wine is a solitary lo-fi [...]

Iron & Wine / Calexico - He Lays in the Reins [ 3:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Feast of fun 9/10 Calexico’s sound inhabits the frontier badlands of the American Southwest, a cinematic multi-instumental brew that takes in jazz, alt-country, Mariachi, folk and electronics. It’s a widescreen affair, a mixture of traditional rootsy Americana (‘Quattro’) and brooding instrumental mood pieces (‘Pepita’, ‘Across The Wire’) that evoke rust and dust choked border towns. [...]

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5 x 2 = excellent film soundtrack 8/10 While ‘Cinq Fois Deux‘ the movie concentrates on a failed marriage, deconstructed in reverse chronology, the soundtrack is a more romantic proposition. As I have no frame of reference for this type of music – classic Italian crooners from the 1960s and 1970s – I can’t really [...]

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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” 8/10 Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is a masterpiece of suspense told cunningly from the confines of its unnamed narrator. This voice, sometimes so implausibly naive, enables the mystery to filter through to the reader in a narrative rich in atmosphere and tension. Du Maurier uses this [...]

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The Inheritance of literary success 6/10 When Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Booker Prize, the head judge praised “the strength of the book’s humanity”, adding that her mother Anita “will be proud of her”. The fact that Anita Desai was also a Booker shortlisted author who never scooped the big prize, [...]

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Are you an excellent steel horse? 8/10 Despite the recurrance of robot horses as a thematic conceit running through ‘Are We Not Horses‘ it would be easy to overplay its significance. Putting aside some of the more obtuse lyrics, what we are left with is an album of extraordinary originality and atmosphere. There is a [...]

Rock Plaza Central - We've Got a Lot to Be Glad For [ 3:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Ghost Of You Lingers 7/10 Although ‘Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga’ finds Spoon moving further away from their punk beginnings and broadening their sonic pallet, it is arguably their most accessible record yet. While ‘The Ghost of You Lingers’ registers one of their most experimental album tracks so far, a masterpiece of lo-fi minimalism (further [...]

Spoon - Finer Feelings [ 4:55 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Indian passages 7/10 E.M Forster’s classic novel is a savage critique of English colonial attitudes towards the Indian ‘subject race’ during the British Raj. Having then visited India with his friend Syed Masood – whom this book’s principle character is said to be loosely based on – Forster was well-equipped to expose the hypocrasy and [...]

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