Demob Happy

10 year milesone for classic psych rock album 9/10 Mercury Rev’s 1998 album was undoubtably a turning point, a massively influencial re-envisioning of the pop-rock form that inspired countless imitators. Marginally pre-dating The Flaming Lips’ equally stunning The Soft Bulletin by about one year, in my view Deserter’s Songs began a protracted period of American [...]

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Intoxicating Man 9/10 Serge Gainsbourg is criminally underrated outside France. Listening to this comprehensive best of compilation it is evident that there was more to him than the sleazy Gallic rogue that is stereotypically presented in the media. By contrast, ‘Initials SG‘ reveals Gainsbourg to be a restless sonic innovator. While his lackadaisical, half-spoken vocal [...]

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Timeless classic 9/10 Nixon was the record that got me into alt-country, even if it was the Lambchop album that saw the band off on a tangent too far for some fans of the scene. A highly unlikely marriage of Curtis Mayfield-type soul and pedal-steel country twang, it is an album of authentic and timeless [...]

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The Darjeeling feeling 5/10 Wes Anderson’s offbeat style of filmmaking is definitely an acquired taste. Highly stylised – his saturated use of colour borders on the psychedelic – but with seemingly improvised dialogue, it is always hard to know how seriously to take his films. The Darjeeling Ltd epitomises this, combining the kind of tongue-in-cheek [...]

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Fantastic!!! Nick Cave!!! Album!!! 8/10 Nick Cave’s fourteenth album finds him trading in the gothic romanticism of his previous work for a swampy, sleazy garage-rock-influenced sound. Taking some of its cues from Cave’s recent ‘Grinderman‘ side project and some of the wild border country atmospherics of his soundtrack work with Bad Seed Warren Ellis, Dig!!! [...]

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The best summation of Murakami’s talents? 8/10 ‘Dance Dance Dance‘ is probably the ideal place for any Murakami novice to start as it is a compelling summation of the author’s singular moods and preoccupations. It combines some of the themes of grief, loss and memory of novels like ‘Norweigan Wood‘, but less oppressively so, and [...]

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Me and my new Merz albun 7/10 Merz’s singular vocals – pitched somewhere between Bob Dylan and Horace Andy (to my ears anyway) – first surfaced in 1999 with his eponymous debut album and a couple of memorable singles that got a lot of airplay on Radio One and the likes. A mix of (sometimes [...]

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