Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT White Denim – Fits 8/10 Such is the strength and depth (to borrow a football cliché) of music Stateside at the moment that I find myself with three acts on heavy rotation at the moment from Austin, Texas, alone. OK, so Spoon haven’t done anything lately but [...]

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Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle – Bill Callahan 8.5/10 Just as I thought I was tiring of the alt-country/new folk revival, along comes an album – from one of the scene’s relative old timers – of such immersive beauty that I can’t get enough of it. While there is much about Bill Callahan’s [...]

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Dirty Projectors -Bitte Orca 8/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Dirty Projectors are a band so singularly unconventional that I wondered how they had managed to gain so much popular attention – although their recent David Byre collaboration (the excellent ‘Knotty Pine’, from Red Hot’s much admired ‘Dark Was the Night‘ compilation) [...]

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Waltz With Bashir – Ari Folman Hagai Levi, creator of the Israeli TV show ‘Be’Tipul‘ – which became in turn the inspiration for the latest HBO phenomenon, ‘In Treatment’, currently championed in the UK by The Guardian – said of Israel that “one of our problems as a nation is that in our mind we [...]

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John Boyne – The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas I’m naturally suspicious of the recent glut of novels marketed as children’s literature for adults (see ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ and ‘The Life of Pi’), but this is a darker proposition. The Holocaust makes for a particularly poignant subject for John [...]

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BRAND NEU ! – Various artists 8/10 BRAND NEU! is a tribute to the influential German band (aka Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother) that brings together a respectable selection of artists inspired by the Krautrock innovators. There are one note chugging guitars and hypnotic motorik grooves aplenty in this beguiling compilation, which doesn’t suffer too [...]

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