Demob Happy

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 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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Black Cherry B-Sides at Best! 6/10 Supernature picks up where singles off Black Cherry such as ‘Train’ and ‘Strict Machine’ – in my mind that albums weaker moments – left off. I have heard Alison Goldfrapp in the press saying that they aimed to make this album more stripped down, the production simpler. This has [...]

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Eastern Block Electro 4/10 TBA – aka Tusia Beridze – hails from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Anullé is her second album. I bought this album on the strength of a glowing review in Uncut that compared her sound, bizarrely it seems, with the Cocteau Twins. I may be missing something, but there is [...]

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Monkey business 8.5/10 Demon Days improves massively from the Gorillaz debut with an album chock full of memorable, innovative pop, garnished with effervescent production. If anything, the cartoon imagery (or you could call it marketing) sticks less easily to this album, with moments of folksy downbeat like ‘Every Planet we Reach is Dead’ sounding like [...]

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Well read? 6/10 On paper this seemed a match made in heaven. Scott Herren’s masterful rythmic programming pared up with The Books’ airy collage folk seeming destined to bring out the best in both: giving the former added space and organic texture and the latter much-need structure and a bit of funk. To begin with, [...]

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Deconstructed disco 7/10 One of the main men (alongside James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy) behind DFA and former member of Six-Finger Satellite, Juan Maclean’s debut is damaged electro with a dark heart. For all its inferences to robotic disco, this is not a Daft Punk album (despite the similarity in name to that band’s latest: [...]

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