Demob Happy

An exact science 8.5/10 In ‘Dear Science’ TV On The Radio have finally delivered on the early promise of their EP ‘Young Liars’ with the dazzling art-rock album they’ve long threatened but somehow neglected to deliver. Although ‘Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes‘ and ‘Return To Cookie Mountain‘ had some great individual songs, overall I found [...]

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Second poor album in a row for once-great psych rockers 6.5/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT ‘Snowflake Midnight‘ is a departure from previous Mercury Rev records in that it is almost entirely dominated by electronics and glacial synths. A digital wonderland as sonically rich as Flaming Lips’ ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots‘, [...]

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One day in Buneos Aires 6.5/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Juana Molina is a former Argentine television actress with an unlikely passion for making a kind of cut and paste folk-tinged electronica (look, I managed to do that without saying ‘folktronica’). Molina’s latest album for Domino comprises eight lengthy, carefully assembled [...]

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Quite interesting, incidentally … 6/10 I have been a keen advoate of all things Damon Albarn post-Graham Coxon (i.e., Blur’s ‘Think Tank‘ and beyond) so was understandably quite excited by the album release of ‘Monkey, Journey to the West‘. I had not seen the Chinese opera-spectacular which this album scores but I didn’t let that [...]

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Beach boys in a blender! 8/10 I’m probably the last blogger alive to post a review of Panda Bear’s 2007 indie favourite ‘Person Pitch‘ so I’ll try to keep this relatively brief. It featured on the end of year lists of many music magazines and blogs and having resisted it for over a year I [...]

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Better the devil you know 8/10 If ‘Neon Golden‘ was The Notwist in a state of evolution, leaving their hardcore punk roots behind in favour of post-rock flavoured indie-pop and electronica, ‘You, The Devil + Me‘ is the sound of a band who have found their, er, sound. ‘You, The Devil + Me‘ may lack [...]

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Third time unlucky? 7/10 Almost every review of Portishead’s ‘Third‘ opens with a summary account of trip hop, with mentions of coffee tables and dinner parties. Musical snobbery conspires to dictate who listens to music and how it is listened to. The fact that ‘Dummy‘ became universally successful or featured in the soundtrack for This [...]

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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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Geek chic 7/10 If like I did you heard ‘Coming On Strong‘ after their second, break-through album ‘The Warning‘, you might be wondering where the big tunes are. There is nothing as stand-out here as 2006′s stunning double-wammy of singles ‘Boy From School’ and ‘Over and Over’. Nevertheless, ‘Coming on Strong‘ sets the template for [...]

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Melody days from the artist formerly known as Manitoba 8/10 It took me a long time to get over how mediocre Caribou’s last album ‘The Milk of Human Kindness‘ was. After the psychedelic onslaught of ‘Up in Flames‘ (recorded under previous moniker ‘Manitoba’), his sophomore record was an exercise in plodding 60s-infused futility. I tried [...]

Irene - Caribou [ 3:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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