Demob Happy

Album Review: Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years 8.5/10 In a recent Pitchfork review Animal Collective declared that it must be “weird to be in a band with good musicians”, referring to the fact that they basically view themselves as electronic collagists than a band in the strict (i.e., formally trained) sense. It is [...]

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Album Review: Crystal Antlers – Tentacles 7/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Among the many acts hyped in 2008 there was a proliferation of new bands called Crystal something. Crystal Castles, Crystal Stilts and Cystal Antlers all came out of the leftfield to get blog love last year. Having been totally confused [...]

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Album Review: Dark Was the Night: Red Hot Compilation – Various Artists 8/10 Most posts of Red Hot Organization’s ‘Dark Was the Night’ compilation begin with a summary dismissal of compilations in general, and particularly those in the name of charity. If such projects are as bad as people say, ‘Dark Was the Night’ – [...]

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Mr Blue Sky ! 8/10 My ongoing love affair with Wilco began at the time of Sky Blue Sky’s release, but not, oddly, with the album itself, which received fairly mixed opinions at the time. Sifting through those variable reviews I found myself tracking back to their earlier album ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot‘, for me their [...]

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“Will it just be like they’re dreaming?” 9/10 It’s definitely a funny time of year to be reviewing what could likely be the best album of 2009, especially one with such sunshine-drenched atmospherics, but Animal Collective may just have rescued us from the seasonally adjusted black hole that is January. Subject to pre-release hype not [...]

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“What will it take to make you listen?” 8.5/10 Some of my favourite albums of the last couple of years have come from a strand of impressionistic folk that roughly began with the release of Grizzly Bear’s ghostly ‘Yellow House‘ in 2006 and Iron & Wine’s kaleidoscopic ‘Shepherd’s Dog‘ a year later, gathering pace in [...]

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FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Back to the future 6/10 ‘Your Ear Knows Future’ is the sophomore effort from Baikonour – aka Brighton’s French-born Jean-Emmanuel Kreiger – a veritable one-man band whose debut ‘For the Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos‘ was a heady blend of space rock and electronica. Where that first [...]

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FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Exile on ’25th Street’ 8.5/10 ‘NYC‘ is Kieran Hebden’s (aka Four Tet) fourth collaboration with veteran jazz drummer Steve Reid and while I won’t pretend that I have heard the other three, the word in the blogosphere is that this is the most equal of their partnerships, [...]

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Gang Gang goes bang 8.5/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Long-time darlings of New York’s ultra-hip, art-conscious underground music scene, Gang Gang Dance look braced to make a wider breakthrough with their new album ‘Saint Dymphna‘, released in the UK on Warp. Like their contemporaries Out Hud, Gang Gang Dance makes a [...]

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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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