Demob Happy

“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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Shock waves 7/10 Minotaur Shock’s second full-length will surely raise his reputation to the level of some of his more overrated peers, namely Four Tet and Manitoba, both of whom seem to have been unjustly hogging the electronica limelight for the last couple of years. ‘Maritime’ take a naval theme as its core imagery but [...]

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Modest mouse 6/10 Mouse on Mars, as the name suggests, often lean towards the cartoonish, anarchic end of electronica, with a tendency to push the envelope of effects and production rather than seek out more emotive content. A lot has been made of the use of vocals on this record but this is hardly something [...]

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