Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

8.5/10
Perennial critics’ favourites Yo La Tengo return with an album that reigns in some of the magpie tendencies of 2006’s sprawling ‘I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass’ with a more focused set. ‘Popular Songs’ - their twelfth [...]

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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) certainly must have [...]

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Scandinavian Dark Star
6/10
Much has been made of the atmospherics and wintery mood on this album but for me this was a dissapointment. The marriage of classical music and electronica is always an uneasy one - countless clinical, po-faced concept records have been made in this mould. What is missing from many of the reviews about [...]

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The Winter Hit Hard
7/10
I got into Hood through their most recent record, Outside Closer, which I still consider to be the better of the two. This is their more celebrated record, although its follow-up has clearly the stronger selection of songs in my opinion. This is a bleak, uncompromising album. Hood have mastered the sound [...]

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Not enough Notwist
6/10
13 and God is a seemingly unlikely collaboration between indietronic Munich crew The Notwist and avant-rappers Themselves of the Anticom label. However, if you are expecting to tune into the bittersweet glitch-pop of Notwist’s ‘Neon Golden’ you will be severely dissappointed. If you are familiar with the dense, cerebral mutterings of Doseone et [...]

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