Demob Happy

Breezy brilliance from casual genius 8/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Arthur Russell’s ‘Love Is Overtaking Me‘ compiles previously unreleased material from the critically regarded but somehow commercially overlooked artist’s archive. Ranging from Dylanesque folk, country and angular art pop from the 1970s through his final home recordings before death in 1991, [...]

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Enter planet dust 8.5/10 ‘Carried to Dust‘ is Calexico’s most mature work to date, arguably the best synthesis of their frontier atmospherics and Latin-inflected country songwriting. The follow-up to 2005′s much-dismissed ‘Garden Ruin’, ‘Carried to Dust’ makes the ‘South-Western noir’ tag stick better than any other Calexico album. It’s a record of great dusky beauty, [...]

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My new My Morning Jacket? 7/10 I have been sitting on this review for a couple of months now, at a loss on what to say or how to start. Honestly I think that might be because I don’t like this album as much as I wanted to, that it hasn’t stirred the same inspiration [...]

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The Empire strikes black 8.5/10 Micah P Hinson’s fourth album – the first I’ve heard since his powerful debut ‘Micah P Hinson and the Gospel of Progress‘ – is an accomplished work and the sound of a prolific artist heading for an artistic peak. Produced by alt-rock mixing guru John Congleton, renowned for the dark [...]

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Dawn choruses 8.5/10 The first thing you notice when listening to ‘At Dawn‘ if, like me, you’ve approached their back catalogue, er, backwards, is how faithful it is to a kind of alt-country orthodoxy when compared to the more magpie-like tendencies of ‘It Still Moves‘ and ‘Z‘. Arguably it is more a consistency of mood [...]

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Too long but It Still Moves me 8.5/10 The Louisville, Kentucky band’s third full-length is a whopping 75-minute set recorded in a grain silo and positively swimming in reverb. By eschewing modern recording techniques altogether they were taking a big risk on ‘It Still Moves‘, their first for a major label, but is with the [...]

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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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A good winter, forever after 8/10 It would be easy to dismiss the history behind the recording of For Emma, Forever Ago as mere press release hype. Yes, Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver) recorded this album recovering from some deep personal disappointments in an isolated log cabin over one bitter Wisconsin winter – but what [...]

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Intoxicating Man 9/10 Serge Gainsbourg is criminally underrated outside France. Listening to this comprehensive best of compilation it is evident that there was more to him than the sleazy Gallic rogue that is stereotypically presented in the media. By contrast, ‘Initials SG‘ reveals Gainsbourg to be a restless sonic innovator. While his lackadaisical, half-spoken vocal [...]

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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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