Demob Happy

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, with Hebden given [...]

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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 [...]

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Timeless classic
9/10
Nixon was the record that got me into alt-country, even if it was the Lambchop album that saw the band off on a tangent too far for some fans of the scene. A highly unlikely marriage of Curtis Mayfield-type soul and pedal-steel country twang, it is an album of authentic and timeless ambience [...]

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Oceans of Venus
7/10
Dengue Fever are a group of eclectic LA hipsters fronted by a bona fide Cambodian pop star (Chhom Nimol), who make a heady brew informed by retro spy-movie soundtracks, psychedelia, lounge jazz and rock and roll. Apparently influenced by organist Ethan Holtzman’s trips to Cambodia in 1997 when a unique local 60s-era rock [...]

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Spaghetti westerns and pulp fiction
6/10
Calexico’s second album is a sprawling, doom-laden and cinematic work that draws heavily on latin jazz, mariachi, country and gypsy folk. Typically rich in the kind of malevolent desert imagery and border country narratives that suggest the novels of Cormac McCarthy, ‘Black Light‘ explores territory that is more fully realised in [...]

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Feast of fun
9/10
Calexico’s sound inhabits the frontier badlands of the American Southwest, a cinematic multi-instumental brew that takes in jazz, alt-country, Mariachi, folk and electronics. It’s a widescreen affair, a mixture of traditional rootsy Americana (’Quattro’) and brooding instrumental mood pieces (’Pepita’, ‘Across The Wire’) that evoke rust and dust choked border towns. Dubbed ‘desert-rock’ [...]

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Beguiling second album
8/10
Not being familar with her first solo effort or previous (pre-Broken Social Scene) encarnations in the Canadian punk scene and beyond, it was something of a surprise to come across this album. Such is the massive (frequently brilliant) overloading of Broken Social Scene’s musical pallette that Feist’s vocals are often buried quite deep [...]

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Music for scary documentaries
6/10
Dan Berridge’s third album proper is perhaps his most accomplished but also his least appealing. Whereas his debut ‘Compassion’ raised the bar for sample-based music with its haunted torch songs crafted from forgotten (and not-so-forgotten) vinyl, follow-up ‘The Vessel’ took a largely-unsuccessful gamble with a male vocal lead. The return to the [...]

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