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’ [...]

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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) [...]

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FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT French windows 4/10 In 1994 a law was introduced in France by then culture minister Jacques Toubon protecting the French language. One of the outcomes of this globalisation-resisting move was that two out of five songs on French radio must be sung in la langue maternelle . [...]

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Ghost in the machine 8/10 All the acrimony surrounding the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, in which Wilco left Warner/Reprise to resist attempts to make the record more commericially viable, seems bizarre now. For despite its moments of sonic chaos, YHF is a great, Beatles-esque, countryfied pop masterpiece with great hooks and immediately indentifiable melodies. [...]

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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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‘Just Like Heaven’ 9/10 While some of The Cure faithful may feel aggrieved by the absence – ‘A Forest’ notwithstanding – of tracks from their gloomiest period (Faith, Seventeen Seconds, Pornography), the more casual listener will find much to enjoy here. Having had a big Cure phase in my teens, I might quibble that the [...]

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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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