Demob Happy

Beak>- Beak> 6.5/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Subterranean bass throbs, some cod-ghostly wailing and vaguely arabesque improvisations on a rusty sounding organ … ’Backwell’ is the opener of the self-titled debut album by Beak>, a new band including Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. With its slighty nauseating retro synths fanning out mechanically over chugging [...]

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Album Review: Crystal Antlers – Tentacles 7/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Among the many acts hyped in 2008 there was a proliferation of new bands called Crystal something. Crystal Castles, Crystal Stilts and Cystal Antlers all came out of the leftfield to get blog love last year. Having been totally confused [...]

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High and mighty 6.5/10 FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Chicago post-rockers Pit er Pat’s latest for Thrill Jockey was largely recorded live in the studio, with raw production embellished by an arsenal of exotic instruments including a bobo balaphone (!), Burmese temple gong and a vibraslap – to cite a few favourites [...]

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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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Hail Radiohead! 8/10 It can take a few years to properly appraise an album by a band as great as Radiohead. It is important to shake off the initial impressions – distorted as they are by the weight of expectation – and allow the album time to grow on you. A band that has so [...]

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Race In to Battles 8/10 Call them Math Rock, Postrock, call them whatever, Battles are a progressive act in the truest sense of the word. Whereas aforementioned genres can conjure images of po-faced musical purism, Battles’ sound is approached with a maximilist, more-is-more attitude. There are shades of Tortoise’s jazz-rock leanings here, ooioo’s tribal freak-outs, [...]

Battles - Leyendecker [ 2:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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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 [...]

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