Demob Happy

“Will it just be like they’re dreaming?”
9/10
It’s definitely a funny time of year to be reviewing what could likely be the best album of 2009, especially one with such sunshine-drenched atmospherics, but Animal Collective may just have rescued us from the seasonally adjusted black hole that is January. Subject to pre-release hype not seen since, [...]

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Beach boys in a blender!
8/10
I’m probably the last blogger alive to post a review of Panda Bear’s 2007 indie favourite ‘Person Pitch‘ so I’ll try to keep this relatively brief. It featured on the end of year lists of many music magazines and blogs and having resisted it for over a year [...]

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Jackson Toth waves his Wooden Wand goodbye?
8/10
FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT:
Previously leader of the New York-based experimental jazz-folk collective Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, James Jackson Toth’s solo debut is a lush take on alt-country informed by blues, soul and, occasionally, punk. Whereas Wooden Hand … was very much an avant-garde [...]

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Cut and paste psych pop
8/10
If you like all or some of the following artists you might like The Ruby Suns’ Sea Lion: Caribou, Animal Collective, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink, The Go! Team, Avalanches, Deserter’s Songs-era Mercury Rev, Yeasayer, El Guincho, Flaming Lips or Grizzly Bear. Made by a Californian (Ryan McPhun) relocated to New [...]

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This month I’m enjoying several tracks from The Magnetic Fields’ new album ‘Distortion’, which appears to be an unashamed homage to Jesus & The Mary Chain. Luckily, they didn’t forget to write songs to match. ‘Old Fools’ has something of Nick Cave about the vocals, which resound strikingly over the layers of feedback and reverb, [...]

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Modest achievement
7/10
Modest Mouse don’t seem to attract the same admiration on this side of the Atlantic as they do in the indie press in the States, where they are mentioned in the same breath as the Flaming Lips and Arcade Fire. It seems they enjoy something of a cult status and a reputation for drug [...]

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