Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
Album Review: Magik Markers - Balf Quarry
7/10

Magik Markers are the noise rock duo hailing from Hartford, Connecticut, comprising two core members in Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan. ‘Balf Quarry’ is their first album on Drag City having previously released material on - among others - the Ecstatic Peace [...]

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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 by the similarity [...]

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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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Kentucky fried pysch-country
8.5/10
Over four albums My Morning Jacket have fashioned a sound that embraces widescreen emotionalism with rootsy Americana, pyschedelia and alt-country. ‘Z‘ sees My Morning Jacket broaden their influences while retaining the unifying use of reverb that makes all the songs sound unmistakably them now matter how far they stray from the [...]

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The best of the baddest
9/10
I am no Nick Cave afficianado but it seems the man is making a real come-back into the critical consciousness with his most recent album, ‘Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!‘. Of course, critical trends mean almost nothing, and if this excellent compliation tells us anything, it’s that Cave has been writing strange and [...]

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‘Something to Look Forward to’
8/10
Anyone who got into Spoon’s later albums, ‘Gimme Fiction‘ and ‘Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga‘, will certainly not want to miss out on 2002’s ‘Kill the Moonlight‘. Spoon are a hard band to categorise, at once both willfully experimental and with plenty of crossover appeal. They make lean, concise alt-rock-pop (if [...]

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“… now you see it’s sucking you in!”
8/10
I found James Murphy’s first album a complete turn-off: the studied cool, the nods and winks to oblique musical references, the ‘tongue-in-cheek’ lyrics. LCD Soundsystem has even been described as dance-punk nostalgia for music journalists. The in-jokery and general calculated irony seemed like cold artifice, dispassionate. The Sound [...]

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