Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT At some point over the last decade David Holmes’ brand of retro mishmashery seemed to fade from the zeitgeist despite the fact that the Northern Irish producer was reaching a wider audience (and no doubt keeping his bank manager happy) with soundtrack work. His turn to the [...]

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Conversational skills 7.5/10 Saint Etienne have occupied a particular niche in British indie, long flirting with the mainstream but never quite breaking into it, while maintaining a certain fashionable credibility. Marrying a 60s (French) pop sensibility to post-acid house dance beats, Saint Etienne were committed to the ideal of the 3-minute ‘pure pop’ song. ‘London [...]

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Third time unlucky? 7/10 Almost every review of Portishead’s ‘Third‘ opens with a summary account of trip hop, with mentions of coffee tables and dinner parties. Musical snobbery conspires to dictate who listens to music and how it is listened to. The fact that ‘Dummy‘ became universally successful or featured in the soundtrack for This [...]

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New Goldfrapp shampoo 5/10 I had high expectations for ‘Seventh Tree‘ given some of the pre-release hype suggesting – falsely it turns out – that Goldfrapp had returned to the more ethereal landscapes of their first, and best, album ‘Felt Mountain‘. There had also been alot made of Goldfrapp’s musical magpieism – a trait only [...]

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’4AM At Toumani’s’ 8/10 Damon Albarn’s Mali Music project is an overlooked album of beautiful mood and texture that barely belongs to the hideous ‘category’ of world music. This is very much a subjectivised, western account of African moods and musicianship, taken largely from muddled field recordings and mixed down in London. Mostly the range [...]

Spoons - Mali Music [ 5:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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“Drink till I’m drunk, smoke till i’m senseless” 10/10 Every generation has music that defines their era and in the mid-nineties it was the output of Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead that has the greatest resonance. Like watching ‘This Life’ these albums transport you to a specific time and place: pre-millenium, pre-9-11, pre-Blair… Although they [...]

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Feelgood by numbers 7/10 I resisted buying this album for a long time as I wrongly judged this to be a fairly unoriginal concept. In fact, on paper, it still is an unoriginal concept – a heady mash-up of 70s samples and breaks – but it is pulled off by a verve and audacity lacking [...]

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Eastern Block Electro 4/10 TBA – aka Tusia Beridze – hails from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Anullé is her second album. I bought this album on the strength of a glowing review in Uncut that compared her sound, bizarrely it seems, with the Cocteau Twins. I may be missing something, but there is [...]

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Monkey business 8.5/10 Demon Days improves massively from the Gorillaz debut with an album chock full of memorable, innovative pop, garnished with effervescent production. If anything, the cartoon imagery (or you could call it marketing) sticks less easily to this album, with moments of folksy downbeat like ‘Every Planet we Reach is Dead’ sounding like [...]

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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 [...]

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