The Mighty Roars are so frenzied that cliché rarely catches up. Posturing, posing and manicuration all goes out of the window in the name of a visceral spirit that grips you by the head and feeds you rhythm via a shovel. From the opening Sellotape to the closing Whipped My Bitch you're ra...
So often music is associated with where it comes from. Thus you get a Liverpudlian beat scene, Oasis and Happy Mondays forever associated with the Manchester sound, and certain periods of Bowie's,...
It's not fair to conflate art with its artist, or to assume that writers are always talking about themselves. As "Dumb Luck" opens Dntel's latest, with Jimmy Tamborello singing solo ...
No longer can Arctic Monkeys be considered underdogs; given the notoriously fickle English music scene, perhaps that means they should be. Last year, the Sheffield quartet's Whatever They Say I Am...
Say what you like, but a name like Shitdisco (pronounced 'Shhhdisco', presumably for radio types), quite apart from making you laugh, immediately arouses curiosity in the band and their music....
For all his nihilistic tantrums, Trent Reznor always wanted to be loved by as many people as possible. After the multi-platinum bloodletting The Downward Spiral exploded in 1994, the depressive frontm...
Whenever I am told that an album sounds 'like nothing you have ever heard before' (unqualified acclaim or veiled criticism?), I am aware of its power to make me call my sanity into question. T...
The one-time protégés of Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley return with 23, their seventh studio album and second on 4AD. The label's influence is easy to hear and the more ethereal m...
Music's impetus is much more complicated within a commercial framework than a traditional folk one, but one of its original functions-- to convey a heritage across time-- remains intact. The best ...
In an interview last autumn, Jeremy Greenspan recalled how the Junior Boys were originally built to appeal to the particular tastes of a good friend. The band's initial jumpstart, he said, came fr...