There are few lonelier sounds than a Neil Young solo performance. Most pictures from his solitary jaunts show him surrounded by an army of guitars or hunched over a piano, trapped in the middle of a stark spotlight. Singing in a hushed and fragile voice, it almost sounds like he's locked in a be...
Now we're at the stage where in certain bars in deepest Hoxton, mere mention of their name can cause previously upstanding members of indie-society to lose control, beating the instigator to a blo...
Air like to let you know what kind of album you're in for with the first couple of bars of their opening tracks. Moon Safari faded up with bongos on "La Femme D'Argent", setting the ...
Few things are more dangerous to good pop than a perfectly talented artist who thinks his music isn't smart enough. It's the sort of attitude that combines the most perilous ideas a musician c...
All those Bob Dylan comparisons that greeted Bright Eyes' previous albums may have prompted courteous denials from Conor Oberst, but he understood what prompted that praise. He knows we need an ar...
Sharing its title with a John Kennedy Toole novel, the Arcade Fire's second album is markedly different from its more cloistered predecessor: On Neon Bible, the band looks outward instead of inwar...
The career of Reykjavik beat combo Gus gus has been a restless one, but richly rewarding for those who've tracked them from the outset. Inevitably receiving comparisons with The Sugarcubes, the ba...
One of the more bizarre sights of recent years was that of Kaiser Chiefs opening the US leg of Live 8. Still relatively unknown over here at that point, heaven alone knows what the Americans thought o...
I must admit, friends, that I did not go into listening to Findlay Brown with an open mind. The single Come Home has appeared on a Mastercard ad, he is signed to a label that is also home to that othe...
Sing, Memory is released on the ServiceAv label that Banbury runs with former Art of Noise member, talking head and all-round art pop aristo Paul Morley, both of whom have previously worked with Nixey...