Author: jerobear
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Kill Your Friends OST
November and tells the story of a music industry exec during Brit Pop’s heyday. Steven Stelfox is a horrendous individual by the sound of it, manipulative, off his head and cheating and stealing: “lies, betrayal murder: just another day in the music industry” as the sleeve says. This is music “inspired by” the film so…
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Bingham String Quartet: Bridge/Scott Piano Quintets
Frank Bridge (1879–1941) was an English composer, violist and conductor, while Cheshire-born Cyril Scott (1879–1970) was a composer, writer, and poet. Bridge was a pacifist and Bridge friends with a Christian Scientist, later becoming interested in metaphysics, and spending many of his latter years living with a clairvoyant. Both the compositions on here — Bridge’s…
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They Might Be Giants: Why?
If TMBG had been alive a few hundred years ago, they’d have been Europe’s most famous court jesters. They write catchy tunes with the cleverest lyrics you ever stumbled across. The problem is that once you’ve heard a song once or twice, it’s played out. The lyrics are the thing, and when you’ve smirked a…
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Stephanie Kirkham: Tiny Spark
We’re highly impressed with this album, though its slickness might put people off: it makes Mumford and Sons sound like a grim underground black metal band. In a nutshell, she’s written the soundtrack to a rom-com (not starring Jennifer Aniston — it would be really good) with songs that are often jauntier than the Andrex…
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Fictonian: (Desire Lines)
We often wander the webbershpere, checking out other reviews, and we’ve never read such twaddle as was being written about this. We must have read half a dozen meandering reviews by people with nothing to say. It’s possibly the audience he’s aiming at though: his Press release talks about spending time in a Fictonian reality…
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Them: Complete Them 1964-1967
Stealing their name from now long-forgotten London band, Shorty and Them (“Nobody’s going to hear of us London” figured young Ivan Morrison), Them are the band with which Van the Man first made his name, though not much cash (“It was a weird situation to be famous and broke — it’s one thing being broke…
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Johnny Cash: Man In Black Live in Denmark
The highlight of this CD is possibly not the Man In Black himself but a tune that later featured in Quentin Tarantino’s best film. This CD (it was originally part of a DVD) was recorded in 1971 for Danish television, which explains the self-censoring line “son of a bleep” at the end of Boy Named…
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Thus Owls: Black Matter
We often wondered about why experimental / arty band Liars kept going but now we know — it was to inspire others with their creepy (and often unlistenable) electronic experimentation. Black Owls take the scary experimentation of Liars and make it more palatable, though this is still unsettling music in places. Thus Owls are…
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Kagoule: Urth
This isn’t what we were expecting, which was some kind of organic indie: Kagoule are far more ambitious than that and this is an impressive debut. Despite being from Nottingham, Kagoule’s heads are over in the US, their sound being that underground rock the Americans do so well, somewhere between Californians Incubus and Billy Corgan’s…
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Percy Grainger: Music for Saxophones
This isn’t what you might expect from Grainger, at least if you only know Percy for his jaunty arrangements of sea shanties that are played at the Last Night of the Proms. There’s a little bit of said jauntiness towards the end but mostly the sound reflects Grainger’s fondness for folk songs and early music.…
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