Author: jerobear
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Enter Shikari: The Mindsweep
Enter Shikari largely passed us by: we’d seen the massive queues of devoted fans outside the Academy but their in-yer-face ADHD take on dance rock was too much for us; it’s for kids to go mental to in the moshpit. This changed with their last album A Flash Flood Of Colour, where they tackled global…
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The High Dials: In The AM Wilds
Like Trophy Scars (see elsewhere), The High Dials are hard to review, because the album is so meaty: you need lots of listens to appreciate it. The High Dials are more poppy than the post-hardcore lot but both would score 9/10 if we did such things; The High Dials is one of those albums that’s…
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Trophy Scars: Holy Vacants
When you load this into iTunes the genre is given as “punk”, which is a bit like saying Gilbert and George draw. The album is about (wait for it) a conspiracy theory surrounding the Nephilitic gene. The album revolves around the tale of two lovers who discover not only that the blood of angels contains…
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The Best of Cerrone Productions
There’s a number of cheesy disco hits we always lump together, nowhere near as cool as Donna Summer’s I Fee Love but classics in their own right, such as Space’s Magic Fly and Cerrone’s Supernature, both 1977. (That year is more likely to be remembered for punk, yet I Feel Love was probably even more…
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John Butler Trio: Tin Shed Tales
This came out a couple of years ago (who says we’re not on the ball?) but we only came across it recently. We’re making you aware of its existence in case you caught JBT’s 2014 album Flesh and Blood. This double CD is an acoustic collection of his tunes played live and we should make…
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DeStijl: Something Wicked This Way Comes
The backstory to this band is (sadly) slightly more interesting than the CD. Pascal DeStijl is a musician and artist from France, who now lives in Manchester and Montpellier. He works for magazines, musicians and commercial companies, producing edgy designs. The band was formed in France in 1995 by DeStijl and John Cleary, bassist. Subsequent…
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Christmas Joy In Full Measure: Various
This was obviously planned some months ago, but we got it too late for Christmas. Bad planning, someone. Still you can buy it now for next year. The backstory is that record label Hand Of Glory records asked 12 artists for an original Christmas song. Presumably they left the remit wide open, because the songs…
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Linos Ensemble: Kalkbrenner: Sextet, Septet and Piano Fantasy
This is a charming CD, featuring the word of Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849). As with many of the CDs we like, his name may not be familiar to most music lovers; in his day he was said to be the foremost pianist in Europe and (according to Wikipedia) became enormously rich because he had a sound…
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