Category: Dance
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The Ramona Flowers: Part Time Spies
This album is an odd mix of cool electronic dance and 80s synth pop: one minute it sounds like a tune from Rob da Bank on the radio (or think Delphic), the next a Duran Duran B side. Opener Dirty World is not bad, despite having an intro that melds Kim Wilde’s Kids in America…
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Smokey Joe and the Kid: Running To The Moon
Well, we might have gotten us right here our most played album of the year. Yessir. It makes you talk like this because it drops in bits of dialogue from top movies and is a bit 1920s. The opening track has lines from O Brother, Where Art Thou?: “You work for the railroad, Grampa? I…
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Skinny Lister: The Devil, The Heart, The Fight
Londoners Skinny Lister beat the listener into smiling submission; it’s impossible not to find something to like or a toe to tap on this raucous and lively album. The sound: imagine if Frank Turner played punk sea shanties. They’ve got the same earthy folk sound as Turner but with added concertina and tin whistle. The…
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Bat For Lashes: The Bride
This remarkable album follows the story of a woman whose fiancé is killed in a crash on the way to the church for their wedding (complete with Leader Of The Pack-style sound effects). The bride goes ahead with the honeymoon on her own and the album reflects on meditation on love, loss, grief, and…
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Various: Beating Heart Malawi
This is a hard album to review: it’s for a good cause but the quality is varied. African music goes down well in the Review Corner, the rootsier the better (ideally one player on a two-string guitar and another with krakebs) so this looked promising: traditional music from the International Library of African Music remixed…
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Air: Twenty Years
There must be people who love Air (and we did play Pocket Symphony a lot when it came out) but they’re one of those bands we never think of, then enjoy when we do hear them. You can guess what this double CD is all about, and the surprising thing is how many tunes are…
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Metronomy: Summer 08
Metronomy’s Joe Mount’s new album recalls when his band first made it big, summer 2008. We think we first saw him the year before, at the 2007 edition of Latitude; after hearing the music floating about a bit, we suddenly realised what he was trying to do with his quirky, out-of-kilter electronic pop. Since the…
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Selah Sue: Reason
Belgium produces some great music: we bought a stack of quality indie CDs (Boy And the Echo Choir, Nox) from a shop in Brussels (near the weeing nipper, if you’re over). Rock band Triggerfinger are from Lier, and we had to buy tickets to see the Rolling Stones to catch them live in Hyde Park.…
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New Order: Complete Music
Music Complete came out last year and was New Order’s first full studio release since 2005’s Waiting For The Siren’s Call, and their first without Hooky. It saw them dump the more dominant guitars for a fairer balance of electronics and guitars. Gillian Gilbert returned. We thought it was their best record for ages, a…
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Highasakite: Camp Echo
If you’re going to name your album after a camp in Guantanamo Bay and then call yourself Highasakite, you’d best not be offering a stoner’s view of American politics. “It’s bad stuff, man.” Happily, Highasakite’s Ingrid Helene Håvik says Camp Echo is “more a state of mind”, and we know what state that is: chilling…
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