Category: Indie
-
Berries: How We Function
This excellent album is melodic, loud, fast, punky and just the right length. Musically the sound is somewhere between the better end of early punk / indie and early Foals, when math rock was still a thing. There are some nice heavy rock riffs in places, maybe not Black Sabbath but certainly a dark edge.…
-
Percy: Monorail
Percy are excellent. They’re billed as post-punk, but they’re merely old school punks, in the sense that they don’t really care about conventions and have a good sense of melody. Don’t expected Damned-style sonic assaults (which were, speak it softly, always a bit rubbish) or more modern punk with punch-in-the-face snare and kickdrum; the band…
-
Jake Rodrigues: Lucky Spoon
We played this a couple of times before anyone hit the nail on the head, and that was (inadvertently) a grumpy chum, repeating the complaint of the elderly that old music is better, but like a stopped clock occasionally correct, specifically, of Radio Two: “Every song was a reminder of how pop music was; simple…
-
Wylderness: Big Plans For A Blue World
This is a nice little album for fans of dreamy indie rock and shoegaze (mostly without the volume), with elements of folk. You could turn to Swedish post-rock band Logh (pronounced Log) as a soundalike, or then again Martin John Henry, the Scottish fella who was in De Rosa but whose The Other Half Of…
-
Kramies: Kramies
If anyone tells you there’s no good music any more, point them towards this delightful and all-too-short album from Ohio songwriter Kramies (pronounced Kraim-iss). The album opens with the gloomily majestic Days Of, which has (in the words of the Press release) a nostalgic warmth, particularly in the chorus, which would warm the heart of…
-
Death Cab for Cutie: Asphalt Meadows
We’ve been fans of Death Cab for years – and they’re one of the loudest bands you’ll see live, despite the gentle songs – and at first play-through of this new one were a bit meh. Death Cab have a sound, they’ve gradually got poppier, and this is largely a pop album of easy-on-the-ear music.…
-
We Are Scientists: Huffy
We’re ashamed to admit we’ve underestimated We Are Scientists. We liked some tracks but never really got them; possibly because 2006’s debut With Love and Squalor came out at a time when there were lots of good guitar bands, notably Arctic Monkeys (and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade) and Razorlight, as well as decent…
-
Benjamin Lazar Davis: Benjamin Lazar Davis
This is one of those perfect indie albums that you can listen to over and over and is a taste of summery sun in the depths of winter; indie in the modern sense of accomplished synth-based pop as a side-project, slick and well played, not the old indie of a DIY band bashing out a…
-
The Mono LPs: Shuffle/Play
This is a really good album ad we’d have said you should buy it even before we realised it referenced one of our favourite films, Being There. (A 1979 satire, based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski and starring Peter Sellers as Chance the gardener, a simple man who knows only about gardening and the…
Review Corner 