Category: Pop rock
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Weezer: Pacific Daydream
Even for us this review is tardy: the Press release is dated 1st December (2017, we’re not that useless), though it may have arrived after that date. Not that they’d mind; their work-rate is sporadic (though 12 albums in 24 years is not too bad), with main-man Rivers Cuomo enrolling at Harvard University after their…
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Steele: Paroxysm
Steel is following in a line of atmospheric singers from, well, forever: Charlotte Gainsbourg is a veteran, people like Lana Del Rey are newer. Steele is half-Swedish and half-British, and lives in Stockholm. She’s got something of that Scandi dreaminess going on in her music. She calls her music “melancholic, bittersweet and progressive” and “cinematic…
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Rebelution: Free Rein
This is reggae, but the sunny, chilled music reminds us most of Jack Johnson; music for lighting a fire on the beach after a hard day’s surfing. Then sinking some beers and saying dude a lot. Rebelution are new to us but the internet informs us they’re big in the States. Their first full-length album,…
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Cruising With…. Jane McDonald
Ahoy, shipmates! Trying to rate this on musical terms is as pointless as a bookie’s pencil. There is no pattern to the songs — the set-list goes from Ultravox’s Vienna to Frozen’s Let It Go, and takes in Mambo Italiano and Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet. Eclectic, to say the least. To call the covers…
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Addie Brik: I Have A Doctor On Board
Brik remind us of Kate Bush, not just for the voice, which is not quite as squeaky but is Bushesque, but for the variety of the sounds she produces. And for the way her biography is casually littered with celebs. Just like Bush, who had a family friend who knew David Gilmour of Pink Floyd…
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Jack Carty + Gus Gardiner: Hospital Hill
Hospital Hill is Jack Carty and Gus Gardiner, whom we could claim to know all about, if we lied. Never heard of them. Carty won the 2010 acoustic singer-songwriter of the year award at the National Music Oz Awards, while Gardiner was with Australian rock band Papa vs Pretty. Despite being limited by us never…
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Neil Young + Promise of the Real: Paradox
For parts of this movie soundtrack you think, “If Heineken did soundtracks…”; other parts are apparently men eating crisps in a field and playing guitar, so less so. Paradox is a film directed by Neil’s other half, Daryl Hannah. Its plot: Sometime in the future past, the “Man in the Black Hat” (Young), the “Particle…
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Prosecco Socialist: Songs from Behind Bars
The appeal of The Beautiful South passed us by somewhat, so it’s hard for us to tell how BS fans will view this rather charming new album from David Rotheray: love it, we expect. The gist of it is that he spent several decades playing/writing pop tunes that people loved, then sacked it off and…
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My Indigo: My Indigo
Dutch singer Sharon den Adel is better known for leading Within Temptation, a symphonic metal band; it’s a genre that is less than huge over here, but is massive in Europe, where the band has shifted millions of albums. She wrote this to deal with personal problems. The album is probably okay for Europeans who…
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Port Cities: Port Cities
Unlike Hinds (see here), who are all quirk, Port Cities are not quite quirky enough; as those ghastly people on The Apprentice say, they have no USP. That’s not to say this is a bad album: Port Cities can turn in a good tune; the type Fleetwood Mac or Tom Petty fans would hear on…
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