Category: Pop rock

  • Neil Young: Carnegie Hall 1970

    New Young albums come along faster than the 38 bus to Crewe and the quality can be patchy (including a set recorded as a warm-up to this) but this is superb. It’s the first release from his Official Bootleg series.It’s just Young and his acoustic guitar and piano and there are 23 songs, many classics…

  • Beautiful People: If 60s Were 90s

    This came out ages ago in 1992. We were never too sure of it at the time, being massive Hendrix fans and unable to see the point of adding dance beats to a genius, but it seems much better all these years on. Perhaps we all need cheering up just now. (Though it did cost…

  • 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…

  • The Sad Song Co: Saudade

    We Googled the title and it means “a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves … it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again … the recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events…

  • Teen Creeps: Forever

    Teen Creeps are from Belgium but the sound of Joram De Bock, Ramses Van den Eede and Bert Vliegen is rooted in another land and another time: Northern Ireland, 1989, to be precise, because that is when Ash formed. Teen Creeps sound like they want to be the Ash of Belgium, though as Ash is…

  • Peach and Quiet: Just Beyond the Shine

    This self-released album from a Vancouver Island duo is a pleasant mix of pop, country and Americana, with a nice organic feel, possibly recorded in minimal takes.Opener Empty To Fill is a catchy 60s pop tune reminiscent of The Byrds, while the next one up is For My Love, a gentler folk/pop tune with some…

  • Still Corners: The Last Exit

    Still Corners are, as they say, a dreamy pop duo who tweak their sound with every album, from pop to a more synthy sound to this, more Americana and even Tex Mex: half of Still Corners, Greg Hughes, grew up Arizona and Texas so perhaps not surprising. Tessa Murray is English, and the two met…

  • The Heliocentrics: Infinity of Now

    The Heliocentrics: Infinity of Now

    The Heliocentrics bill themselves as psychedelic-funk which is about right: it’s a hybrid of jam music (Goat or Holy F—sprang to mind) mixed in with Portishead and some Can / krautrock. They claim to sound like the funk of James Brown and “the disorienting asymmetry” of Sun Ra (psychedelic jazz player) It’s all very cool,…

  • The Messenger Birds: Everything Has to Fall Apart Eventually

    The Messenger Birds follow in the footsteps and The Black Keys, The White Stripes and Royal Blood, two blokes making a lot of noise (“That’s not a rock band, that’s just two guys!” they cite “some guy named Kevin” as saying on their Bandcamp page). Like Jack White, they’re from Detroit, Michigan. The album opens…

  • Eagles: Live From The Forum

    We’ve never really been massive fans of Eagles but you’d have to be a miserable wretch not to like this new double album recorded live at the impressive Inglewood venue, practically a homecoming gig for the band. Someone who saw Eagles years ago complained to us: “It sounded just like the records”, which is perhaps…