Category: Pop rock
-
Recreations: Baby Boomers 2
We listened to this half a dozen times before reading the Press notes. The singer has got a bit of the “awight squire” Essex voice you expect to deliver jokey lyrics but doesn’t (in other places he sounds a bit Albarn so banish thoughts of Chas ‘n’ Davian antics). He sounds about 12, so when…
-
Green Day: Revolution Radio
We never really got into the whole Green Day thing. They were a decent punk band with albums that were good in places, but we suspect the success of American Idiot surprised them. Dookie shifted 20m copies but at the time of Idiot they were winding down and not getting on. American Idiot was a…
-
Empire of the Sun: Two Vines
This is the third album from Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore and continues the two men’s contribution to classy pop. Steele is the genius behind The Sleepy Jackson while Littlemore is bit of an over-achiever, having co-written for The Sleepy Jackson, been the frontman of the electronic duo Pnau, a member of the art-rock band…
-
Xylaroo: Sweetooth
After reading the biog, this is not what we were expecting. The sisters that make up Xylaroo are from Papa New Guinea and now live in London, via Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and we were expecting something a bit world, but opening song, Track A Lackin’ is a rollicking country tune. It…
-
Natalie McCool: The Great Unknown
We feel we should be kind about McCool’s new album. She has a tenuous Cheshire connection, so she’s almost local, and we’ve heard her earlier stuff and thought she had potential. But, as people sometimes say, this would be a vinyl album, where you play side one but rarely flip it over for side two…
-
Baby Strange: Want It Need It
Every few years a band comes along with the message for young music fans that rock n roll can be fun. The last one was Vaccines, and before that Glas Vegas (maybe not so fun, but it was stripped down) and before that; well, there would have been someone. Baby Strange play swampy garage rock…
-
Jacko Hooper: After The Storm EP
We played this one Sunday afternoon and it’s great Sunday music, laid back and reflective. We were sent a download and the tracks aren’t in the correct order but opener Closer is a gentle piano ballad, and the repeated refrain “my heart breaks when your lips shake” is nicely ambiguous — is the owner of…
-
Big Top Heartbreak: Deadbeat Ballads
An album we play quite often is Vincent Black Lighting’s Songs From The Underbelly Part Two (it’s 1,536,042 in music on Amazon). Musically it’s a kind of sedate punk rockabilly with fantastic lyrics about life in North West England (they were from Burnley or somewhere). It was never going to be a hit but they…
-
Dan Whitehouse: That’s Where I Belong
Anyone who saw Danny And The Champions Of The World at Biddulph this year will know the Whitehouse sound — soul mixed with a splash of country and folk; this pleasant new album is in fact produced by Danny of Danny And The Champs. That’s Where I Belong is the standout song; it’s very familiar…
-
Phil Collins: The Singles
It’s Phil Collins. It’s the singles. What more do you need to know? Avuncular Phil has drawn a stickman (sticksman?) playing drums on the cover to pretend it’s not just a hits package coming out before Christmas. The collection shows why Collins is vastly under-rated as a talent: if the Press hadn’t mocked him so…
Review Corner 