Review Corner

Category: Pop rock

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    The Slow Show: White Water

    An excellent, if slightly left-field album, The Slow Show present a mix of the atmospheric and arty, as if David Bowie was the Big Black Goth and not the Thin White Duke. Dresden, a former single, opens with a male voice choir sound-alike before piano and spoken word. It sounds in places like something from…

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    Sundowners: Sundowners

    Sundowners (we’ve typed the same word out three times now) have a head start: co-producer is The Coral’s James Skelly, whose brother and sister Alfie and Fiona play guitar and sing respectively, which probably means the band skipped many of the early pitfalls newbies fall into. Not that The Coral should be a reference point:…

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    Dutch Uncles: O Shudder

    And wasn’t this one welcome in the Review Corner? We loved their second album Cadenza back in 2011 and even went to see them tour, but follow up third album Out of Touch, In the Wild was just dull. We were sad. Now they’re back with a fourth (the debut self-titled album came out on…

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    Mark Nevin: Beautiful Guitars

    This is an album that might not bother the charts but is going to sell steadily for years to come from word of mouth as people tell each other how fantastic it is. Nevin is the guy who sold four songs to a publishing company for £50 a pop; the fifth was turned down so…

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    Funeral For A Friend: Chapter and Verse

    Having said that (see last comment above) Funeral For A Friend perhaps show why Enter Shikari are so good. FFaF came up with the post-hardcore / emo revival 15 years ago and won best newcomers with Kerrang! They’ve played with bands like Saosin and Hawthorne Heights, whose music is pretty predictable — but it’s what…

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    Enter Shikari: The Mindsweep

    Enter Shikari largely passed us by: we’d seen the massive queues of devoted fans outside the Academy but their in-yer-face ADHD take on dance rock was too much for us; it’s for kids to go mental to in the moshpit. This changed with their last album A Flash Flood Of Colour, where they tackled global…

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    The High Dials: In The AM Wilds

    Like Trophy Scars (see elsewhere), The High Dials are hard to review, because the album is so meaty: you need lots of listens to appreciate it. The High Dials are more poppy than the post-hardcore lot but both would score 9/10 if we did such things; The High Dials is one of those albums that’s…

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    Trophy Scars: Holy Vacants

    When you load this into iTunes the genre is given as “punk”, which is a bit like saying Gilbert and George draw. The album is about (wait for it) a conspiracy theory surrounding the Nephilitic gene. The album revolves around the tale of two lovers who discover not only that the blood of angels contains…

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    The Best of Cerrone Productions

    There’s a number of cheesy disco hits we always lump together, nowhere near as cool as Donna Summer’s I Fee Love but classics in their own right, such as Space’s Magic Fly and Cerrone’s Supernature, both 1977. (That year is more likely to be remembered for punk, yet I Feel Love was probably even more…

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    John Butler Trio: Tin Shed Tales

    This came out a couple of years ago (who says we’re not on the ball?) but we only came across it recently. We’re making you aware of its existence in case you caught JBT’s 2014 album Flesh and Blood. This double CD is an acoustic collection of his tunes played live and we should make…