Review Corner

Category: Pop rock

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    DeStijl: Something Wicked This Way Comes

    The backstory to this band is (sadly) slightly more interesting than the CD. Pascal DeStijl is a musician and artist from France, who now lives in Manchester and Montpellier. He works for magazines, musicians and commercial companies, producing edgy designs. The band was formed in France in 1995 by DeStijl and John Cleary, bassist. Subsequent…

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    Christmas Joy In Full Measure: Various

    This was obviously planned some months ago, but we got it too late for Christmas. Bad planning, someone. Still you can buy it now for next year. The backstory is that record label Hand Of Glory records asked 12 artists for an original Christmas song. Presumably they left the remit wide open, because the songs…

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    Ratworld: Menace Beach

    Someone, somewhere must have said something wise about music constantly reinventing itself and this is the latest incarnation of shoegazy, scuzzy, distorted guitar pop. Teenagers who are new to all this will find this to be exciting and moshpit friendly music; older musos who’ve heard it all before will find Menace Beach entertainingly enthusiastic and…

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    Team Me: Blind As Night

    This is a proper mix of styles and influences: think Arcade Fire covering Kate Bush by way of a generic American pop punk band. The first time we played it through it all just slipped by, but it’s not an album you can half-listen to. We’ve warmed to it via successive plays. Opener Ride My…

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    Aled Jones: The Heart Of It All

    He’s come a long way since Walking In The Air and now he’s almost a national treasure, appearing on Songs of Praise as he does. We’re not being judgemental (and could be wrong) but we’d guess a lot of his fanbase are churchgoers, probably members of the WI or Mothers’ Union, and perhaps their spouses.…

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    Wu-Tang Clan: A Better Tomorrow

    This has met a mixed reception: the general Press has given it good reviews, long-time fans and the specialist writers have been less generous. One long-time fan on Amazon writes: “There are no moments that make you think ‘that was a clever lyric’, that you are listening to a potential single, or even something that’s…

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    Glass Caves: Alive

    We reviewed this a couple of weeks ago, using a faulty CD that skipped a couple of tracks. Now equipped with a fully working download, we’re going to plug them again, as they’re very good. Think Arctic Monkeys with a slick polish and sparkle (which you could read as “Arctic Monkeys having lost their edge”…

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    Kill It Kid: You Owe Nothing

    We were expecting some kind of indie pop band from the name. The opening track took revenge for this preconception by beating us around the head with a length of nail-hard blues and dowsing us in spit and sawdust. They’re so hard they make Royal Blood sound like One Direction. OK, perhaps that’s an exaggeration…

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    Stevie Nicks: 24 Karat Gold — Songs From the Vault

    This is a collection of Nicks’s tunes, the ones she had just lying around and it’s, well, a Stevie Nicks album. Despite the fact that the tracks are from various years (between 1969 and 1987), it holds together well as a body of work. Recorded in Nashville with a group of session players (including Dave…

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    Black Swan Lane: A Moment of Happiness

    Black Swan Lane play melodic and fairly gentle tunes given a goth air thanks to the husky vocals of Jack Sobel (who along with John Kolbeck is the only original member, former Chameleon Mark Burgess having left). They’ve not changed their sound over the three albums we have in the Review Corner vaults (there’s three…