We saw The Courteeners on an early tour, and singer Liam Fray looked as if he’d outgrown the sub-Oasis lad rock featured on the band’s debut album. In hindsight perhaps he just thought he’d outgrown venues the size of the Sugarmill, because The Courteeners never left the lad rock behind. Fray has the ambition of…

Play this pop / country album through and you’ll be wondering where they’re from: Nashville? The Canadian Maritimes? Er, nope, they’re 20-year-old twin sisters and from Hampshire. They did have a Canadian cousin, though. On one hand that explains its slightly pedestrian feel: we have a theory that country is so suited to America because…

You’ll only snigger when we say this is really good; that’s right, ha ha, a good album by the bloke who was in Busted, and left to form a metal band you never heard of again. But it is really good, and, moreover a pleasure to listen to. We’ll say right off that while it’s…

Plastikman — aka Richie Hawtin — is an exponent of minimal techno. He was born in England but later lived just over the Canadian border from Detroit, the home of techno, and had a dad who liked Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. He later lived in Berlin. He’s also into multimedia art installations. He’d retired Plastikman…

Years ago, the Review Corner used to visited the Netherlands on a regular basis, and peruse the record store in Oosterhout or even in the bright lights of Breda. Invariably there’d be something from a local band playing moderately-well recorded rock, singing in heavily accented English. It had a charm of its own but we…

  We like M Tellier in the Review Corner — indeed, two of the corner walked down the aisle to his La Ritournelle — but he’s wilfully annoying. We saw him live at a festy once and he came on late and faffed around so much that the stage cut the power, because he’d used…

We’ve been enjoying this tuneful album from the Bristol five-piece, which is up there with a couple of other classy rock/pop albums we’ve had this year (notably Breton’s excellent War Room Stories). For bands you might have heard of, Bombay Bicycle Club’s effortless and pleasing sound is a good benchmark. Trademark sounds are falsetto vocals…

Ever since Emilíana Torrini’s Fisherman’s Woman a decade ago we’ve had a soft spot for whimsical female singers from Iceland. Hafdis Huld? Even her name’s appealing.She sounds exactly as we would have wanted: it’s the kind of music fairies would play of an evening after they’d bedded down the unicorns for the night.Maybe it’s because…

Pearson is a singer songwriter and plays nice tunes, centred round his acoustic guitar. He reminded us a lot of Bernard Fanning, lead singer of Australian rockers Powderfinger, whose solo stuff is a mixture of blues and acoustic folk; as well as musical similarities the two have got similar voices, most especially on Pearson’s Wishing…

Ms Lewis was in the excellent Rilo Kiley, whose pop/country More Adventurous was excellent, with the follow-up Under the Blacklight more commercial and very Fleetwood Mac. Since then she’s released solo music on her own, as part of the duo Jenny and Johnny and with the Watson Twins. This new album harks back to Under…