Review Corner

Tag: Jeremy Condliffe

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    Ghost Culture: Ghost Culture

    This is a very cool album, though it gets a bit samey towards the end. Ghost Culture is electronic musician James Greenwood and one of label Phantasy Sound’s newer signings; he’s had help from Erol Alkan and Daniel Avery making this. It opens with the nice Avery throb of Mouth, the minimalistic sound being reminiscent…

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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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    Toc: Haircut

    We know very little about TOC, as the internet is not forthcoming. They’re on the Circum-disk label, a collective of jazz musicians based in the Malterie in Lille, France. Toc is a trio and the Circum-disk website seems to say that the album name is because they seek to “cut, equalise and often uncurl” music.…

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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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    Mary Dullea: Gothic, New Piano Music From Ireland

    After all the loud music we’ve had on this week, this has been a real pleasure, aided and abetted by the fact that Audible’s talking book version of Dracula has also been playing. You can never have enough Gothic. The contents of the CD can be guessed from the title. It features works by Ed…

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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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    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…