The Heliocentrics bill themselves as psychedelic-funk which is about right: it’s a hybrid of jam music (Goat or Holy F—sprang to mind) mixed in with Portishead and some Can / krautrock. They claim to sound like the funk of James Brown and “the disorienting asymmetry” of Sun Ra (psychedelic jazz player) It’s all very cool, […]
When a band calls its album after its home city’s dialling code, you know they’re proud Liverpudlians, (and no review copy will be finding its way to The Sun) but you can’t tell, the odd accent aside, that they’re from Liverpool or even England — they’ve got a West Coast feel that’s more California than […]
Elephant Sessions’ claim to fame is that they blend trad folk (they’re from the Highlands) with indie rock, which means they have an electric rhythm session, plus electronic dance beats, and mandolin and fiddle. Peak Elephant Sessions is possibly the bit in Colours where it all drops down to an electronic kick drum and ambient […]
Foals are one of the best bands in Britain. They’ve improved and matured on every album and each release has a different sound. For this they’ve lost a bass player but replaced him with a synth, the backbone that supplies giving the music more of a groove; a lot, in fact. In some ways it’s […]
There’s a raft of bands rotating around the daddy of this genre, Frank Turner: we most recently reviewed Beans On Toast, but there’s any number of singer-songwriters playing folk-based tunes with sincere and/or entertaining intelligent lyrics, and with links to Turner. Marwood is another. After the first couple of plays, we’d have said his […]
We can see why people love Stormzy, the first grime artist to land a number one album; he’s got charm and intelligence. The aging musos in the Review Corner haven’t got much in common with a black man from London, but even as young dogs we’d not have gone down the Tip Café to meet […]
Review Corner