Bootsy Collins - World Wide Funk (Album Review)

Bootsy Collins is an American musical institution. A career that spans the J.B.’s, Parliament and Funkadelic now includes his ninth solo album, and while ‘World Wide Funk’ demonstrates his world-class talent in varied bandleading, the real meat in this funk sandwich is in the high energy, old-school grooves.

Written by: Jacob Brookman | Date: Wednesday, 01 November 2017

Bully - Losing (Album Review)

It’s been impossible to read about Bully’s career without finding the name Steve Albini propping up the word count somewhere. That’s because singer and guitarist Alicia Bognanno interned at his hallowed Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, learning the analog recording skills used to capture the band’s live energy on ‘Losing’, their second album. With all due respect, though, Albini should soon be a footnote.

Written by: Laura Johnson | Date: Wednesday, 01 November 2017

Julien Baker - Turn Out The Lights (Album Review)

Julien Baker’s ‘Turn Out The Lights’ is a masterpiece of intimacy. While retaining the confessional lyrics and sparse instrumentation of her debut, ‘Sprained Ankle’, her second release pulls us in closer. We’re no longer observers: we feel what she feels.

Written by: Jennifer Geddes | Date: Tuesday, 31 October 2017

Weezer - Pacific Daydream (Album Review)

Weezer. Oh no. Last year’s ‘White Album’ restored faith in California’s most annoyingly inconsistent sons. After 15 years spent chipping away at their legacy, this guitar-toting, Beach Boys-worshiping band decided to take what made them brilliant in the first place and boot it into 2016. It was home to ‘50s melodies, alt-rock fuzz and painfully awkward words spewing from Rivers Cuomo’s lyric sheet. It was a Weezer record fans could finally be proud of.

Written by: Alec Chillingworth | Date: Monday, 30 October 2017

Margo Price - All American Made (Album Review)

With the USA’s public intensely divided, album titles featuring the word ‘American’ may have increased appeal owing to their unifying effect. Thus, in 2017 we’ve had ‘American Teen’ (Khalid), ‘american dream’ (LCD Soundsystem) and now we have ‘All American Made’ -  the second album from Nashville singer Margo Price.

Written by: Jacob Brookman | Date: Friday, 27 October 2017

Destroyer - ken (Album Review)

Dan Bejar and Destroyer have been releasing music since the mid ‘90s and their latest record, ‘ken’ is their 12th studio album. It’s named after the working title of Suede’s 1994 hit The Wild Ones, a song Bejar has described as “one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years”.

Written by: Jacob Brookman | Date: Thursday, 26 October 2017

Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice (Album Review)

Kurt Vile’s stock seems to rise with every release, something that has been the case since he departed the War on Drugs and set out on a solo career. On ‘Lotta Sea Lice’ he collaborates with another artist following a similar trajectory - the Australian indie-rocker Courtney Barnett, who's fresh from a breakthrough with her debut LP 'Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit'. On paper, the match would seem a perfect fit, and in practice it largely is.

Written by: Graeme Marsh | Date: Wednesday, 25 October 2017

And So I Watch You From Afar - The Endless Shimmering (Album Review)

It’s difficult to overstate how refreshing And So I Watch You From Afar (or ASIWYFA) were when they arrived on the scene nearly a decade ago. Looking back now, guitar-led instrumentalists took up scant space in a busy alt-rock market, but reading indie blogs at the time led you to believe every other band was peddling the same drawn out, dynamics-based sound. Then, out of nowhere, this noisy wee quartet from Northern Ireland came along to blow the bloody doors off.

Written by: Jonathan Rimmer | Date: Tuesday, 24 October 2017

Trivium - The Sin and the Sentence (Album Review)

Up. Down. Up. Down. Sideways a little bit. Get off to throw up. A few people laugh. Get back on again. This is the rollercoaster of Trivium's career.

Written by: Alec Chillingworth | Date: Tuesday, 24 October 2017

Beck - Colors (Album Review)

Photo: Eliot Lee Hazel For Beck’s 13th album, the Californian singer-songwriter has eschewed the critically lauded musical introversion of his previous two records in favour of outright pop. The results are inconsistent, but when they deliver, they do so with an explosion of joyous swagger; all swinging grooves, smashy snares and production flare.

Written by: Jacob Brookman | Date: Monday, 23 October 2017

St. Vincent - MASSEDUCTION (Album Review)

St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, has had a dramatic few years. Her eponymous fourth LP made her reputation internationally as a gifted musical auteur. Then, a romance with the world’s most famous supermodel, Cara Delevingne, catapulted her into the strange position of being a tabloid concern; one British paper branding her the ‘female Bowie’.

Written by: Jacob Brookman | Date: Friday, 20 October 2017

The Darkness - Pinewood Smile (Album Review)

“History will remember us as the apathetic generation who negligently ushered in a dreadful dystopian age that may or may not come to be known as ‘The Rise of the Arseclowns’.” With his unique take on Brexit and Donald Trump matching his group’s equally idiosyncratic and often hilarious new record, we’d like to say welcome back Sir Justin of Hawkins: may conformity and political correctness never darken your wonderfully unhinged door.

Written by: Simon Ramsay | Date: Thursday, 19 October 2017

Kele Okereke - Fatherland (Album Review)

Kele Okereke is well known as the talented, cool yet surprisingly shy Londoner who fronts Bloc Party - an indie band that was always a bit more jagged round the edges than their contemporaries.

Written by: Helen Payne | Date: Wednesday, 18 October 2017

Weaves - Wide Open (Album Review)

Photo:  Brendan George Ko Weaves’ debut hit home thanks to a stack of offbeat melodies and vocalist Jasmyn Burke’s wonderfully quirky vocals, which amounted to a diverse, genre-defying affair. ‘Wide Open’ finds them treading their own path once again, but this time the rough edges have been smoothed out even as the eccentricity is dialled up to 10.

Written by: Laura Johnson | Date: Wednesday, 18 October 2017

P!nk - Beautiful Trauma (Album Review)

Pink’s seventh album finds her cementing a seamless transition into the adult pop market. Having forged a successful career off the back of pop-rock anthems that championed the outsider, ‘Beautiful Trauma’ mainly drops that familiar sound for an album that seeks to align with current trends.

Written by: Jennifer Geddes | Date: Tuesday, 17 October 2017

H.E.A.T - Into The Great Unknown (Album Review)

There’s always been something heroic about H.E.A.T’s single-minded determination to bring 1980s arena rock back to the mainstream on their own terms, which makes the Swedes’ fifth album something of a surprise. More modern and diverse in presentation and scope, ‘Into The Great Unknown’ mixes an array of new flourishes with the band’s finest traits in a way that has unsurprisingly divided opinions.

Written by: Simon Ramsay | Date: Monday, 16 October 2017

Pale Seas - Stargazing For Beginners (Album Review)

It’s taken a while, but Southampton’s Pale Seas have finally conjured a debut LP after a disappearing act Houdini would have been proud of. The band, led by Jacob Scott, piqued interest with a handful of singles several years ago before vanishing, taking any thoughts of album one with them.

Written by: Graeme Marsh | Date: Thursday, 12 October 2017

Alex Lahey - I Love You Like A Brother (Album Review)

As we get older, there are things that take some figuring out. Love, work, money...they all take a toll. Alex Lahey knows that, and she’s no bullshitter. On ‘I Love You Like A Brother’ she is never less than candid while meandering between realisations.

Written by: Laura Johnson | Date: Thursday, 12 October 2017

Satyricon - Deep Calleth Upon Deep (Album Review)

Black metal is regressive. Far from the antagonistic, counter-culture beast it was upon its inception, it’s become so stringently adherent to its own rules that it’s now nothing more than a sea of people in facepaint croaking about how terrible religion is.

Written by: Alec Chillingworth | Date: Wednesday, 11 October 2017

Citizen - As You Please (Album Review)

‘As You Please’ eschews the extremes of Citizen’s most recent album, ‘Everybody’s Going To Heaven’, and features some of the band’s most mainstream sounds yet, with the production talents of Will Yip adding shine. But it is lacking in conviction.

Written by: Jennifer Geddes | Date: Wednesday, 11 October 2017