Reviews - page 2

The Sales EP is a six-track EP from minimalist guitar pop duo Lauren Morgan and Jordan Shih. It contains one new track, four songs that the band have previously released as singles, and a remix...

After a long absence, Andrew Montgomery returns with Ruled By Dreams, his solo debut album. Has the former Geneva lead singer found the music to match his voice?

Given that I normally like to live with an album, eat sleep and drink an album before sitting down with a view to reviewing said album, what am I doing reviewing Royal Blood before I've...

Not quite the return to form many are saying, World Peace is None of Your Business suffers from inconsistency, and too many lows among its peaks.

Letters We Told is the self-penned, self-recorded debut album from Jay Woodward, released late last year. It’s an intriguing mix of ageless folk and modern technique and appreciation for the possibilities of simple songs, softly...

The début album from Woman's Hour is a beautifully poised work: eleven easy-going pieces that belie the emotional turmoil documented within. While Conversations never goes all out to surprise, it is full of subtle but...

Gingerlys are a New York quintet who have created an EP that can only be described as pretty much perfect in every way. It packs into its whirling eleven minutes an almost inconceivable number of...

A stunning post-punk / garage debut EP that you simply have to listen to. Heart Full of Beef is equal parts lyrical, abrasive, dark and beautiful.

“Of course I love the old songs, from New Wave to Murder Park” sings Luke Haines on Future Generations, from the fourth (we weren’t expecting another one…!) album by The Auteurs. See what you can...

After the relative failure of Now I’m A Cowboy, and the irrepressible surge of Britpop, it’s tempting to describe After Murder Park as more of the same, only more so. In order to understand what’s...

“If you possess the wrong kind of ambition, you fall between the cracks”, Luke Haines opines with the final sentence of Chapter 10 of Bad Vibes, the first part of his autobiography.

“What makes you ashamed to be British?” asked Select Magazine of each of its cover stars in the now infamous ‘Yanks Go Home!’ edition in May ‘93. Luke Haines, lead singer of

After the not entirely modern, not so old-fashioned either, relatively straight-up Victory for the Comic Muse, much of Bang Goes the Knighthood is refreshingly and charmingly off-beat. At times it’s endearing or silly; sometimes it...

The obvious reference point for the title is the long-forgotten début album Fanfare for the Comic Muse. The truth, as so often is the case with The Divine Comedy, is more ambiguous. Victory for the...

After Regeneration sadly, mystifyingly failed to have the intended impact, Neil Hannon broke up the band, toured with Ben Folds (the two performing extra-special covers of classics such as Careless Whisper to great acclaim), before...

Maybe if just the music had changed…

Fin de Siecle was the last album The Divine Comedy recorded for Setanta; its title is almost too perfect. There’s a definite sense throughout that this thing, in its present form, has gone about as...

What to do after the success of Casanova… not so much the success of the album itself, which didn’t quite make the Top 40, so much as the success of singles like Something for the...

It’s tempting to see Casanova as nothing more than Neil Hannon’s cheeky-chappy coming out album. The truth, as ever, feels not quite as simple as that.

Just in case Liberation was a bit too easily-digestible, not quite soaked enough in literary reference, art or artifice, for its follow-up Neil Hannon pulls out all the stops. On Promenade he casts aside, for...