After listening to the choral teaser from Rebecca Palin's soul in opener Southern Climes welcoming us in: "as our journey has begun, as we fly into the sun.", you'd be forgiven for estimating that the remaining tracks would be a one trick pony where the accompanying music is lacklustre and dependant on the vocal gimmick. Although to be fair there are times when it's the most powerful element...
Listening to Owen Pallett's music as both his birth given name and previously as computer game-inspired moniker Final Fantasy is like being on a thrill-seeking space-travelling rollercoaster in which you are not completely sure what you will witness but you know what kind of experience you've signed up for...
Eccentric Australian psychedelic astronauts Pond continue to invite their listeners on comic journeys on their sixth album but this time there's a vunreble and inward self-reflective shade of blue added to their already colourful personalities resulting in their most rounded and diverse effort to date. Proof of this new found fragility is found on the addictive Sitting Up On....
There's a nostalgically soulful charm pulsating through the veins of Nashville singer-songwriter Natalie Prass's eponymous debut album that's not immediately obvious from her first teaser Bird of Prey.What we learn initially from the track is that she has a sweet harmless morning voice that breezes over gleeful Rachel-Yamagata piano arrangement backed by sophisticated production and delicate orchest...
Uncompromising determination and crowd-funding from entrepeneural website Indiegogo have contributed to the eventual release of Kate in The Kettle's debut album after an exhausting two years wait. However, vocalist and fiddler Kate Young's mind is so curious, inquistive and obsessed with the diverse nature of the world, that she was unlikely to twiddle her fingers in boredom. In previous years, she has started projects in Bulgaria, Iceland, Kenya...
One of the most misunderstood and controversial princes of hard rock music undergoes another metamorphosis without completely rejecting his belief structure and distinctive idiosyncrasies.Marilyn Manson's ninth album The Pale Emperor follows on from the ephiphany-motivated Born Villain, which acted as a fresh canvas with Manson re-launching his dramatic industrial rock genre from the...
Last year, prolific workaholic producer Dan Carey was rewarded for his overtime with two Mercury Prize nominations helping to ignite the careers of two British new bloods: Kate Tempest and Nick Mulvey. His next challenge is to repeat the same feit with All We Are. Although, geographically, none of them are British - Guko Gikling is Norwegian, Luis Santos is Brazilan and drummer Richard O Flynn is self-explanatory Irish- they formalized and call Liverpool their musical...
The recent revival of the British born genre of shoegaze has pedalled it's way to the cold icy landscapes of Russia. The genre that originally attracted media attention and criticism in the 1990s for being The Scene That Celebrated Itself might seem an odd choice for a band that wish to distance themselves from Russia's recent controversial music exports that themselves tagged confrontation: TATU and Pussy Riot. Incidentally, it depends on how you approach the shoegazing genre...
Like The Olympics and the Fifa World Cup, 31-year-old Electropop Chilean Javiera Mena releases an album quadrannually, which indicidentally is a good measuring stick for progress and maturity. The title of her third record Otra Era is Spanish for "Other Era" and as suggestively exciting as it sounds, the presumptive connotations associated with the phrase can also be anxiously worrying, especially considering there was nothing wrong with the previous epoch found...
Whether immediate thoughts are notated on mobile phone notepad applications, SMS messages or 140- character-limit Twitter, sometimes there isn`t enough room to completely express yourself in a memo. This can have it`s benefits because it prevents repetitive rambling overshadowing a simplistic point. In the case of Miami`s Brika she uses her debut album as a short memo to introspectively ponder....
The multi-ethnic island of Cuba's cultural motto "¡Patria o Muerte, Venceremos!" translates as "Homeland or Death We Shall Overcome". That's a powerful proverb that's perhaps installed in the minds of Paris-based twin sisters Lisa-Kaïndé and Naomi Diaz as they come to terms with the loss of their musical father percussionist Anga Diaz. Influential in both the Latin Jazz scene and in his daughter's lives...
Whilst it could appear that José González has been in exile
hiding inside Korallgrottan cave for the last eight years, the truth is he has still be as pro-active with his acoustic guitar as he ever once was. He released two albums in 2010 and 2013 with childhood friends Tomas Winterkorn and Elias Araya on previously abandoned project Junip, seemingly making up for the lost buddying time that dissapeared when he suddenly...
Sometimes it can be a worrying thing if a band you admire hits their creative peak too soon. This is perhaps the case for French/Finnish duo The Do who failed to live up to the entertaining and majestic high standard of their second LP Both Ways Open Jaws. This was always going to be a difficult challenge considering that the previous record should have been shortlisted for the best release of 2011. It perfected the...
Overprotective parents often quiver in fear upon discovery that their precious child is hanging round with a new group of friends. Amongst the inviolability concerns, they are terrified that their offspring's personality will revolutionalize and consequently lose their defined character. Fans of Norwegian art popper Susanne Sundfør might involuntarily feel the same anxiety after their heroine featured on tracks for M83 and...
After being nominated for a Swedish Grammis this year (oddly for Best Jazz Album) and for setting high standards for uncategorizable wildness and creative experimentation on their previous three albums Heartcore, The Snake and Rivers, there was high hopes for the latest addition to their quadrology and thankfully the praise was well and truly deserved. Unseperable duo Mariam Wallentin and Andreas...
On 4th September 2011, an unexpected marketing technique brought a sparkling new duo from Canada's diamond mining city of Edmonton over a million YouTube hits resulting in fast exposure. The video posted by Jessica Viscusie promoted an enthralling and lush track called Lofticries accompanied by a seductive photograph of a woman dressed in lingerie inside a hotel room. The idea worked and since then Purity...
Step aside Chromeo, there's a new neo-funk duo in town in the form of the suave Tuxedo. Tuxedo is a collaboration between two musicians from mildly different urban backgrounds but both with American caucasian skin. Although Mayer Hawthorne developed a flirtatious and charming personality with his smooth and retro blue eyed soul influenced by Motown, funk and quiet storm acts such as Marvin Gaye and...
The evolution of inquistive Manchurians Dutch Uncles has been one of self-discovery, wanderlust, experimental play, sandwich-naming and an inventive creation of math-pop and prog-pop fusion that has the potential to expose into the masses. They gave hope to music fans of Northern England that grew restless with the neandethral masculine odor of "Madchester" bands and could break the barrier between...
Over the course of 28 tracks from his two previous albums Disaster (2007) and Every Man For Himself (2011), Chicago-based tenor and composer Daniel Knox bravely commented on nearly every taboo that exists. From blasphemy (Yet Another One For You) to rape (Naive Theresa) to death row (Red Handed) to alcoholism (Lovescene) and to pornography (Etc.) amongst other controversial subjects...
Homogenic, Vespertine, Medúlla, Volta and Biophilia. Apart from the consistency of one word titles, what links the choice of names of Björk's last five albums is a unique phrase that defies obvious meaning and therefore it becomes attached with her project for eternity. The names are her concepts and display a new character and direction that make her never boring and constantly fascinating...
Six years ago, a personal singing visit from CALLmeKAT's Katherine Ottosen would have the been the perfect cure for a neurotic person's insomnia. Her delicate and dreamy lullabies provided an effortless entrance to a sparkling utopian paradise with limitless magic and guided into the adventure by the retro robot Johnny No.5 from the Short Circuit movies...
When Welsh alternative pop musician Marina Diamondis unveiled the song Immortal as the third part of her "froot of the month" promotion series, it was immediately captivating. The lyrics were not just meaningful and inevitably tragic but were undeniably true and unquestionable universal. A human's desire to leave a footprint on earth when their spirit fades is discussed in frank lyrics: "All the things that...
In every set of brothers there always one that is serious, introverted and emotional, that ponders hope, seeks for more and thinks like a poet, whilst the other brother is mischeivous, cheeky, attention-seeking, extroverted and likes to tease his sibling's personal boundaries. Newly solo Will Butler is the latter personality and from his sugar-high performances as mulit-instrumentalist of Montreal indie...
Sporting bleached blonde hair, the earings of Billy Idol and a leather jacket whilst having a body that is cut out carelessly like a scrapbook and placed over the idiosynchratic palm trees of LA, the album cover illustrates the new musical direction and cool rebel image of Bordeaux's SoKo with informative clarification. It's also a drastically surprising costume change for an artist previously associated with minimalism but one that uncovers a different side to her personality, her artistic inspirations, her new found home and her growth as a person and musician.
The world's third largest capital Mexico City is a place that in recent years has attempted to distant itself from corruption and drug war associations, as well as embrassing stereotypes by creating a cultural boom of talent ready to be exported and displayed to the world as a symbolism of their growth. The export showcase includes film directors: Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and the oscar-winning Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu, It also...