The Shaky Hands have taken a while to find their feet and settle after various lineup changes already occurring since their formation in 2003. Based in Portland, Oregon, vocalist Nicholas Delffs and Colin Anderson founded the band with Paul Culp joining in the fun on bass. By the time they signed to Holocene Music in 2006 though, Culp seemingly wasn’t having that much fun after all and was replaced by Mayhaw Hoons while Jeff Lehman arrived to beef up the band’s sound on rhythm guitar. Shortly after signing Nicholas Delffs’ brother Nathan also got in on the act with a bit of percussion. Finally, to bring you right up-to-date, founding member Colin Anderson has been replaced by Jake Morris and Nathan Delffs, who had been filling in on drums after Anderson’s departure has also left. So on the face of it The Shaky Hands’ history has been a choppy one especially for a band so young. Lunglight is their second album and one that shows off the same inconsistencies as the lineup. Continue Reading

A pulse starts up, vocals are panned beautifully across my head, the pulse is growing, stronger and stronger. A lone piano kicks in, delay ridden and full of remorse. So far, so promising. And then this buildup is interrupted by some terrible close harmonies, and some of the most cliched lyrics ever. “You wandered out into the crowd, you wonder how you got there. And the sound is very loud, from underground”. At that point I closed iTunes.
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Perhaps I should have had the sense to see it coming, but the rather pompously-titled Vice and Virtue by the daftly-named Keith is a bit of a duffer, to be honest. The title and closing track, with its nine-and-a-half-minute bulk, finishes things off in the same way that a big piece of ice finished off the Titanic – fairly slowly, but painfully. Containing such witticisms as “you think you are right / but you are probably wrong”, it just goes on and on and on. In fact, it’s baffling to think that the band actually kept on playing like this in the studio – did it not strike anyone how incredibly dull it was getting, how mind-numbing it was? It’s hypnotic in the worst possible way, crushing any hope that Keith might be able to produce anything genuinely interesting on the record. Continue Reading

Super Furry Animals are currently hard at work on their 9th studio album in Cardiff.

Currently with a tracklisting but without a title the band promise; “Musically it’s based around riffs and grooves we’ve been playing around with over the last few years. We have enough now for a whole album so even though it’s still very melodic we thought we could leave off the acoustic ballads for the time being.”

“It’s recognisable as a melodic SFA record, but is very focused musically as a cohesive album. And no country rock as Daf has developed a pedal steel phobia. Which has confined the great Nashvillian instrument along with the Saxophone to the banned instrument directive of the SFA board. There’s only one slow number which isn’t slow at all.”

Longtime cohorts Pete Fowler  will combine with legendary Japanese artist Tanaami for the album artwork.

The album is due for digital release on the 16th March via the bands own website (www.superfurry.com), the physical following on the 13th of April on Rough Trade Records.

Super Furry Animals have some more tricks up their sleeve which will be announced a little closer to the release date – watch this space for more information!

Working Title Tracklisting
1.’The very best of Neil Diamond’
2. White socks/Flip Flops.
3. Inaugural Trams.
4. Sounds Familiar.
5. Cardiff in the sun.
6. Where do you wanna go?
7. LLiwiau LLachar.
8. Mountain.
9. Moped eyes.
10. Inconvenience.
11. Crazy Naked Girls.
12. Earth.
13. Prick.

Silence may be wild, but it’s not an adjective you’d necessarily apply to balladess Frida Hyvönen. ‘Quirky’ perhaps, or ‘melodramatic,’ but ‘wild’? Nah. But that’s not to denigrate the Swedish songstress, for what she’s lacking in edge she mostly compensates for with an idiosyncratic lyrical approach and a fine line in lush melodies.

The most striking element of the album is the lyrical content, which eschews the hackneyed rhyming couplets of many singer-songwriters for a conversational style at odds with her grandiose musical arrangements. More well-crafted short stories than expressions of generic platitudes about love and loss, they give a sense of emotional authenticity to these seemingly autobiographical tales, and at her best she displays a vein of rich wit worthy of her former touring partner Jens Lekman. But occasionally there’s a sense she tries a little too hard, her stream-of-consciousness approach coming across as too self-knowing, pat- even cringeworthy. Take these sample lines from ‘Dirty Dancing’, an endearingly kitsch piano ballad that appropriates the clattering castanets and female harmonies of a 50’s girl group, which does so well until those last, wincingly clumsy two lines: Continue Reading

Photographs by Rich Thane

Oh St. Giles-In-The-Fields, how I love thee. Conveniently located in Central London, its superb acoustics, intimacy and unassuming beauty makes it the perfect venue for the discerning music lover. No wonder the usually confident Anglophone Emil Svanängen stumbled over his English phrases from time to time; if I had been given a chance to play such an amazing venue, I’d be tongue-tied too. But thankfully his sense of wonderment carried over to the music he played, in a set that further reinforced the Scandinavian stranglehold on superior harmonic folk-pop. Continue Reading

Phosphorescent, a.k.a. Matthew Houck, never shy of the “interesting cover version” here takes things one step further in releasing a complete “tribute album” to one artist: country music legend Willie Nelson.  The title seemingly a clever play on the title of Nelson’s own 1975 tribute album (To Lefty From Willie – an album of Lefty Frizell covers), Houck has wisely selected some of the lesser-known songs, neatly sidestepping the issue of listener over familiarity which can sometimes prove problematic on such endeavours. Continue Reading

After wallowing in debate over whether to retire from music or not, Patrick Wolf is back and preparing for Battle, his forthcoming album set for release this Autumn. As a warm up for his yet-to-be-announced world tour, the glitter-adorned, self-proclaimed lycanthrope has plotted a four-date tour in March.

Wolf wrote on his blog: “After taking a break from touring last year, I am excited to be back onstage to perform my new album, Battle…I’m so very excited to get back on the open road and onstage where I belong…I am planning to present a whole new bigger production and vision to what I have delivered in the past… So be prepared for many surprises and new arrangements of the best from the last three albums.”

March
8th – Colchester Arts Centre
9th – Gloucester Guildhall
10th Cambridge Junction
12th – London Heaven

Tickets go on general sale on Wednesday 4th February.

A rather productive folk pop band from East London, Whole Schebang have already put together three tiny EPs, and the three-song Stranger Than The Weather is the latest in their line of diminutive releases. There’s a familiar feel to this for anyone who’s heard anything by Left With Pictures, which isn’t surprising considering that the two bands share multi-instrumentalist Stuart Barter. That similar eccentric, whimsical feel is present and correct, but with a tiny dark tinge to the fun, witty lyrics – which are sung in pretty, dynamic vocal harmonies.

You can’t expect a massive variety of styles with such a tiny record to fill up, but Stranger Than The Weather isn’t its title track rehashed a couple more times. “Hollow Feeling” strips most of the instrumentation away, and brings in haunting strings, erratic acoustic guitar and washes of cymbals. Eventually the song’s big moody, cinematic theme kicks in, and whilst it represents a different approach to the first track, it’s every bit as accomplished. The dramatic climax, whilst extremely brief, is something to behold. Continue Reading

It’s been announced today that John Martyn has died at the age of 60.

An exceedingly influential artist during the 70’s, it saw him produce some amazing music. Anyone who hasn’t heard Solid Air needs to rectify that now.

Martyn had seen his latest work gain critical acclaim, which, along with his inspirational early work, had resulted in him winning a lifetime achievement prize at last years Radio 2 Folk Awards, and gaining an OBE in the New Year’s Honours list.

Our thoughts go out to his family.

It’s diverting to wonder what might have happened to Luke Haines if everything predicted early for him had come true: if the music press had followed up the early interest in The Auteurs that saw them on the cover of the Melody Maker very early on and featured in the famous Britpop launching issue of Select magazine; if their debut album New Wave had actually won the first Mercury Music Prize rather than losing out by one vote to Suede; if one of their three top 50 singles that didn’t break into the top 40 had gone a little further. Reading Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall, Haines’ bleakly, acerbically tragicomic retelling of his story and his place in things during the early and mid 1990s, you suspect he might not have ridden it out all that comfortably. Then again, given what he actually did was jump off a fifteen foot wall in Spain aiming to end a tour early, succeeding admirably by breaking both ankles, and then while in convalescene writing a warped avant-funk record about and named after the 1970s West German terrorist collective Baader Meinhof, that’s probably just as well. Continue Reading

An essential rule of music journalism: never reveal your thoughts on an album in your opening paragraph. It leaves you without a hook, no pay-off, your audience will just get bored of all the words and words and words when they already know what you think, skip to the score, and wander off back to Pitchfork to see what real journalists think. All rules are there to be broken, though, and I’m gonna shatter this one for Sky Larkin’s sake, because Christ knows they need something out of the ordinary about them. There it was, just three sentences in. Continue Reading

Following on from a busy 2008, This Town Needs Guns head out on their first UK tour of the new year later this week. The bands debut album, Animals (released via Big Scary Monsters Records in October), will see a US release in March via Sargent House, to be followed by their first Stateside tour.

For ticket details and more info see www.thistownneedsguns.com

Jan
30 – Leeds, The Library (w/ Wintermute)
31 – Sheffield, The Red House

Feb
03 – Birmingham, Barfly
04 – Liverpool, Barfly
05 – Dublin, Whelan’s
06 – Cork, Fred Zeppelin’s
07 – Limerick, Bakers Place
12 – York, Fibbers
13 – Glasgow, Barfly
14 – Aberdeen, Moshulu
18 – London, Barfly
19 – Oxford, The Cellar
20 – Cardiff, Barfly
21 – Worcester, The Firefly
26 – Exeter, The Cavern
27 – Brighton, The Hope (w/ Blakfish/Adebisi Shank)
28 – Norwich, The Queen Charlotte

Kicking off with a rousing, shouted-in-unison “fuck you!”- self-conscious statement of intent if ever there was one- The Airing Of Grievances is just the album to give your sister… if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy sort of girl. It both sounds and feels like those Irish bars they have in America, at least on TV, and at least in the scenes where its all raucous and “fun”. It’s a complete mess, but it’s a mess hollered with enough propulsive force to stay together until impact. Didn’t this come out about a year ago though? Different release dates on different sides of the Atlantic really, really do not mean anything at all. Oh well. Continue Reading