Sure, it’s not going to win over CocoRosie’s naysayers, but in the main Tales of a GrassWidow is an invigorating listen, a compelling world of shifting moods and patchworked genres.
CocoRosie – Tales of a GrassWidow
Christian Cottingham
The Postal Service – Brixton Academy, London, 19/05/13
Warmth and nostalgia battles it way through a terrible sound mix at Brixton Academy for The Postal Service’s re-union show.
Foals – Royal Albert Hall, London 28/03/13
Efterklang and Foals treat the Royal Albert Hall to a matinée performance they’re unlikely to forget.
Daughter – If You Leave
If You Leave is staggeringly beautiful from beginning to close, a catharsis that’s both bracing and woozily amniotic. Picking out high points is pointless: it’s the whole damn album, from beginning to close, and there is quite genuinely not a weak moment here.
Sunns – Images Du Futur
Images Du Futur is exciting in a way that few albums manage to be, dangerous and compelling like a first cigarette or fumbled sexual encounter, and nothing here quite seems real.
Atoms for Peace – Amok
Never anything less than interesting, this is an album that shows us, finally, what Thom Yorke’s dancing sounds like, itchy and erratic and utterly compulsive.
“Music: you could look at it as an escape, or as a way of colouring in your life” : Best Fit speaks to Patrick Watson
Patrick Watson talks about touring, the lack of vegetables in our music and his love of crazy cabins in the woods.
Errors – Heaven, London 18/10/12
Their songs a dichotomous meld of dancefloor lure and synth-led solipsism, Errors’ recent London outing feels particularly significant. Christian Cottingham reviews.
Bat For Lashes – The Haunted Man
The Haunted Man is an excellent album, possessed with enough innovation to carry Bat For Lashes forward without disturbing the flickering half-light that their sound inhabits. And that cover? The cover’s by far the least interesting thing here.
Efterklang – Piramida
Like the abandoned mining settlement that was its inspiration, Piramida is a haven, frozen and expansive but ceaselessly alluring, and deserving of far more than just a visit.
Patrick Watson – Adventures In Your Own Backyard
This is not an album that screams for our attention, but it deserves it all the same. Adventures In Your Own Backyard is ambitious without feeling overblown, intimate without falling to sentimentality and subtly, delicately compelling.
Islet – Illuminated People
Islet may not yet have fully found their voice but at least they haven’t settled for some old and tired sound, stifled by its own yawn – and hey, any rough edges that Illuminated People has quickly pale next to the sheer vigour of the thing.