London duo Matt Chilton and Ed Lush formed Spork after realizing they were kindred spirits when it came to guitars, with Lush a drummer and Chilton a bass player in their everyday music mongering. Many Of Them Seriously is their debut album, where dense astral guitars create a bed for a basic sound, which then has synth, percussive blips, tasty drumming, electronic ephemera and an overdriven buzzing bass adding some finer detail. The songs occupy a middle ground between prog rock, (sans pomposity), and post-rock, (sans the quiet-Build Up-LOUD-quiet-Build Up-LOUD dynamic), extremes have been stripped away leaving subtlety and finesse, but also a touch of formlessness. Continue Reading

Despite unavoidable assumptions, Bluebeard’s Room is not an album made by pirates. Or for pirates. It has absolutely nothing to do with pirates, unless there’s some hugely subtle or coded reference, or a band member was a pirate in a previous life.

Another variable seems to be the band’s nationality. At times ( see ‘Johnny Bentham’s Dilemma’ and ‘I Couldn’t Get Off’) the vocals have a Dylan drawl and words run together, with a touch of Kings Of Leon lazy articulating, but the accent is as English as a good queue. On album opener ‘Runaway Pram’, and ‘I Do Know’ the vocals sound distinctly of Gallagher origin. Continue Reading

Beth Tacular, (Accordion, Bass Drum, Backing Vocals), Phil Moore, (Lead Vocals, Guitar, Tambourine), Mark Paulson (Violin, Pedal Keyboard, Bass Drum, Backing Vocals), are the three members of Raleigh, North Carolina’s Bowerbirds, a band that has crafted a brilliant album which could be called folk, but such a classification falls well short of truly giving justice to what they sound like. When listening to Hymns For A Dark Horse you get the feeling that these songs are physical objects as much as they are ephemeral waves of vibrations. Filled with ideas, imagery and metaphors in the lyrics, melodies, themes and rhythms in the instrumentation, songs seem so bursting with life that they are something you experience, something that you can walk around, prodding and peering at. Continue Reading

Interestingly-named Manchester band Working For A Nuclear Free City haven’t produced a conventional double album here. What Businessmen & Ghosts really consists of is the entirety of the band’s self-titled début album, the majority of the Rocket EP, and also new material. At a whopping 29 tracks and almost an hour and 45 minutes long, this is a comprehensive rather than bite-sized introduction to the band’s music.

Like the vaguely similar project that was Use Your Illusion, the 1991 kind-of double album by Guns N’ Roses, Businessmen & Ghosts is very much a mixed bag rather than a coherent, focused album. In fact, this lack of focus and inconsistency in terms of style and quality is the main gripe that emerges from the album. When WFANFC are at their best though, they’re very good. At times “Innocence” sounds like the soundtrack to a hip 70s muscle car or blaxploitation film – all cool beats and funky wicky-wah guitars. This is a band that can convey such cool, when they set their mind to it. Continue Reading

“We started a duo. And then we found a name that reminded us of of Japan, California, deep secrets and sunsets. Pacific!” - Björn Synneby of Pacific!

In an interview with Anthem Magazine earlier this year, Björn Synneby had this to say about Swedish music: “The Swedish hype is very 2006. Bands like José González, Jens Lekman and El Perro Del Mar went around the world.” Don’t get the other half of the eternally sunny Gothenburg wrong he loves Swedish music (he was even a member of El Perro Del Mar), but he realizes that this resurgence of interest in all things Sweden is already becoming sadly passe. The electro-surf duo is rounded out by Daniel Högberg and they traffic in the floral sounds that Balearic groups, like Boat Club, Air France and Studio have reintroduced to another generation of listeners. The rebirthed genre’s link to the psychedelic grooves of 1960’s California surf music and neu-cool factor of Parisian dance (Daft Punk, Justice) and old disco music ( runs as a sleek antecedent to the more sparse and stark electronic beats that prevail in Stockholm-the home of The Knife and Zeigeist. Continue Reading

There’s no shortage of nautical imagery in the realm of music, particularly in the indie-folk set. Enter Port O’Brien, with their sophomore effort All We Could Do Was Sing, a ‘not-quite’ concept album loosely based on the sea. The main difference between Port O’Brien and other sea-shanty belting artists, however, is that this Oakland band has a sublimely intimate connection to their subject matter; founding members (and romantic partners) Van Pierszalowski and Cambria Goodwin spend every summer on Kodiak Island in Alaska - Pierszalowski fishing on his father’s boat and Goodwin baking at the Larsen Bay Cannery. Continue Reading

Pivot hail from Sydney, Australia, but their influences could hardly be more European. The three names that instantly spring to mind, and in fact almost wholly categorise the band’s music, are Greek legend Vangelis, esoteric Frenchman Jean-Michel Jarre and the long-running German electronica group Tangerine Dream. On their second full-length, O Soundtrack My Heart, all these influences are present and correct – which arguably makes this a very niche record indeed.

Everybody has heard something by all these big, classic electronica artists, but how many people really listen to them? That’s what I find myself wondering when I listen to this Pivot effort. This is a kind of music that can be breathtaking as an accompaniment to something else, as many of us have discovered while watching Blade Runner and hearing that famous Vangelis soundtrack – but it can also be intimidating, difficult and frankly quite dull to listen to in and of itself. This is the central problem Pivot have to address – and by sounding extremely similar to their heroes at times, they have less than entirely successful results.

‘October’, the album’s opening track, still stands out as one of those instrumental album openers so beloved of bands as diverse as Coldplay and Nine Inch Nails these days despite the fact that the rest of the album is instrumental too. Like many of such tracks, it feels almost completely pointless, a stop-start, pretentious dirge which fails to add anything to the album and doesn’t even effectively introduce anything at all. In fact the first half the album is, surprisingly, the weakest - ‘In The Blood’ starts promisingly but quickly fizzles into mediocrity, the title track has little to offer besides its eerily familiar synths…

To find something a little more inspiring we must look to the latter section of the album, and to tracks like the atmospheric, spacey ‘Epsilon’. The trouble is, that this sounds exactly like any other 70s or 80s electronica album. You could play it amongst a random shuffle of Vangelis or Tangerine Dream output and virtually nobody could tell that it was recorded in 2008, or that it was by an Australian band called Pivot. And thus Pivot have fallen into the classic electronica trap – by sticking too close to their forebears, they have produced an album of almost stunning ordinariness which ends up as just another dated, pretentious face in the crowd.
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Links
Pivot [myspace]

Quite a buzz has been surrounding Leeds based “post rock” outfit Vessels. With their first record about to be released this month, musical circles have been spinning with aplomb and excitement. And that excitement is well warranted. Their record White Things and Open Devices is one of those that, from the moment you begin listening, creates waves; the sort of waves you’ll most definitely want to ride.
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UK punk and hardcore label Boss Tuneage has taken the rather wonderful step of re-releasing practically everything Stupids ever did over six CDs, and for this we should be eternally grateful. If you thought the likes of Snuff were a bit noisy in the early days, think again.

Something approaching seven hours of childish, non-PC eighties skate thrash punk can be yours for about £60, across Violent Nun, Peruvian Vacation, Retard Picnic, Complete BBC Peel Sessions, Jesus Meets the Stupids and Van Stupid & Frankfurter, so that’s granny’s Christmas present covered. Sorted. Continue Reading

So I’m sitting at home on a Summer’s evening having a cup of tea. I’ve got a spare half an hour out of nowhere, which is always an unexpected treat, so I delve into my pile of CD’s, trying to find something to listen to. Something a little random appears at the top. The debut album from Gramercy Arms, a New York supergroup, featuring members of Joan As A Policewoman, Guided By Voices and The Dambuilders with backing vocals by the filthest woman on the comedy circuit, Sarah Silverman. And what a revelation it is. A perfectly executed 30 minutes of power pop to rival the very best. A slice of pure sunshine goodness full of catchy riffs, heartfelt lyrics and more bounce than a shed full of Tiggers. See, it’s even put me in a good mood!
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The sound of Jaguar Love is not, as any naturalists amongst the fine Line Of Best Fit readership might expect, a mewling feline cry ringing out across the jungle night. Nope. Hark! It’s the sound of some boys from some defunct American bands forming an emo-rock supergroup.

I was never particularly enamored with the one trick pony screamo barrage of Blood Brothers or the terminally fair-to-middling Pretty Girls Make Graves. Anything verging on emo yelping is usually enough to make me run for the exit, especially if it features the usual eyeliner-clad preening pretty boys with twatty hair screaming about nothing all that much. But luckily, Take Me to the Sea manages to be more than the sum of it’s parts. Continue Reading

This album was always going to get panned; daft Brazilian indie dance combo CSS have gone and done what both the people who liked them and the people who didn’t could get pissed with - they started taking the whole music thing seriously.

Thousands of little indie types took CSS to their hearts because they were quirky, pretty short on talent, funny looking and easy to dance to if you can’t dance. There was a bit of attitude, a lot of energy, a complete lack of polish and people fell easily into love and hate sides - Marmite bands are always onto a winner. Add the fact people thought they’d in some way ‘discovered’ them (that was, you know, Sub Pop, and then Xfm et al, I’m afraid, not you, grubby teen internet nerd) and you had an instant cult band - made all the better by their willingness to tour relentlessly and play any tent in a muddy field they could find. Continue Reading

A rushed Monday morning commute was not the most conducive environment to give this album its first airing, but some tracks from Micah P.Hinson’s third and latest are so heart-wrenchingly poignant that I was almost welling up onto another mans shoulder. That’s an indication of the usual cattle crush ride on the tube rather than a little nugget of personal disclosure, but you get the picture.

With a passing resemblance to a young myopic Elvis Costello, the slow rumbling Texan drawl that emerges from Hinson’s wry frame seems to much closer match expectations based upon his unsettled personal history of addiction and mental illness, money problems and vagrancy, a jail term, and a painful back condition that endured during this recording. I suppose I’m a subscriber to the ‘troubled artist’ theory - at least to have had experiences from which to draw creative intensity if not currently facing obstacles; and all that is, as typically for Hinson, evident here. But the album also often hints at a flickering light at the end of the tunnel, and at those points seems to be some kind of cathartic celebration. The biggest source of his salvation must be his new(ish) wife. He actually proposed at the end of a show at London’s Union Chapel late last year, and parts of the album are practically a love letter to his muse. Continue Reading

Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong’s self-titled debut was completed last year, and was due for release this past Monday (August 4th). However the band and management have already decided that it was recorded far too early in their career so it was pulled at the last moment. A new LP is scheduled for release in early 2009 with approval of the bands label, Vertigo.

Now I know writing this review may seem a bit redundant, seeing as Joe Lean and co. already decided to ditch their album, but I thought it only fair to share with you what “no longer represents them as a band.” A larger-than-life character, Joe Lean is the stage name for the Brixton council estate-raised actor turned pop star Joe Beamont, who also goes by the name Joe Van Moyland as the Peep Show fans among you may already know. Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong are another band that have been hyped from the word go, and therefore have great expectations to live up to. Continue Reading

Noah and The Whale have made quite a name for themselves on the indie-circuit as of late. ‘Twee’ is a word often used to describe their own specific brand of romantic anti-folk: a description hardly surprising when debut album Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down boasts a ukulele, hand-claps, trembling violin strings, romantic folk tales, whistling, a cowbell and fellow anti-folk artist Laura Marling on backing vocals.

Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down is a collection of simple and uplifting songs about love, death and time. Penned and demoed in dark bedrooms in Twickenham and Manchester this album is anything but dark. Despite tales of awkward and isolated love, the melodies are instantly uplifting and reassuring. Continue Reading

Those familiar with James Lavelle’s UNKLE project will find plenty of points of reference on this, the band’s fourth full-length release. Their patented guitar driven electronica is underpinned across the majority of tracks here, with guest vocals from usual UNKLE suspects such as Gavin Clark and Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, as well as Joel Cadbury, Black Mountain, Chris Goss, James Petralli and Robbie Furze. There are also tunes used from the soundtrack of Odyssey in Rome, Alex Grazioli’s doco about Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara (such as the terrible acoustic ‘Open Up Your Eyes’, where the man himself, erm, ‘sings’). Continue Reading

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

That quote itself could have been the perfect review for The Ascent Of Everest’s debut How Lonely Sits The City. Now, I admit to being a bit of a lazy person, but even I’m not that lazy… So here goes: Post-rock has never really been my “thing”. Perhaps it’s my short attention span doing battle with the often marathon-length tracks, or maybe it’s my partiality to things like, say, lyrics. Upon receiving HLSTC, I was admittedly daunted by the album’s scant five tracks, ranging in length from seven to fourteen minutes. Still I approached it with the same open mind I try to approach any new music, and I came away considerably moved by the album’s mixture of subtle beauty and crashing intensity. Continue Reading

Mugison is Icelandic born singer songwriter and all round blues powerhouse Örn Elías Guðmundsson. Yes, not exactly a blues name is it. But trust me this man has blues running through his veins. The name Mugison was a childhood nickname and literally means son of Mugi, who is his father. There’s something about Malaysians who couldn’t pronounce his fathers name properly, or something. Sounds more Japanese though doesn’t it, like the second prodigy of Mr Miyagi. Anyways, Mugison was born, literally. Continue Reading

First of all it is criminal why Modey Lemon aren’t huge! Their punk infused drug fuelled garage rock should be pumping through all our ears. But rather than just thrashing it out three chord style, throwing in a lick here and there, this band take a much more considered approach. Yes they play loud, and their tunes fucking rock big time, but they are far more adventurous than your average “garage” band.

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Southern Records are responsible for recently re-homing the discordant, ear-rendering lunacy of Racebannon, prompting the band to bring to the table a new album after a four-year gap. Championed by the underground movement that demands it’s rock be non-generic, febrile and unpredictable, the quartet from Bloomington, Indiana are here to dip you in their aural bath. You choose - acid or blood?

From the opening off-key guitar chimes, scattergun snare and fearsome feedback of ‘Translucent Lifeforce’ it is instantly apparent that the band haven’t been whiling away those four years in comfort. Edgy, haphazard and grimy, Racebannon bring us panic in sonic form. ‘Sister Fucker’ is all about the killer riff, a huge heaving beast of vibrating reverb over which Mike Williams’ vocal scorches a blaze of throttled fury. Continue Reading