Unfashionable I may be, but I think Natalie Imbruglia’s pretty underrated. Her pop credentials may not appeal to everyone, but I personally furnish her with a lot of kudos for having transferred from a soap opera to music far more successfully than most who have travelled the same path. Successfully in the sense that she’s produced some genuinely great music, as opposed to merely accumulating massive sales. Nat’s debut Left of the Middle was a bit of a  mini-watershed, a quality pop rock album which resolutely refused to be crap, which many might have predicted. Continue Reading

Conventional wisdom presumably dictates that I should be eager to expose much-hyped Australian pop outfit Empire of the Sun as vacuous pretenders, a pair of washed-up musos hiding their talentlessness behind a facade of kitsch costumes, extravagant videos and daft, pretentious album covers. But having listened to their full-length debut Walking on a Dream, having given it the chance to really sink in, I don’t actually feel quite that way inclined. Don’t get me wrong – there’s a thick vein of superficiality and glitz running through just about everything that Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore do, but that’s not to say that this isn’t a fairly decent album, a solid set of ten songs which approach worthlessness just as rarely as they approach true greatness. Continue Reading

Let’s get this out of the way before anything: Sarah McIntosh is 17 years old. Now of course that brings to mind some pimply bad memories. The conundrum in reviewing a young person’s album is that you know what you were capable of when you were at this age – not too much. I was lucky if I wore matching socks let alone make an EP that’s spreading like a small brush fire in the UK blog circuit. So before you take the perfunctory Web  2.0 route and skip to the bottom of the page to read the rating (ahh don’t do it!), please read my lips, à la George Bush Sr: “The Good Natured is a work in progress.”

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